'Water breaks are fine, but they have to eat': As rugby tries to speed up, props just get bigger

For years I have tinkered with a movie script for the seminal rugby film. To be honest, I have spent more time than I should on the opening credits, location scouting, Peter Gabriel soundtrack, and violent conclusion.

I set the story in Ireland, on Skellig Michael off County Kerry. Our hero is a monk. A tighthead prop.

He runs barefoot on a treeless island to the sounds of a sledgehammer on the spine of a ridge from the austere monastery to the angry sea where he sheds his cassock without pausing and leaps from a crag into a whirl of waves; scars adorning his body like sacred tattoos.

He emerges and regains altitude, head down, and hammers back up the natural steps of the island’s cliff to the field outside his home. There we see a couple dozen other monks, about to practice the patience and endurance of a rugby match against visiting brothers from a faraway land after a rough boat and the same steep steps.

As one might expect from a screenplay, our monk grapples with the sea, creation, his master, stubborn vice, deceptive revenge, his origins, and his fate, but along the way, we see variegated pain and trials, including murder, torture, betrayal, and scrums.

I was working on another actual project recently in Los Angeles and decided to pitch my scrum monk movie on a whim at dinner. The reaction from the expert was about the same (“Well, isn’t that something!”) as when I told it to the master of dry Kiwi reaction and semicolons, Geoff Parkes (“It’s got; something”).

It may not have helped that instead of pitching a religious rugby revenge flick to Mel Gibson, I was explaining it to a man Mel insulted in his drunken rant.

Thus ends my obligatory Easter introduction. Happy Easter to all, including the residents of Easter Island, often overlooked during these holy days.

Speaking of 13 foot, 14 ton moai statues, our great sport of rugby is shaped for all sizes. One position in particular has a lot of shape and size.

The right prop, head trapped tight, big right arm in a perfect position to be snapped, forever stabilising yet often pancaked, lifting and cleaning taller men, constituting the maul, shrugging in the gym, and isolating the hooker. Or as we all call them: the tighthead prop. The tighthead is called the tighthead in every place, unlike the exotic nomenclature for backline players.

Their given names can be exotic: Uini, Tyrell, Tadgh, Tank, Taniela and Zander. We have not even touched on Georgian props like Nika, Guram, Beka, and Sergo. All the English have are Joe, Dan and Kyle, which could be part of their problem.

They are more certainly substituted than any other, sooner. Water breaks are fine, but they have to eat.

Tighthead props eat, therefore they are. They can also lose weight. Show me a big boy who does not have a wide off-season deviation and two complete and separate wardrobes; I’ll show you a lock or a loosehead. Tightheads love to go up and down.

There is an apocryphal story from Japan, where most stories are apocryphal, wherein our friend Frans Malherbe, the reigning Springbok tighthead, lost five kilograms in one humid match. He has never denied it to me, but five kilograms to a tighthead is like an apple to a scrumhalf.

Humanity is getting pudgier. A survey of 127 countries showed the Cook Islands as having the highest average weight for adult men at 103.7 kg. The average weight for men worldwide is 78.1 kg.

French tighthead Uini Atonio is two average men.

But not all heavy folks are unhealthy. A tighthead can run a rather respectable 5K, is often remarkably flexible, and can withstand an impact force of 10,000 Newtons.

Still, to keep up with the increase by everyone else, everyone is getting bigger in the front row. The average weight of Six Nations tightheads increased 10 kilos in the last decade.

France has been fielding the heaviest packs in history recently. They put a 962 kg pack on the pitch in 2019; 38 kg short of a one tonne pack Toulouse started in 2017.

They may have the heaviest tighthead at their own World Cup, hoping home cooking helps them.

One of the best tightheads, Irishman Tadgh Furlong, is one of the ‘smallest’ along with Australia’s Allan Alaalatoa. Both are good at carrying and passing; Alaalatoa is also good at binding with Eben Etzebeth and making a strategic retreat.

These six footers are mere fire hydrants to the two-story buildings of Malherbe and Lomax; but still larger than looseheads like the squat bodied Frenchman Cyril Baille or Wallaby bolter Blake Schoupp, who Eddie Jones called a brick shithouse, invisible behind a picket fence.

Here is a list of top tightheads at the moment, in ascending size (note, not height).

Tadgh Furlong 1.82m 125kg
Allan Alaalatoa 1.82m 125kg
Zander Fagerson 1.88m 125kg
Dan Cole 1.88m 123kg
Frans Malherbe 1.90m 130kg
Tyrell Lomax 1.93 130kg
Taniela Tupou 1.78m 135kg
Tank du Toit 1.93m 136kg
Alex Kuntelia 1.99m 138kg
Uini Atonio 1.99m 145 kg

Tightheads have grown bigger over the decades (except for Long Carl Hayman, who was tall but a mere 120 kg). They used to have big hair (Adam Jones and Martin Castrogiovanni come to mind; the latter now owning several restaurants, including Timo in Leicester, which adds two kilos to you just if you go on their Instagram) and now they have short hair or no hair (Cole). The big hair helped when squeezed into the armpits of opponents, or when the engagement was more of a big hit: it was a helmet.

A tighthead like Malherbe is in the top two percent of height and top one percent of weight, which makes him uniquely well shaped and sized for his job.

(Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

His strong right-hand bind must be long and stay long and look long over the loosehead’s ribs. He must not get cramped. He cannot be disconnected from his hooker on the drop. He must not buckle. He must absorb pressure without bending his back.

When Frans came on our podcast, he went through this process (painting a picture for the referee) in detail. Holding, not bowing, takes ballast. A tighthead is a barge, not a catamaran. His hips don’t lie.

There is no way to fake a prop body. You are born with it, and then you add to it.

Some of it just comes at birth.

We do have prehistoric DNA around: nearly all of us homo Sapiens have at least trace amounts of Neanderthal genes, as much as 2 percent in Europeans and 4 percent in Melanesian populations, but far lower in Asia and Africa.

Yes, we have relics of interbreeding about 50,000 years ago and whilst the effects are not massive, bone density and lung capacity are two of the more key traits: in both cases, bigger and stronger. (The downsides are an increased ‘risk’ for sunburn, chest hair, and balding; making this author fairly certain he is on the high side of the Neanderthal spectrum).

(Photo By Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

The ancient country of Georgia has a huge Venn overlap between chest hair which does not neatly divide from their beards, Neanderthal DNA, Greco-Roman wrestling gold medalists, and professional props. Most of the Top 14 has at least one Georgian tighthead: it may be a league prerequisite.

A super heavyweight wrestler is perhaps the closest sport analog to a tighthead prop. If you want to wrestle, just hike the Caucasus.

Georgia was itself named by Persians, using the Farsi word gurg (wolf) which became Gorgan (“land of the wolves”). Props rarely act alone on the pitch: they are pack animals, forever in concert, on the hunt.

We will not travel the rabbit trail down trait-association direction, generational variants, evolutionary trajectory, and the frequency of heritability; it is Easter, for God’s sake. Let us just imagine how lovely it would be to see the passion of an Easter scrum on the five metre line in the shadow of a ruined monastery, between Irish monks Padrick Fitzgerald and Gerald Fitzpatrick, played by 1.85m, 110 kg Brendan Gleeson and 1.88m, 105 kg Gerard Butler; and a hairy Georgian-Neanderthal monasterial front row of Propvashvili, Bindadze and Loosedadze, played by themselves.

Never lose the scrum. Don’t rush it into extinction. Enjoy the odd monasticism of this chant: “Crouch. Bind. Set.”