Egg in your Beer

Three fine football players have gone out for rugby this spring, and they all think they've stumbled onto a great new sport. Arnie Horween, the newest man out, is downright effusive:

"I haven't enjoyed a spring sport so much in my life," he says, "and I think football players with nothing else to do at this time of year should use it as a conditioner."

More critical are Warren "Red" Wylie, who captained varsity football here last fall, and George Sella, 1949 varsity captain at Princeton. Both of them say that rugby's pattern of play is a little too rigid.

According to Sella, "Your play goes on in a definite order, and you miss the interesting play cycles you get in football especially after something like a situation down."

Football Tricks Work

Wylie agrees, particularly where defensive play is concerned. "I've noticed you can always work one trick," he says. "When you see the back whom you're supposed to 'mark' getting near you, you make a feint to tackle him. That makes him pass to the back next him. Then, when the ball's left him, you run forward, and chances are you'll intercept the pass and break away safe with the ball."

Wylie should know--when the varsity payed M.I.T. in April, he pulled this trick on Tech's offensive line three times, and generally played what his team-mates thought the best defensive game of the whole match.

A thing Wylie can't understand, however, is rugby's low accident rate. Both he and Sella agree the sport is a rough one--Sella thinks it's rougher even than football. Wylie adds, "You wear no equipment of any sort, except maybe a pair of shinguards. Yet you can do a flying tackle, or be tackled, and not really notice it."

Sella thinks the explanation comes from rugby's less rigorous schedule of games and infrequent practice scrimmages. "I hate to think what would happen if the squad practiced every afternoon of the week, say for about three hours at a time," he says.

Sees Big Contact Lack

Wylie's guess is that there is just less overall contact than in football. As he puts it, "Football's contact, contact all the way . . . rugby's that way only about half the time."

Wylie thinks the actual tackling is safer because ruggers don't normally clash head on. "I tried that in Bermuda last Easter, and got badly jarred,' he says. Now he usually makes his tackles from a player's side or back, since it doesn't matter much if he gains an extra yard.

Sella and Wylie still have difficulty with the no forward-pass rule and the no blocking rule. Wylie instinctively wants to block a forward as he goes for the ball, and it's a real effort of will to stop.

Nevertheless, he likes what he calls "rugby's compensation" for the no forward-pass. This is the ground-gaining kick for the sidelines. And Wylie's comment on it is that it lets the individual player kick or pass the ball as he likes, without having to run with it to advance it.

Balancing this is his disappointment that a rugby back can't control the play like his football counterpart. "No matter how good a man is," he says, "he's useless without the other backs . . . . It's the threat of the line as a whole that counts."