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Game must stomp out the violence
By MICHAEL DONALDSON - Sunday Star Times
05/07/2009
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/o...t-the-violence
OPINION: American footballers get into a heck of a lot of trouble off the field with incidents in recent years including shootouts and dog-fighting. But on the field, you struggle to find a much cleaner sport.
In a week when rugby was struggling with its image as a thug's sport, with eye-gouging incidents on either side of the southern hemisphere, I wondered why rugby still has this wild streak about it.
In my experience, the only other sports with as much violence as rugby are ice hockey, Australian Rules and that ancient, crazy Italian game Calcio Fiorentino, which allows head- butting and punching.
In professional ice hockey, the violence is actually encouraged as part of the entertainment while in Aussie Rules a lot of the worst thuggery happens off the ball and usually involves punching.
Rugby has done a lot to tone down violence in the past 20 years and the advent of widespread television coverage has made it harder for players to get away with things but heinous crimes such as biting, testicle- grabbing and eye-gouging continue.
Sure, there are huge hits in gridiron and players have been known to target each other, looking for a hit that can leave a rival flat on his back, but they veer away from the really nasty stuff. About the worst thing you can do in the NFL is grab another guy's face mask. Anything that even looks like turning violent is shut down quickly by one of the seven officials swarming around the action.
But the main difference between the two codes is that American football does not have a contest for the ball. In that regard it's a lot like league, with the play effectively ending with a tackle. With no ruck or maul there's no opportunity for players hidden at the bottom of a pile of bodies to do damage to their counterparts.
Not that American football was always so clean. At the start of the 20th century, players regularly died in games, usually as the result of blows to the head. It got so bad that president Theodore Roosevelt threatened to ban the game unless the violence stopped.
The evolution of padding and, in particular helmets, made the American game safer but only after the officials outlawed what was known as spearing, where a player would initiate contact with his helmeted head. But the greatest advances in the past quarter-century have been the number of officials on the field and the number of TV cameras.
American football is still a fierce game, with massive men directing deep wells of aggression against their rivals but it lacks the nastiness that creeps into rugby, where there still exists a dark space away from the eyes of officials, often hidden from the HD cameras, where an evil intent lurks. Sometimes that viciousness slips out into the open, as it did with eye-gougers Schalk Burger and Sergio Parisse last weekend.
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How can rugby further clean up its act? Well, it can't do away with rucks and mauls, which are the essence of the game. As long as there's a contest for the ball, the baddest players will use any means, fair or foul, to secure that ball and in the process intimidate and opponent. The two go hand- in-hand: I can remember a friend telling me about a game he played against a senior All Black some years ago when the All Black, in a maul, grabbed his rival's testicles and twisted them while saying "let go of the ball".
In the end, it's up to the IRB, to emulate Teddy Roosevelt, and send really strong signals. To that effect, Burger's eight-week ban is probably not enough, particularly given his history of dangerous play. A year-long ban would start to make an impact.
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