Eugene weekly., March 17, 2011, Page 16, Image 16

game to Olympia’s Budd Bay Bandits. Both
Stepnioski and Shaffer admit that the Bandits
are the most dominant team in the league, but
they’re hoping to take them down in the fall,
when offi cial league competition begins.
Playing forward on the pitch, Shaffer
presents a towering fi gure, a fearless, fearsome
dynamo of grit and determination. “I like
tackling, it’s probably my favorite part,” she
says. “I’m hard to tackle, too. It makes it
fun when you get the ball. I really like how
competitive it is, too.”
During the Feb. 26 match against the
severely outsized Ducks, Shaffer often had
three or four opposing players hanging off
her, struggling to bring her down as she
plowed ahead with the ball. She scored two
of the Reign’s three tries (Stepnioski had the
other). “The most important part about rugby
is your aggression,” Shaffer explains. “You’re
not going to win the game if you’re not ball-
aggressive.”
A DUCK KICKS THE BALL UP THE PITCH
16 MARCH 17, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
LAUREN LING OF THE EUGENE REIGN,
POST MATCH, FEB. 26
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
Given the decidedly primitive and unfl ashy
nature of rugby, you might guess its era
of invention to be roughly Paleolithic. In
fact, rugby hasn’t been around all that long.
One apocryphal but highly cinematic story
dates the game’s invention to 1823, when a
student playing soccer at England’s Rugby
School suddenly picked up the ball and, hey
presto, started running with it — after which,
Rugby School ran with it too, putting up a
commemorative rugby plaque in 1895. In
1848, British students set down the laws of
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
RUGBY REFINED
rugby in writing for the fi rst time. And so it
began.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that the
fi rst kids to play a pigpen game like rugby were
from class-conscious colleges like Eton, the
alma mater of George Orwell, John Maynard
Keynes and Hugh Laurie. It’s like discovering
that curling was invented by the Yanomamo.
Rugby’s tony origins, however, may explain
the very un-American propriety and politesse
that often governs the game — such as when
everybody on the fi eld takes a knee if a player
is felled by an injury.
Referee Jonathan Sowins, who headed up
the Feb. 26 match, says his priorities as an
offi cial are overseeing the safety of the players,
maintaining sportsmanship and simply letting
the ruggers play the game. “The referee is the
sole judge of fact and of law during a match,”
Sowins adds.
Still, it’s not necessary to understand
or even know all the laws to enjoy a rugby
match. From what I can discern, the game is as
arcane and mannered on paper as it is chaotic
and gorgeously cluster-fucked in reality. Most
of the laws have been written piecemeal
and retroactively to clean up the game here
and there over the years, like a sort of rugby
Geneva Conventions.
But the smashing continues, without pads,
remorseless, constant, with none of that huddling
or hiking or halting that characterizes games in
the NFL. If football is Billy Ray Cyrus, rugby is
Johnny Cash. “They just hit to knock down the
player and that’s it, the play stops,” says Reign
forward Shaffer of traditional football. “It’s
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