WRITING THE LAWS OF RUGBY OR A "THANK YOU" WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE

Thursday Jul 5, 2007 in Fanzone

By DEREK ROBINSON

Hard to believe that the founding of the Manhattan RFC eventually influenced the shape of the laws of rugby. But it’s true.

Early history

Manhattan RFC was the child of conflict. In 1960, there was a rebellion inside the New York RFC (oldest club in the US) and a few malcontenters decided the city needed a new rugby club. The rebellious group met in McCorkin’s Bar (now defunct) on West 45th Street and Eighth Avenue and argued over crucial factors; such as the color of the socks. Drinking quietly nearby was a man called Al Simms, who knew nothing about rugby but recognized bullcrap when he heard it.

“That’s no way to organize anything,” he said. Before the night was over, Simms had become Manhattan’s RFC’s Secretary. It was that sort of club: spontaneous, unpredictable, erratic, and often weird.

I joined in 1961, played my first game away at Dartmouth College where I received a police escort to the hospital and five stitches in my lower lip, which had swelled to the size of a banana. I was obliged to drink the students’ bourbon by chucking it past the lip damage and into the back of my throat. That way, I felt no pain. I woke up Sunday afternoon after the car had crossed the Triboro Bridge. I mention this only because it typified the Manhattan club’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition): one hell of a good party.

Manhattan may not have won many games (in fact, we lost nearly everyone my first year). We may have been short of a regular fifteen (sometimes we recruited soccer players to fill out the scrum). We may have played on fields of dirt instead of grass. (I recall the pre-match ritual at Van Cortlandt Park, when both teams joined the “Glass Pickup Parade” to remove broken soda and beer bottles.)

But we never lacked opponents; because after rugby, Manhattan always threw a terrific party, often back at 417 East 84th Street, where several of us lived. It was regularly awash with beer, literally…awash. I woke up one Sunday morning, got out of bed, and my feet stuck to the floor. Those post-match parties were always conducted on a heroic scale.

Manhattan had many memorable characters but few victories. The question was: How to attract better players? That was our challenge. We decided to advertise but we had no money for this. Instead, we published a small booklet with exciting pictures of our matches.

First writing

Rugby in the US in the early 1960s was starting to expand up and down the East Coast. (Editor’s note: In spring 1961, there were only 15-college or club teams in existence in the entire east.) Most of the new players had only a vague idea of the laws. So, in response to the confusion with the myriad of rugby laws, I decided to write, Rugby – How To Play the Game. This would provide a brisk and short gallop through the lawbook, aimed especially at Americans.

For instance, I pointed out that American football and rugby both developed from the same game, which explains why a touchdown is so named, since a rugby player who scores has, in fact, to touch the ball to the field. And so on.

In those days I worked as an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue, so I could handle words. A pal at the agency, Wally Lawrence, a talented photographer, took a stack of action shots during Manhattan’s games - tackles, lineouts, and kicks at goal, wingers in full flight – to illustrate the text. And in its first season, the booklet sold twelve hundred copies at $.50 each, which, in those days, was the price of a mug of beer in New York. That says a lot about its appeal to American players, or not much about the quality of the beer. Or, possibly, both.

Manhattan improved. In April 1963, we broke with tradition and won a game. Soon after, we were fielding three XVs a week. Maybe it could have happened without the booklet. Who can say? But demand for the booklet was steady, and new editions regularly rolled off the press.

Oh, to be published in England

One copy of Rugby – How To Play the Game found its way to England, where the Rugby Football Union (RFU) liked it so much that it publicized its own edition. And so did the New Zealand RDU. Amazing!

By now it was 1968. I was living in Portugal and refereeing the occasional match in Lisbon. The official rugby lawbook was such a mess – too long, too stuffy – that translation was almost impossible. The Portuguese players read it (if ever) in English. This was not a happy set-up for explaining the laws to non-English reading ruggers.

However, the success of the booklet published in New York meant that I had made some contacts at Twickenham. So, I offered to revise the traditional lawbook. I would straighten it out, make it work.

By coincidence, the IB (International Board, which became the IRB) felt the same need, and the RFU accepted my offer, ordering, “Do what you like, but do not alter the meaning of the laws.”

I then carried out a massive cut and paste job, which reduced the number of laws by 25-percent and tried to knock some sense into them. For instance, I created an Advantage Law. In the old law book, advantage was an obscure paragraph, hidden away and almost lost. I cannot say if the IB’s new (1969) lawbook used all my ideas, but it did buy into many of them.

Intoxicated by my success, I wrote my first commercial hardback, an idiot’s guide to the laws of rugby, cunningly disguised under the title, Rugby Success Starts Here. Thirty-seven years later, it’s still in print, now a paperback, called, more honestly, Rugby: A Player’s Guide To the Laws. These royalties helped pay for groceries.

Let’s fast forward to 1991. By then, I was an established novelist with a dozen books under my belt, and living in Bristol, a rugby hotbed in the west of England with a strong referees’ society. (Our local man Ed Morrison took the Rugby World Cup Final in 1995.) At one refs’ meeting, there was an argument over a fine point of law, something to do with a touch-in-goal. The problem arose that no one could find the ruling in the lawbook. It wasn’t there, and if we were perplexed, how could refs expect the players to know better? It reminded me again of the same 1960s’ confusion of Americans learning the game.

Once more into the breach

Again, I wrote to my contact at Twickenham, and offered to make the rugby lawbook – in a phrase soon to become fashionable – user-friendly.

“Go ahead,” they said. “It will take me six-months,” I replied. Very wrong; it took me three-years.

I shall not bore you with the details of the long haul. Basically, I did the writing and briefed the illustrator with the expert help from two top refs, Jimmy Crowe and Peter Hughes. I had another stroke of good luck, my former Manhattan scrumhalf, Robin Hall, was running an ad agency in England. He redesigned the book and handled the printing, the pricing, and the logistics, in short, everything. We could not have succeeded without him.

The IRB liked the rewrite. International players and referees warmly welcomed the new book worldwide. We called it, The Laws in Plain English. For three-years, it appeared along side the old, official lawbook. Every year, we updated it; and each year it sold out. The new lawbook cost the IB nothing – in fact the organization made a small profit from the sales.

Robin Hall and I handled the entire production. Those were still amateur days in rugby, so please remember that we received not a penny for our efforts. And then, abruptly, the IB dumped The Laws in Plain English. It sent us a cold fax saying the booklet must never be published again under any circumstances. There were no additional explanations, and most definitely, not even a token thank you.

For the next few years, the IB kept churning out the same old lawbook, with all its faults. But somebody must have been at work in the backroom of its headquarters, because, eventually, it brought out a new, simplified, all-singing, all-dancing lawbook.

And, hey, guess what? It looked a hell of a lot like The Laws in Plain English with similar layout, and similar brief headings within each law for quick reference. Also, I found the language to be quite comparable; short words, short sentences, and nothing legalistic. Finally, the illustrations seemed to us also quite alike that it was hard to believe someone had not traced over our original illustrations.

So, why did we get the chop? I often wonder? Could it be that the IB was embarrassed when a couple of nobodies from the grassroots of the game achieved something that made the governing body look kind of slow? Our book The Laws in Plain English was better than the IB’s version. Did it find this truth intolerable?

And there’s another question: Why didn’t it at least say thank you? One tiny little thank-you would have helped. The answer to why not is easy. Here it is, the old saw that states, “No good deed ever goes unpunished.” One day, I’ll have that stitched in needlework and hang it over my bed.

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Derek Robinson’s acclaimed war trilogy has established him as the world's most talented military aviation writer and one of the top authors of war fiction of World War I and World War II. He is best known for Goshawk Squadron, his first novel, which was nominated in 1971 for the UK’s prestigious Booker Prize. This was followed by War Story and Hornet's Sting. Recently, he wrote a highly praised novel of 19th century life in rural America entitled Kentucky Blues. His books are available at Amazon.com.

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