The Roar
The Roar

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At the precipice of a new season

Roar Rookie
22nd February, 2017
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Who says rugby isn't art? (Image: grapeseed)
Roar Rookie
22nd February, 2017
22

The emotionally insecure and intellectually inadequate will tell you that sport is not art.

They pretend that the melancholic strains of Mozart’s Requiem stir the soul deeper than the lament of a beloved team felled in extra time of the grand final.

Others who clamour to consume the bland gruel of pop culture peak their snouts from the trough only to sneer at those who dress in team colours to yell, sigh, cheer and cry at a scoreboard.

Frozen in the sterile dark, watching computer images pretending to be people pretending to be more interesting people, they know only what it is to see distorted reflections of human truth.

We know the truth is that sport is warfare, religion, science and love.

It decants millions of years of evolution, laying bare the marrow that bonds you to your gibbon grandfather in the Sahara, with the shrew of the Cretaceous, to the single-celled organism swimming laps of the primordial soup.

For us, it is served in 80-minute intervals, inciting passion, inflicting pain, making us giddy, woozy, insane.

It is Quade Cooper’s cartwheel, Bernard Foley’s final kick. It is a Springbok nation united, a Black team sick.

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It is praying for the foot of a God to hold up for the final, it is folklore wrapped in a boot.

It is mercy, redemption, deception and pain. It is beautiful, brutal truth.

It is trigonometry, geometry, physics, and chemistry. Poetry, drama, biology and history.

It is zero to ten, all in a second, and ten back to zero when the next moment beckons.

It is giants and gnomes, conquering dragons and thrones, inspiring the mild, the meek and the lame.

Purveyors of art, politics and science wish that they could mimic this game.

So what if your couch is the Louvre, the stadium your chapel? Let the cry of the commentator ring in your ears like the majestic C of a famous tenor, the lineout pod harmonise like a string quartet, and the Monday morning write up resonate like Hamlet’s soliloquy.

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Here at the precipice of another season, perched on the couch with your son, in the pub with a mate, or under the stadium’s glare where humanity connects via invisible double helix, know the truth.

For it does matter, it is not frivolous, and it is important.

Rugby is awesome.

Dedicated to the memory of Dan Vickerman, Renaissance Man.

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