Hack job that became a must-read for rugby fans
RUGBY’S only genuine best selling author, Michael Green, has passed away aged 91 but hopefully rugby, which can take itself rather seriously on occasions these days, will never lose touch with the game he described so hilariously in The Art of
Coarse Rugby and it’s follow up Even Coarser Rugby. His autobiographies The Boy Who Shot Down an Airship and Nobody Hurt in Small Earthquake are also among the best and funniest books on journalism ever penned with both containing numerous rugby cameos. It is though for The Art Of
Coarse Rugby that he will always be remembered with 23 reprints since it was published in 1960 – that’s well in excess of 250,000 books. If you want your hopeless but spirited ineptitude glorified, your prodigious drinking feats justified, your gross unfitness excused, you will sink into your armchair and turn gratefully to its well thumbed pages.
“I remain mystified to this day about the book’s success, it came from nowhere and teaches you never to give up in life,” Green told me when I interviewed him a couple of years ago. “I always wanted to pen the ‘great novel’ but I wrote a newspaper article for The Observer about the kind of rugby I played and loved and it snowballed from there.”
It wasn’t quite as simple as that. What actually happened is that Green was on the Observer Sports desk subbing one afternoon when, exasperated by the straightlaced and formulaic rugby reports coming in he threw his hands up in despair and said he couldn’t stand reading this rubbish any more, or words to that effect.
His sports editor Chris Brasher, the 1952 Olympic steeplechase champion, overheard his outburst and cornered him in the pub when the paper had gone to bed, challenging Green to write an article that reflected the grass roots game he loved. Put up or shut up.
“The week after the article appeared a publisher phoned me up and offered me a few quid to try making a book out of the idea. I had to bash it out in three months – it was a hack job for 75 guineas to pay a few bills – and all that time I hankered after getting back to my ‘great novel’ and serious laudable writing. It was a chore at the time, you have to work very hard indeed at being spontaneous.
“Believe me there are very few laughs in trying to write a funny book – it’s mostly tears of frustration – but to everybody’s surprise it seemed to capture a mood and sold like hotcakes.
“It was very British, it’s only ever appeared in English actually and I seriously doubt if the French for example would ever ‘get’ the ‘coarse’ philosophy at all. Essentially it was – is – about losing and being rubbish and incompetent while aspiring to so much more and I suspect only us Brits find that gentle ego pricking genuinely funny.
“Not that we set out to be hopeless, we always tried our very best which only added to the pathos. It’s also about muddling through a crisis, normally of your own making, mateship, excessive drinking and occasional poorish behaviour dressed up under the banner of high spirits.
“The great thing about coarse rugby, of course, is that no buggar watches it so that you only have to entertain yourself. And although all the best stories have a goodish element of truth in them you are allowed to embellish and improve them because frankly there are no spectators on the touchline to contradict you in the bar afterwards.”