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Big hits. Don’t you just love them? Sure it’s not very PC right now. But is there anything better than two 100kg-plus behemoths lining each other up, gritting their teeth and KABANG!
It’s a noise that sounds like the world is coming to an end.
Mind you, it has been a difficult couple of weeks for rugby league’s hit parade.
First Frank the Tank got put in the naughty corner. Then the Beast had to pen a written apology.
Now T-Rex is facing Origin extinction. Perhaps the NRL is just trying to eradicate overly aggressive nicknames, or maybe the landscape of rugby league is transmogrifying once more.
Rugby league is an unpredictable sport, when you turn on the telly to watch you never quite know what you’re going to get.
Sometimes it’s a beautiful lady, sometimes it’s a ferocious tiger, sometimes it’s a Roosters versus Raiders stinkfest.
There is a delicate mix of beauty and brutality involved in the game, and in this ecosystem big hits exist as discouragement of hesitancy for the code’s more skilfully blessed opponents.
But rather than just accepting that this fine balance will always exist, here we are for the seventh billion time, trying to regulate the impossible.
Warring clubs and judiciaries are employing everyone short of Stephen Hawking to determine vectors of intent, and Atticus Finch to argue nano-molecules of “not his go-ness”.
This is of course frustrating, but pales in comparison to the frustration of the banal, cyclical press that accompanies the situation.
First every crusty old player with cauliflower ears, who had his nose bitten off in a scrum, is interviewed so to tell everyone that “the game is turning into bloody netball”.
Then a couple of netball players come out and tell us how tough netball actually is. Then the netball administrators put out a press release saying netball is perfectly safe and a great game for people of both sexes.
Then the ARL commission says rugby league is increasing female player numbers. Then Kevin Sheedy comes out and tells us he actually invented women’s sport.
All of this does nothing to change the fact that if a bloke makes 25 tackles a game in 20 odd games a year, with the intent of stopping a 100kg opponent running full pelt and trying to dodge him while he’s fatigued… stuff is going to happen eventually.
I mean, what about poor old Frank Pritchard eh? For the last five years everyone has been calling him lazy and soft. Finally he has looked at himself in the mirror and eaten a few angry pills. Now he’s bad bad Leroy Brown.
A couple of centimetres lower and he would be on the highlight reels for years of smelling of Brut.
So let’s try not to demonise these blokes. The Morleys. The Dwyers. The Guttenbeils. Let’s celebrate them.
Let’s trawl through the archives to release Rugby League’s Greatest Hits! Vol. 1-17 with good, legal bone-crunchers set to classical music ensembles. I’m happy to kick things off (see below video), but I’m only one man.
If you’re a hit fan yourself and would like to contribute to the movement, I urge you to login, load up and stand up for the great hit men of the game.
Trust me, this is going to be big. In fact, I’m sure it’ll be a hit.
Vic_Arious@twitter.com
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