The First XV E-Book

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 116

Beschreibung

We all like choosing the best-ever rugby team, but here is a XV with a difference. A team of fifteen writers, not players, describe the exhilaration of the game, and the emotions of the most passionate followers in the world, in some classic prose. They deserve the best team we can put on the field. Here it is - a selection of world-beating writing on rugby.With an introduction by Gerald Davies, the featured authors include Richard Burton, Gwyn Thomas, Frank Keating, Alun Richards and many more.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Introduction by Gareth Williams

Foreword by Gerald Davies

Harri WebbVive le Sport

W.J.Townsend CollinsThe Master of Supreme Achievement

Terry McLeanThe Greatest Match

Dylan ThomasEnoch Davies and a Stranger

Gwyn ThomasPadded up for action

Alan WatkinsUps and downs of a climber

Richard BurtonThe last time I played rugby

John MorganExcursion Train

Dai Smith and Gareth WilliamsCliff Morgan

John Reason and Carwyn JamesGerald Davies and Barry John in New Zealand 1971

Gerald DaviesChoking with Clive

Frank KeatingPhil Bach

Alun RichardsCarwyn

Eddie ButlerProsser’s Pontypool

Rupert MoonMoonstruck

Lewis DaviesGone from under your nose

John Stuart WilliamsRiver Walk

The Authors

Gareth Williams

Gerald Davies

Copyright

Editor’s Introduction

In 2007 I edited for the Library of Wales an anthology of Welsh sports writing called, unsurprisingly, Sport. The surprise to many lay in the quality of the writing it showcased; it has been twice reprinted. It offered a sporting smorgasbord – from bando to boxing and snooker to swimming (there was also some soccer) – varied enough to revitalise the most jaded palate, but maybe the meat came last, in the most substantial section which occupied almost a third of the entire book: ‘Rugby’. This imbalance reflected not only my own sporting and literary interests but underlined the centrality in the popular and wider culture of Wales of what the late J.B.G.Thomas always referred to as ‘the Game’. For over the years Welsh rugby has generated some classic writing, even if it has yet to attain the literary status enjoyed by cricket in England and boxing and baseball in the USA.

Parthian’s Richard Davies is an award-winning writer and a former player. It’s in his DNA. I was a spectator at the old Arms Park in the late sixties when his father Randall, the mildest person you could ever meet, was sent off during a notably bruising (i.e. dirty) game between Cardiff and Neath. With the nation gearing up for more bruising World Cup encounters in New Zealand, I accepted Richard’s invitation to select a best fifteen from the forty odd pieces that appeared in the original Sport anthology. Here they are, with two new entrants that did not make the first cut, and two reserves. I wanted my ‘First XV’ propped by the poets who bookended the original selection, so a brace of bards, the one feisty the other wistful, find themselves on the bench.

My selection has been shaped by the same principle as before: the best rugby writing is good writing that happens to be about rugby. Gerald Davies, who writes the Foreword, is as much an admirer of literary as of sporting elegance, and he has written on the game as stylishly as he played it. If I have needed an introduction, he needs none.

Gareth Williams

Foreword

I enjoy very much the crossing over of cultural boundaries. Of, say, a musician with whom we are familiar and recognise as the figure on the podium all dressed in black with a white dress shirt and a bow tie conducting the evening’s music only for us later to notice him ‘dressed down’ with scarf and bobble cap among the madding crowd at Murrayfield. Or the elegant writer and broadcaster recording all of a nation’s yesterdays and bringing that history to bear on today’s events, and then to find him on the golfing greens of Augusta. Or the eloquent politician surviving the bear-pit confrontations of the House of Commons who, regretting the lack of respectful silence there, brings this rumbustious experience to his Saturday’s outing by shouting away on the sporting terraces.

I find it somehow pleasing to find heroes from one way of life enjoying the thrills and fun of a different life; admiring and respecting the talent of others and entering the mood of the sporting spirit. These are people with a hinterland, not exclusively one dimensional, cherishing something beyond their narrow, though expert, field of endeavour. I am thrilled when such people say they love rugby, my passion.

The same goes for the solitary business of writing. Quite simply I like it, having played rugby, to find that there are those who have the gift of translating the instant and instinctive action into words, creating a picture in the mind of what came and went in the blink of an eye and to understand why it happened and, perhaps, how it came to happen the way it did and thereby recording for all time the events of the day. Or the admiration the writer feels for a remarkable player who shapes an extraordinary event or a famous trip with a club gang and brings it all to memorable life.

In so doing they re-create the drama of what they saw and, more importantly, what they felt; of their encounter with the heroic, with mythical and lyrical embellishments of the pageant unfolding in front of them or, as Richard Burton writes, of ‘the massive lies and stupendous exaggerations’. So long as it makes for a good read.

We warm to the adventure of the game from slow staccato beginnings to the final mad crescendo; or the other way round, of a game reduced to a longing for the referee’s whistle to bring the whole dull, muddy rigmarole to an end and for an early beer to relieve the depression or to inspire a witty record of the slapstick event, ‘Vive le Sport’; the mediocre which cannot be ignored but which frequently, by the stroke of a clever pen, can be transformed into enriching, guffawing comedy. There are the jokes and the ribald songs. There is the romance the writer senses. There is the high seriousness as well as the cheerfully peculiar which he reviews.

We will all conclude that in the larger scheme of things, sport is ultimately but trivial goings-on which we gladly embrace to relieve us of much that is ordinary and mundane, taking us out of the day’s tedium to make us feel, or as close as it is possible to feel, that glad confident morning once more. Rugby, whether played at its glorious best or, for that matter, a simple unexpected and unadorned victory, uplifts us to make us feel better about ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Rugby can transport us into different realms. The game can either be painted in golden epic colours of international drama, in pastel shades of a casual rural scene, or sometimes, viewing the Pickwickian shape of the trundling tight-head prop, in bold and splashing tints of humour and even of farce.

Sport has the ability to do this and the writer is there to take us back to remind us of the exhilaration and the fun.

Gareth Williams’ marvellous anthology gives us a wonderful taste of the kind of writing and the variety of styles that the game has inspired over the years. I wished for more. That he has included a piece of mine among the distinguished writers is an honour.

I hope the collection gives you as much pleasure as it did me.

Gerald Davies, CBE, DL

HARRI WEBB

Vive le Sport

Sing a song of rugby, Buttocks, booze and blood, Thirty dirty ruffians Brawling in the mud.

When the match is over, They’re at the bar in throngs, If you think the game is filthy, Then you should hear the songs.

from The Green Desert (1969)

W.J.TOWNSEND COLLINS

The Master of Supreme Achievement