For anyone who hasn’t stumbled across it yet, I have a rugby league archive of my writings for various league publications going back to the start of the summer era. It can be found here: RL Archive
In a nutshell, the site is just a random mish-mash, in no chronological order, of old interviews and the like. Personally, I find looking back over stuff like that to be eye-opening, entertaining and – more often than not – amusing. Being the chap what wrote it, the writing style often makes me cringe – there’s nothing like being slapped in the face with your own naivete – but what the heck. I was a wide-eyed optimist at the time and you can’t say fairer than that. I always try and drop a new (old) piece into the archive every day – or at least have done for the past three months – but that can’t go on forever. Chances are I will be slowing down to a crawl soon as suitable material runs low, but the archive shall remain for future online historians to pore over when rugby league has, in fact, taken over the world (cue maniacal laughter).
Also, some of the articles I uncover don’t really sit well among chats with players and coaches – usually smart-alec old columns and such – so I thought this RLW blog might be a good place to regurgitate them from here-on-in. Not on a regular basis or anything, just when it seems appropriate. So, bring in the trumpets, here is one such offering from Super League Week, the forerunner of Total Rugby League – itself the paper predecessor of LPL’s website by that name – first published in August 1998.
tubthumping column
A novel approach to League
AS the “let’s get back to winter” brigade never tire of telling us, it’s holiday time. Indeed, as you read this I shall be toes up on a beach in the future Rugby League hotspot of Perranporth, Cornwall. I don’t know about you, but to me holidays mean catching up on my reading. So this week I thought I’d take a look at how this great game of ours has been treated book-wise since Caxton first invented the photocopier.
Now, it has to be said, literary fiction and Rugby League are not the closest of bedfellows. Sure, there have been some great factual League books in recent years, Dave Hadfield’s XIII Winters, John Haynes’ From All Blacks to All Golds and Paul Wilson’s The Best Years of our Lives to name but three. Historically, too, Mrs Beeton’s Victorian Cookery Book has undoubtedly been a huge influence on the catering facilities at many of our grounds. As for modern-day quality fiction, forget it (unless, of course, you are thinking of Framing the Future).
It wasn’t always thus. The traditional literary canon is packed to busting with Rugby League references, it’s just a case of knowing where to find them. So sit back, crack open another bottle of Nuis St Wilderspool, and take a trip with me on a whirlwind bibliographical odyssey that will raise eyebrows the length and breadth of the M62.
We start, predictably enough, in medieval times, with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a book which – despite the title – had nothing to do with a load of Aussie Bulldogs fans on a pilgrimage to the Belmore Sports Ground. No, the subject matter was much closer to home, as the following quote from “The Wife of Barrrrth’s Prologue” perhaps testifies.
“For trusteth wel, it is an impossible/ that any clerk wol speke good of wyves,/ But if it be of hooly seintes lyves,/ Ne of noon oother womman never the mo./ Who peyntede the leon, tell me who?”
Leaving aside how Chaucer’s poetic style was obviously influenced by the commentary of the late Eddie Waring, the “seintes” referred to here are clearly the ones currently playing at Knowsley Road. “Who peyntede the leon”, meanwhile, is an equally clear reference to the Aesop fable in which a St Helens supporter attempts to use his painting of Bobbie Goulding wrestling a Swinton Lion to the floor in a Welsh nightclub as evidence that Saints are a stronger outfit than Swinton. Unsurprisingly, the Lions fan to whom he is showing it doesn’t reckon much to said painting as evidence, reasoning that if he – or any other Swinton fan – had been the artist, the end result would have been different. What both Chaucer and Aesop are getting at here, I reckon, is that rugbye unione joonolystes are the ones who do the lion’s share of sports reporting and therefore it is no surprise that their sport is the one which gets the better press.
Anyway, from there we skip forward to the 18th century, and to the Enlightenment. The time in which floodlights were famously invented, thereby helping to make BBC2′s famous “Floodlit Trophy” of that era the huge success it turned out to be. The major Enlightenment literary figure, of course, was Wigan pair Andy and Paul Johnson’s great grandad, Dr Samuel, who famously declared that; “the only end of Rugby League is to enable its spectators better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Dr Johnson, of course, was a fan of Doncaster Dragons.
Actually the 18th century was something of a golden era for League literature. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for example, at one point the eponymous hero can be found wondering in his diary whether his new-found “savage” would prefer to be called Man Friday, Saturday, Sunday afternoon or early evening. Later in the book, too, there are a couple of paragraphs in which Crusoe ponders his island’s potential for attracting a Super League franchise. Almost fifty years later, Oliver Goldsmith – an author famous for the sentimental relish with which he writes about the moral authority of suffering – used his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) to consider the plight of Primrose, a vicar who positively laps up the repeated trials and tragedies heaped upon him by a lifetime of supporting Wakefield Trinity. Goldsmith’s influence is still readily apparent today, as sports headline writers the country over continue to over-use the title of one his plays: “Broncos stoop to conquer.”
Of course, the novel really came into its own as an artistic form in the 19th century, when writers such as Haworth’s Bronte sisters (whose brother Bramwell was driven to drink after nearby Keighley Cougars were scandalously denied admission to the top flight in 1847), Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Peter Gill look-a-like George Eliott were to the fore.
Dickens wrote a whole raft of Rugby League novels; Great Expectations (a tale of RL administrators), Hard Times (another tale of RL administrators), Bleak House (a tale of BARLA HQ in set in Huddersfield) and Our Mutual Friend (a tale of Wendell Sailor), while Hardy, Eliott and Austen were no slouches either. Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) dealt with the sad demise of that town’s Marksmen, Eliott’s Middlemarch (1871) grappled with the best time to hold the Challenge Cup Final, and Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) concerned the experiences of a Sheffield Eagles player at the Don Valley Stadium.
With the 20th century came modernism, and authors such as Virginia (Warrington) Woolf, T.S. (Matthew) Eliott – whose epic poem The Waste Land was completely ruined with the advent of summer rugby at Odsal – and the great James Joyce, whose monumental 600 page work Ulysses (1922) is an ingenious account of the mind of a single man on a single day in Dublin. Joyce was originally going to base his book on Super League Week editor Tim Butcher’s last visit to the Emerald Isle, but he didn’t think there would be much of a market for a book with only half a page in it (Don’t bother coming back -ed). Incidentally, Ulysses‘s amazing richness of texture, combining mythical and literary allusions, parody and pastiche, punning and humour, with a powerful sense of the infinite complexity and subtlety of the individual’s emotional and intellectual life (it says here), was heavily influenced by this column.
Moving right along, as I can see the edge of the page approaching, there have been writers in the latter part of this century who have made an impact. Writers like George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Down and Out in London and Paris (1933) dealt so intelligently with salary caps and franchising respectively. Others include children’s writer Beatrix Potter, who had the good taste to name one of the cats in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers John Joiner after the ex-Cas coach of the same name, and Salman Rushdie who, since the infamous Fatwa, has taken to standing on the terraces at Leigh as no human being would ever be suspected of being there.
Most recently, the author of A Kind of Loving (1960), that archetypal sixties kitchen sink drama, took things to an interesting level when he merged with Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and became the Stan Barstow Border Raiders. Generally, though, it has to be admitted that today’s writers do not seem to be up to the challenge. Pass me another glass of Nuis St Wilderspool, Marjorie.
