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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 3 (June 1, 1934.)

A Means to an End

A Means to an End.

In winter the thoughts turn to sports in which action is acrobatically accelerated; and, of these chill-dispelling gambols, Rugby is the most riotously rigorous; for, when thirty doughty dispellers of ennui congregate on the campus to oscillate the oval with boot, beef and abandon, membrane and muscle are mainly a means to an up-end.

Rugby! What a game to give you that screwshin feeling! What a hurly-burly for the burly! What a game for the “game!” A game wherein the best man is not always on top nor is it any disgrace to be “sat on;” essentially a pastime for the physically fit and the naturally “nifty.” For I fear, oldtimer, if you and I were to enter the arena, as of yore, we would have to be re-inflated at the nearest service station. But boys are boys, and their corpuscles cry for the clash of arms—and legs; the bounding oval has the skin they love to touch and the good earth rushes up to meet them from time to time with rough caresse—or so the poet has it; but the Rugby realist simply says he has “come a thud.” But what does he care; he's tough with training, and through his veins the corpuscles zoom with zest. He is imbued with the spirit of “e-sprint de cops,” he has the will to win—if he can, and the will not to whine if he can't.

“That half-back feeling.”

“That half-back feeling.”

page 10
page 11

The world forgetting,
By the world forgot,
His dearest hope,
To kick a “pot;”
Or, failing this,
To take a fly
Across the line,
And score a try.

Believe it or believe it not, the value of this sport of springs—apart from taking the chill off the weather—is its ability to inculcate in its adherents the spirit of the ancient philosophers, that “game for the game's sake” sentiment. For philosophy is a dying art like thinking out of office hours and preferring the throaty throb of the thrush to the honk of the fleeting “flivver.”