Inspiration, big hits and odd-shaped balls

Rugby tackle? Double leg takedown? Take your pick.

I was browsing YouTube the other day watching clips of tackles and big hits from rugby. Though never a team sport lover, rugby is something I grew up with. Being born and bred in the Welsh valleys, it’s kind of impossible not to be exposed to it at some point. As far as contact sports go, rugby is one hell of a game. MMA fighters put themselves through fifteen or twenty-five minutes of on-off pressure, sometimes coming out banged up, sometimes coming out unscathed. Rugby players step onto the pitch and get roughed up by fifteen guys wearing boots with metal spikes for an hour and a half (with pretty much zero padding). And whereas top fighters maybe step into the cage or ring a maximum of three or four times a year, rugby players do it every single weekend for six months of the year. That is a lot of knocks.

Watch rugby and you’ll see some of the best double leg takedowns you’ve ever seen. Their tackles are immense, and the way the players are conditioned nowadays, they’re only getting stronger and harder. I was discussing this with my dad a few weeks ago. He loves MMA and tells everyone about the magazine, bless him, but he is a rugby man through and through. We were chatting about how rugby has changed, how a sport that went fully professional only just over a decade ago has evolved so quick, and how the players now train. He told me nearly all of their conditioning is short, explosive and about generating maximum power, unlike the matches from the 70s and 80s where players used to have to slog out a 90 minute endurance battle. Now it’s a running game, anaerobic and explosive.

What he didn’t know was that many teams are bringing in trained grapplers to act as tackling coaches. Aussie Rules (a game similar to rugby but one no-one outside of Oz understands) is a game where nearly every big team has a specific grappling coach. The Australian rugby league and union teams picked up on this, and the trend has picked up over here. Even my wrestling coach has worked with local rugby teams, teaching them the subtle (and not so subtle) ways to manipulate bodyweight when it really, really doesn’t want to be manipulated. Here is a video of the ‘grapple tackles’ being used in a rugby league match down under (Australia). At points it looks more like a wrestling match than a game of rugby!

Of course, a blog about rugby ain’t shit without videos of the big hits I love so much. First is a short but sweet dramatic vid with the best hits from rugby union, my preferred choice of rules.

And lastly, there is another rugby related video, though on a different tack altogether. Jonah Lomu was one of the greatest players of the 1990’s. He was feared, and rightly so. A winger, he wasn’t that skilful a player. He was a sprinter, but he was physically huge (6′5, 120kgs of muscle), fast as you like (100m in 10.89secs!) and he had a mean hand off. It usually took two or three men at least to bring him down if he had any speed up.

In 1996 Lomu was diagnosed with a rare kidney disorder. I’ll let Wikipedia fill in the story.

At the end of 1996 Lomu was diagnosed as having nephrotic syndrome, a rare and serious kidney disorder. His rugby union career went on hold whilst the disorder was treated. In May 2003, the NZRFU announced that Lomu had been put on dialysis three times a week due to deterioration in his kidney function. Side effects of Lomu’s dialysis treatment led to severe nerve damage in his feet and legs; his doctors warned him that he faced life in a wheelchair if a kidney transplant was not performed soon.

Lomu got a kidney transplant and not only recovered, but returned to professional rugby. That is nothing less than awe-inspiring. I’m not ashamed to say that the video below, even with it being only 60-odd seconds long, made me well up a bit.

Addendum: It’s a bit late, but this blog could have served for some good inspiration for FightLinker’s Anthem for a Beatdown contest.

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