This is about rugby.

For those who don’t know rugby,

me too,

but also,

the aim is to score more tries than the other team.

So,

here we are, just

Trying to Try!

My dad, in his day, played some rugby in some semi-serious way and I remember, as a kid, watching him get frustrated with patchy replays on youtube, trying to keep up with the games that were being played I never knew where but just surely not here.

Until embarrassingly recently, all I knew of rugby was that you were supposed to travel forward without ever throwing the ball forward and you could kick the ball whenever you wanted to and a try is 5 points but a converted try is 7 points which makes it the same as a converted touchdown so it felt like I had enough foundation to learn more about the game.

(Cricket, however, is bloody hopeless.

Do not ask me about cricket.)

Both my parents played organized sports into their early twenties so it was expected that my brother and I play sports in a real way, too. When I think about where sports started for me, I realize that I started playing because it was something that was expected of me.

That’s why and how kids do things right? Without much agency of our own, we do what is expected of us.

I’m starting to think it’s not all as serendipitous as I wish it was and

there are paths carved out for us and there is magic, undoubtedly, on each of our paths and also there is quite a lot of human influence and guidance and perhaps that is not something you are meant to understand until you start to get lost without the guidance of other, older, wiser beings who know best because of course they do,

right?

Anyway

I watched Invictus circa 2009 and gained an understanding of the intersection of race and rugby union in South Africa, as informed an understanding of international race relations as a 9-year-old American girl can muster, at least.

Somewhere along the way, I pieced together that rugby is about more than just sport

and that at large,

sport is about more than just bodies and sweat and balls.

Some morning not too long ago, I sat on a couch here in Auckland and sipped on a coffee and watched New Zealand play Italy in the 2023 Rugby World Cup quarterfinal. The couch belonged to some people who are quite enthusiastic about their All Blacks, people who knew people who were in that stadium in Paris, people who were yelling and jumping and shouting and then I accidentally became a person who was yelling and jumping and shouting because that’s what sports can do to a person!

Then, some days later, I found myself at my neighborhood park playing touch rugby with some mates and I was nervous at first because it is hard for me to not be good at sports and it is hard for me to not take sports seriously

but they told me the rules were simple:

don’t get touched when you have the ball and

touch the person who has the ball

and then I took myself to a *movie because on Mondays the cinema does free popcorn and that is really the only reason I go but it just so happened the ticket I bought took me to a movie about rugby

but also about identity

specifically,

cultural identity and how sport, in this case rugby, can give an almost tangible voice to that which has been silenced in entire communities of people.

So yes,

sport is about more than bodies and sweat and balls

sport is about identity and community, yes

trust me

I know this about sport.

Also, though, and maybe more often, sport is about fun

!

?

as in

just have fun

!

?

Sport for me for the past however-many years has absolutely not been just for fun. That is not to say that it has not been fun but rather just to say that fun has not been the point of sport for me for a very long time.

Before I got recruited, I was playing sports to get recruited. When I did know where I was going to play in college, I was playing sports because I signed a contract that said I was going to continue playing sports. And then, when I got to where I was going to play sports, I was playing sports because it was something I had promised my coaches and my parents and whoever else that I was going to do.

As I have mentioned here before, I worked with an incredibly influential sports psychologist my first year at uni who helped me realize that there was nothing keeping me from leaving the thing that was causing me so much stress at the time — the scariest and most freeing idea in the world was that I had a choice: keep playing or stop playing. And every choice has consequences and we talked through what life would look like if, after all these years and promises and expectations, I decided to stop playing sports and I decided I would keep playing sports and I got there, to that decision, on my own which is what made it easier.

However, at no point did I think that the point of the whole thing was to

just have fun

And people used to say, all the time,

it’s supposed to be fun

it’s a game

don’t forget,

it’s a game

all well and good, sure, we say lots of things to comfort ourselves — to keep from quitting something we’ve started so yeah, I would even say it to myself sometimes

it’s fun!

Only now, in my retirement, do I believe that I am maybe perhaps occasionally meant to be playing sports

just for fun

And I have not found my way back to beach volleyball for fun

except on that little island, on that perfect day in Fiji, with all those perfect strangers

but it took real effort to put down my beer and get out of my beach chair to

try to

just have fun

!

I hate that I feel called to write about sports.

I spent a long time fighting with my identity as an athlete because I believed that if I claimed “athlete” fully, I could no longer be anything else and above all else, for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be dynamic and well-rounded and balanced.

But here, having watched the Fifa World Cup in person and watching the Rugby World Cup on someone else’s television and playing touch and shooting a basketball and watching people laugh and talk shit and drink beer and hug each other and laugh and

just have fun,

I feel proud to have done sports more than

just for fun.

I understand that without anything else, sports are for fun; maybe it is just when there are other people watching that it becomes important and serious and about race and about identity and about community. But whenever all those other ingredients get really heavy and hard to move through

that is when we remind ourselves

it’s just for fun

!

Maybe sport cannot be all these other important serious things if it is not, first and foremost, fun. Maybe the world’s best athletes have found a way to

just have fun

in the middle of all the other hard stuff. And maybe if I could have found it in me to prioritize fun during my college career, I would have had more success.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that I regret being serious about sports; I value that I had the privilege of being serious about sports. I value it now, more than ever, watching people watch other people who are serious about sports, wishing that they had a chance to be serious about sports, too.

Anyway

Rugby is about tries and

sport is about trying —

trying as hard as you want for as long as you want and then going back to real life afterwards — taking with you all the Goodness you gained when you were playing sport and

just having fun

xx

Until You Know Better

Just eat an almond croissant, honestly

Great Artists Steal

*Watch the film Uproar, starring Julian Dennison

Watch the film Stylebender because Israel Adesanya is, in my opinion, a perfect example of how sport can be everything else and fun all at the same time

Watch the film LFG because there’s no such thing as representing your country and not also being concerned with what your country represents