Rugby

by Tettyana Jasli

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My left big toe nail is hanging open.

It’s quite fascinating. I can sort of swivel it open like a door on a hinge. Underneath the yellowish layer of the nail, I can see the soft pinkness of the layer of newly formed skin. Soon, I will be able to peel it off completely.

Plucking dubiously at it, I feel a sense of déjà vu. Barely four weeks ago, my right big toe nail was in a similar predicament after the exertions of the Guinness NRC 7s.

It’s a good thing my mother hasn’t seen the monstrosity that is my left big toe nail yet, though. She’s already voiced her objections to the muddy rags I bring home, the purple bruises and the other monstrosity of my right big toe nail.

Despite all this though, I’ve been rather pleased by the way she has reacted to me playing contact rugby. I played touch rugby during my junior college days, so when my friend Hui Ting persuaded me to try out contact with Bucks Rugby one July evening last year, I vaguely told my mother I was going for rugby, leaving out the delicate fact that the rugby I was going to be playing was the kind which involves people ramming into others, getting up, and then doing it again.

That evening, I trundled down to my first contact rugby session, together with Ting, former junior college classmate, now Princeton sophomore and fully-fledged rugby jock. She had persuaded me to drag myself down for the session with Bucks Rugby. The first thing we did was tackling practice. Maybe it was because it was my first time, but I really don’t think I’ve ever been tackled as hard. Ting weighs around 120 pounds and is about 1.64 m tall, but boy, she sure can tackle. Well, I came home that night feeling like I’d been in a car wreck, valiantly pretending that I had been playing touch.

Well, I’ve stopped doing that, at any rate. Pretending, I mean.

I don’t know exactly when my mother finally wised up, but I suspect it was either when I started bringing home T-shirts with muddy skid-marks, or when out of exasperation, I decided to demonstrate the mechanics of a tackle to my brother.

In any case, I think she’s caught on that the rugby I play is actually contact and not touch because every time I watch rugby on television, she takes one look at the scrums and starts fretting that rugby is such a rough game and squints anxiously at me.

Which is a good thing, in a sense. Sure, it does mean that I get a little more flak from my mother when I get a bruise on my right thigh or when I bring home a particularly muddy, sodden pair of socks. But for my mother to recognise my participation in which my interest most likely settles, it means a lot to me.