CANADIAN WOMEN A GOOD FIT FOR RUGBY SEVENS

Game’s hockey-like physicality suits this country’s sporting mindset

What, I asked a colleague who once played rugby, is the point of the scrum, except to push and stuff? She thought a minute. “I don’t know that there’s a lot of meaning to it,” she said.

Well, I pressed, when you were first learning the game, what did the coach tell you to do in a scrum?

“To hang onto the other guy’s shorts and push forward as hard as you can while someone tries to kick the ball back,” she said.

She then moved as far away as possible from me in the press stands.

Lesson learned: The meaning of life is not likely to be found in rugby, let alone in rugby sevens, which is, curiously, the sevenperson version of the bigger game, which is called union for no reason I could unearth and which has 15 players a side.

(The rugby scrum, in fact, is not unlike the journalist scrum at the Olympics, except possibly that the latter is more dangerous, due to giant cameras. If rugby is the ruffians’ game played by gentlemen, as is famously said of it, journo rugby is the ruffians’ game played by ruffians, and usually there are many balls being kicked).

This is the rugby sevens debut in the Olympic Games, and unlike some of the newer sports the International Olympic Committee has just recently OK’d (such as sports climbing, whatever that is, and surfing), it’s actually a proper, not to mention old and well-established game — if, shall we say, a bit literal, having been started at the Rugby School in, yes, Rugby, England, in the 19th century.

It’s an admirably rough full-on contact sport, played at breakneck speed, with the full Olympic tournament over and done in three days. At 14 minutes playing time per game, there are about 129 games a day, with matches coming and going more often than trains on the Toronto subway.

Just about anything goes, too — tackling, standing on another player’s shoulders (seriously), grabbing, hitting, leaping — and the strangest thing is that the ball is almost never whistled dead, even when in other sports it would be.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given our hockey-like physicality, Canadians are good at it, in particular Canadian women.

After a disappointing loss to Great Britain, they bounced back to beat France 15-5 Sunday, meaning they advance to the semifinals, a medal within sight. The earlier 22-0 whupping by Great Britain took its toll though, and left the players with a case of nerves, head coach John Tait said after the win over France. They’ll have to be better.

The players are aware of that, Ashley Steacy said. “We’re gonna bring it,” she said.

The great Canadian captain, Jen Kish, with her white blonde hair and magnificent tattooed arms, put it like this. The tournament went pretty much as expected: On Day 1, against weaker opponents, the Canadians won big and made it look easy and maybe fell prey to believing their own press releases. On Day 2, against better-quality teams, they made too many mistakes.

But they didn’t lose their composure, and were resilient, and now, Kish said, “We want to be in the gold-medal match, and show that Canadian rugby is a contender in this sport.”

She was thrilled by the support from the crowd, which had a good-sized Canadian section rooting them on, although they were mostly drowned out by the raucous French.

“They travelled all this way and paid all that money to see us play,” Kish said wonderingly.

On Monday, they get a chance to give those folks another bang for their buck.