Rugby is great. The players don’t wear helmets or padding; they just beat the living daylights out of each other and then go for a beer. I love that. Joe Theismann
8Playing football and rugby is the Samoan sport. It’s part of the conversation at church. It’s part of the conversation in their barbershops, in the grocery stores. It’s what everyone is aware of and familiar with. They take a lot of pride in the beating you can take in the course of that sport. Junior Seau
It takes leather balls to play rugby. Rugby slogan
Give Blood Play Rugby. Rugby slogan
Rugby is played by men with odd shaped balls. Bumper sticker
Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the centre of the city. Oscar Wilde
In our country, true teams rarely exist ... social barriers and personal ambitions have reduced athletes to dissolute cliques or individuals thrown together for mutual profit ... Yet these rugby players, with their muddied, cracked bodies, are struggling to hold on to a sense of humanity that we in America have lost and are unlikely to regain. The game may only be to move a ball forward on a dirt field, but the task can be accomplished with an unshackled joy and its memories will be a permanent delight. The women and men who play on that rugby field are more alive than too many of us will ever be. The foolish emptiness we think we perceive in their existence is only our own. Victor Cahn
[After biting Sean Fitzpatrick’s ear]: For an 18-month suspension, I feel I probably should have torn it off. Then at least I could say, ‘Look, I’ve returned to South Africa with the guy’s ear.’ Johan le Roux
[On female rugby teams] Everybody thinks we should have moustaches and hairy arses, but in fact you could put us all on the cover of Vogue. Helen Kirk, 1987
Rugby football is a game I can’t claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. P G Wodehouse, ‘Very Good, Jeeves’, 1930
The only trophy we won this day was the blood and sweat we left on the pitch, and it was enough. Bill Beaumont, attributions and variations
A major rugby tour by the British Isles to New Zealand is a cross between a medieval crusade and a prep-school outing. John Hopkins
Don’t ask me about emotions in the Welsh dressing room. I’m someone who cries when he watches Little House on the Prairie. Robert Norster, 1994
The French selectors never do anything by halves; for the first international of the season against Ireland they dropped half the three-quarter line. Nigel Starmer-Smith, BBC 1974
The job of Welsh coach is like a minor part in a Quentin Tarantino film: you stagger on, you hallucinate, nobody seems to understand a word you say, you throw up, you get shot. Poor old Kevin Bowring has come up through the coaching structure so he knows what it takes ... 15 more players than Wales have at present. Mark Reason, Total Sport, 1996
We’ve lost seven of our last eight matches. Only team that we’ve beaten was Western Samoa. Good job we didn’t play the whole of Samoa. Gareth Davies, 1989
League is much, much more physical than Union, and that’s before anyone starts breaking the rules. Adrian Hadley, 1988
The whole point of rugby is that it is, first and foremost, a state of mind, a spirit. Jean-Pierre Rives
You can go to the end of time, the last World Cup in the history of mankind, and the All-Blacks will be favourites for it. Phil Kearns
What had begun as the 1969 Springbok tour had now suddenly become a battleground in the worldwide anti-Apartheid struggle. The World Against Apartheid: Have You Heard From Johannesburg? II Fair Play, PBS 2012
The [Australian tour] protesters had planned a campaign of non-violence and civil disobedience, but as the tour continued they were met with increasingly violent attacks from frustrated rugby fans and heavyhanded police. ibid.
The ill-fated tour moved on to New Zealand. ibid.
As the All Blacks headed for South Africa the protests spilled over into the Montreal Olympics. ibid.
New Zealand v South Africa: ... A Boer heart beats here, not in fear, but in rage. Five to six hundred people are denying the rights of twenty-eight thousand. South African TV
He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping. Then Jack Lawton’s yellow boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after. He ran after them a little way and then stopped. It was useless to run on. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
My name’s Steve Thompson. Rugby changed my life. With it, I travelled the world, met the Queen, and won the Rugby World Cup for my country … Years of impact have damaged my brain, and now at the age of 42, I’ve discovered the game that gave me so much is taking everything from me. Around 4 years ago, some of my most precious memories started disappearing … Head On: Rugby, Dementia & Me, BBC 2022
9 years ago American NFL players won that argument. There’s now a billion-dollar fund for affected players in the States, while over here there is nothing. And the rugby authorities still won’t recognise the damage that’s been done to players like me. ibid.
‘Wheelchair Rugby League: the best sport in the world.’ Storyville: Made of Steel: Wheelchair Rugby’s Fiercest Rivalry, BBC 2023
‘France are number one in the world. Whenever we’ve played France, we’ve been the team that loses our head. They’re the team to beat.’
November 2022: The Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup is being hosted in England. The English and French teams are favourites. ibid.