The BRIC: Rugby that tackles the lines
“Dad, I’m going to play rugby” I shouted proudly, entangling my fingers in the laces of my shoes ready to put the ball between the poles. A solemn day of conversion to our Toulouse religion with the BRIC, the Bourrassol Rugby International Club. Time passed, but the memories remained.
The rough contact of the ball on the soapy hands, its whirling which whistles the air, the saving shoe shot. But above all, these souvenir faces. Our beloved Daniel Herrero said that the Ovalie is a world where we meet more than we cross paths.
LET’S HAVE A LITTLE RUGBY SESSION.
Among these faces, there was Eva.
Her long fiery hair and her happy smile find myself on this scorching day. Sealed in the darkness, Eva and Hugo give me a bubble in the privacy of the club.
“I still remember the faces, like that of a man in his forties, it was his first day” I confide. Eva smiled: “It must be Robert! He’s the oldest, he’s still there!”
The BRIC amazement had taken place during a smoky match of merguez with smoke bombs and shouting stimulations with the megaphone: “Come on Eva, let’s get moving, the beer at the Champagne Bar won’t wait shit!”
A fellow called Rudako – balaclava user of a group of acrobats called “Krav Boca” – convinced me to have my cauliflower ears cut too. A rising stress in the chest in front of these strangers, preparing to watch my pizzaiolo throws. “Shall we pass each other just to get you acquainted?” a blond haired man says to me. The pressure drops.
A newcomers welcome & kindness that adapts to temporalities and abilities, of any level, age or gender.
“We started by recruiting people from the “barre” to play without a penny, just a ball, and moles” laughs Eva. The BRIC in turn transformed the Bourrassol park into a molehill by smoldering the oval, its calves swollen like melons. Former Spanish refugee camp, Bourrassol is a district where the “barre”, a tired salmon pink building, overlooks a space greenery stimulating the sporting and playful imagination.
To go play a joyful soccer game like rugby, that’s the spirit.
The BRIC, “it’s not just on the field” specifies Hugo, having a few drinks with the members the day before his first training session. “We put a rugby ball on you at 2 a.m. to convince you: tomorrow you come” Eva lines.
Relaxed, self-managed, and gender mixed rugby under the coconut trees. This is what creates unanimity. So yes, beyond the plurality of bodies on the field, the minds, with anti-fascist values, are just as much. “Commies, anarchists, autonomous, socialists, union members, or just not into politics…” enumerate Eva and Hugo in unison.
It creates a few political phalanx salads, but friendship is beyond.
If it’s an activist springboard for some, priority should be given to the pleasure of hitting the grass and fumbling with the ball. Jean-Pierre Rives said: “Rugby is the story of a ball with friends around and when there is no more ball, there are friends left.” Sport, a unifying tool, or, as Adam will say, club member, brilliantly: “A reason to come together, without tearing each other apart around small ideas”.
LET’S TACKLE (WITH KINDNESS).
Adam, whom I meet at his favorite café, with a strong pedigree – grandson of a founder of Family Planning, and “unionized since three days” he will specify – arrived a year ago.
Between two bites of cheesecake, he confides: “I wasn’t a rugby fan originally, I was looking for playing partners with values”. Play, the key to sporting practice, is often relegated to the pressure of performance.
“You are not categorized” said Hugo, swapping the boxing gloves as he thought “not being cut out for that”.
This feeling of illegitimacy, of not having “the right body” which will be scrutinized. Because the rugby player has been qualified for a long time “of Roman centurion more than a Greek ephebe” to quote a lover of the Ovalie, Henri Garcia.
The successful drop of the BRIC is this playful game framework, which “desecrates the action of tackling” Adam will say.
From volleyball to bachata, this sports game lover confides: “It’s more about acquiring skills than transforming my body. Soon the water rugby! – The what?”.
Before my amazed eyes, a poetic and muscular ballet of bodies under water takes shape. But the game should not exclude progression. This is all the sporting balance as Eva questions: “We need goals. Even if we’re not aiming for the best performance, it’s nice to feel that you’ve improved”.
How to make progress the individual, depending on one’s abilities, in a diverse collective?
The club continues to make its twenty people think, like training program and turning coaches. “When we lost 66-0 in our first match against the Gorets, we said to ourselves that we lacked a little technique” laughs Eva.
The lack of playing partners with whom and against whom to play does not make the task easier. Although pogo fans sharpen this skill, receiving the weight of a body against you, thrown like a shell, is technical. We close our peepers. We tighten the snags. And we wait for the impact.
Learn to kiss the ground, to welcome a tackle, to push the haunches of his teammate in the air, need to be guided. There is the whole border between game and sport.
UNTANGLING THE INCLUSIVITY SCRUM.
To progress, we must feel legitimate and fulfilled by the place we find. Quite a program.
“Rugby favors certain places for certain profiles. The scrum is the refuge of the Fats”. My eyes widen, Eva laughs. “We call them that in rugby, you need a medical certificate.” It’s not so much the ingested peanuts and the glucose pastis that do something than the musculature.
“In the center, it’s often the guys because they dare to make contact more”. Hugo raises his finger in disagreement. He doesn’t feel justified in going there. Gendered, bodily but also social sensitivities. “There is city and country rugby. In Aveyron, I played with female farmers. There is a rustic spirit”.
Ways of playing, there are as many as teeths lost on the field: at XV, at XII, at seven, the touchdown, from the amateur to the professional, from the city to the countryside…
A hell of an imbroglio of cross passes which requires more than a chickpea in the coffee maker. The BRIC attempts to meet this challenge of inclusiveness, and not just gender diversity.
To not just do sport, but think about how to do it. Touchdown rugby for instance focuses on avoidance and not contact.
Or, can’t we want to play rugby like others? To tackle, to be tackled, without wanting a violent bump? To seek contact without being a raging bull?
Adam, the polar opposite of rough contact through his practice of duo dancing, had his adrenaline piqued: “I think what I like is choice, if I take two more steps, I’ll get tackled. Do I make the pass or do I get in the pile?“. The taste for risk, or the art of”lie under the train”.
“You think that guys they adapt to girls when they tackle?” The answers differ. It is not so much a question of gender as of morphology, age or level. A well-built girl can give a hell of a sound to a guy who’s as curvy as a microphone stand. Can you adapt to the body in front of you?
In this quest for truth, here I am in the middle of the fields of Ariège, birthplace of Bilel, a childhood companion, whose paws exceed the head of a baby.
Sitting around a rickety plastic table, amid the scent of the earth freshly turned over by his tractor, we recall his fifteen years spent in the locker room – but also in the rings. “Boxing, there is contact but it is precise and controlled. You can adjust according to your opponent. But rugby… tackling is primitive, you can’t control how your body is going to crash against each other when you’re running. And the scrum…”. It makes me think.
The virile and beat-up culture associated with the world of Ovalie, “fists are clubs, knees are clubs, arms are nunchucks” Herrero wrote, also makes it difficult to transform the inclusive essay. Vile gestures, from the fork to the spoon, including the tie, the punishments on the field, although sanctioned, are hardly facilitators.
TOWARDS THE GOAL.
But the BRIC is thinking, experimenting, learning. “I don’t have a model yet. But I have confidence in our way of doing diversity rugby” underlines Eva. Proof that the BRIC is not far from the promised land of the goal, Adam and Hugo confide that they are not considering anymore doing single-gender sport. And this is all the creativity that sport can generate when it is thought out.
“On a sporting level, we will find some solutions. Everything that is outside the field takes longer” sighs Eva. Here we are, talking at length. How to achieve justice in a collective regarding sexist & sexual violences? How to ensure that the “BRIC does not belong to anyone”?
As Herrero wrote in Dictionary of modern-day rugby lovers, “What is a being who knows how to live with others?”
When we are not only companions in rugby boots and social struggles, the interweaving of the affinity in the collective does not always make it easier.
But the creativity of sport makes it a formidable field of experimentation, as the BRIC illustrates. We will end with this beautiful summary from Eva:
“The BRIC is a team that moves with the times and with the mentalities of the people who drive it. People make the life of the BRIC. So the BRIC looks like the people who take care of it.”
GLOSSARY
Cauliflower Ears: War wound of veterans due to friction.
Tackle / Caramel / Stamp / Tie: Rolling of a heavy vehicle tackled. The tie is an infamous tackle to the throat punished by a red card.
Phalange Salad: Distribute chestnuts and chestnuts or open the box of slaps
Fork: “To stick your fingers in the eyes of the opponent with a sharp and precise blow as if to straddle a piece of overcooked meat.” D. Herrero
Spoon: Open bar of the trip (hand, knee… everything goes), punished by a red card.
Promised land of the in-goal: Amen, where the ball is flattened like the messiah.
To go under the train: To be rolled dirty during a tackle and accept the fatality of one’s destiny.
If you want to go further about gender mixity in rugby, go listen to the podcast “C’est pas demain la veille…” with the BRIC – in French though!