House of Pain

Go-oh Highlanders, that’s our name
Go-oh Highlanders, here to play the game
Go-oh Highlanders, winning is our aim
Welcome to the house of pain!

Yesterday was our chance to take in one of the great cultural experiences of New Zealand. We got on the bus with a bunch of other out-of-towners and listened to our driver tell jokes about Dunedin and the Kiwis until we arrived at the local pub. There we received our tickets for a free beers and traded them in for two pints of Speight’s, the local brew. We picked up our free yellow and blue capes with a cartoon kilt-wearing and sword-bearing Scot. We went out onto the patio and partook of the free sausages on sliced bread with sautéed onions and drank our beers. We stepped into the growing mob of face-painters to smear our visages with the ever-increasingly ubiquitous blue and yellow. Then, painted up, caped, and filled with beer and sausage (and a few chips for good measure), we piled back onto the bus (among out-of-towners who felt much more like long-time locals and friends) and listened to our driver tell off-colour jokes (had he been drinking, too?) about the North Islanders while we drove to the athletic mecca of the Otago province: Carisbrook rugby stadium.

The United States has football, Canada has hockey. Harvard and Yale have rowing. Most of the rest of the world has soccer. In New Zealand they have rugby.

Rugby is a sport that has been juxtaposed in some circles with soccer in the quippy phrase: “rugby is a ruffian’s sport played by gentleman; soccer is a gentleman’s sport played by ruffians.” Now I can’t really vouch for the lifestyles or personalities of New Zealand’s rugby players, but the game we saw last night between the Otago Highlanders and the Auckland Blues revealed beyond any doubt that rugby is a ruffian’s sport. Brutal, in fact. And unabashedly so: most of the game consists of a mode of play called the “maul,” in which players do something similar to the popular meaning of that word, repeatedly, across the field and down it. The secondary and tertiary modes of play are called the “ruck” (when they’re kicking the ball around the field) and the “scrum,” two words that are perfectly onomatopoetic names for this generally messy sport.

For those of you who have never seen rugby: it is a precursor to American football, but without so much stoppage time and no helmets and pads. Each team is attempting to get the ball (shaped like an American football, but a little larger, heavier, and more blunt) into the opposite end zone and touch it to the ground in a maneuver called a “try.” Every successful try is followed by a “conversion,” in which the scoring team kicks the ball through the uprights for an extra two points.

Enough of the rules. Even without knowing much about the intricacies of the game, it was fascinating to watch. The “maul” consists of the team in possession trying to run the ball through the opposition, then getting tackled and smashed under a dogpile of players (friendly and opposing) each of whom is over 6’2” and carries over 200 pounds each of solid muscle. Here’s the kicker: when you’re tackled, the game doesn’t stop. None of this neat, easy-going, pansy let’s-measure-to-see-if-it’s-a-first-down business. No, the game’s just begun when the guy with the ball has been smothered under 1600 pounds of surging muscle and sweating flesh. Now the team in possession has to get the ball out.

Once you’ve been tackled, you must release the ball in such a way that your team picks it up (and not the other team). So now you’ve got four or five guys from each team running around the seething dogpile, trying to see where the ball comes out. Finally—after what seems like an illegally long time sometimes—the ball pops out of the human mess like an egg emerging from a hammered goose. One guy picks up the ball and starts running until he’s tackled, and the thing starts all over again.

You can see why Carisbrook stadium is nick-named “the house of pain.”

So there we were, two foreigners amidst a seething mass of fans on their feet—we didn’t have a choice, we were in the section without chairs; in Shakespearean times I think this place was called the Pit—fans yelling “Oooooo-taaaaaaaah-gooooooo” at the players and an impressive array of obscenities at the ref. Quite an experience. It was fun to be in the midst of this crowd routing for the underdog team and watching that team dominate the game. (Auckland was expected to win; the Highlanders won 25-13.) Apparently whatever they paid that beefcake who ran out in a kilt with a plywood sword (to music from the Braveheart soundtrack) before the match was worth it.

I once entertained some thoughts about playing rugby. Having seen a match and knowing that the number one injury in rugby is a concussion, I think I’ll stick to playing a gentleman’s sport with ruffians. At least it’s illegal to rough someone up in soccer. At any rate, we’ve been inducted into the fullness of New Zealand culture. Now I’ve got to figure out how to get this face-paint off.

~emrys