Gudday Cobbers,
On the eve of the Australia versus Georgia rugby test, after deep reflection, and with full awareness that by my choosing to expose such matters from the bowels of the Scrum Illuminati, that this may be the last time anyone ever hears from me, I feel nonetheless compelled to share a secret.
What I share now marks me as The Betrayer. What I disclose below has been, up until now, knowledge buried and sanctified beyond the realms of ordinary men. While known to a chosen few, its details have historically been a closely guarded secret, with any written discourse of such squirreled away in otherwise forgotten vaults of the Papal library archives. And so, for me to openly discuss such matters, certainly condemns my soul to damnation beyond the help of mortal man. Nonetheless I’m going to do it.
Today I talk of ‘Scrumception’.
Scrumception is a state of being unlike anything else you will experience in life. The vast majority of rugby-players, let alone humanoids, never will know it. And for that, they should be thankful they will never even wrestle with it as a concept in their consciousness, let alone have to abide it for the challenge it is.
But some of we few, we chosen few, we happy band of brothers who accept the higher calling of assuming the mantle of jersey 1, 2 or 3 may experience it once, and a very rare few idiots may taste it twice, in our lifetimes. And when happens, it fundamentally alters the way you see the world, your life, our game, and your role within each of those spheres, in the most elementally base manner.
Scrumception happens, much like any more garden-variety end to a Dunnings-Kruger inspired overconfidence, when an opponents scrum hits you so hard, so unexpectedly suddenly and so overwhelmingly that your whole essence of being simply becomes enveloped in a bubble-moment of exploding sensations and emotions so completely outside your conception, that the world simply vanishes from all sensory perception faculties that you have. This is beyond getting lifted off your feet. This is other than popping rib cartilage, dislocating a shoulder or collapsing a knee. This is sub-terranean.
Accordingly, Scrumception can be difficult to articulate at a granular level, particularly to those who’ve just not ever played up-front, or perhaps done a bit of wrestling, and so don’t have even a modicum of learned experience in which to root the base elemental factors of pain, unexpected spiritual self-awareness and the all-encompassing sense of impending doom that is multiplied exponentially outwards in all directions and dimensions simultaneously. In-fact I liken trying to describe it to the seminal words of Potter Stewart, associate justice of the US Supreme Court and his famous non-definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it”. Only I’ll rephrase it slightly and say, “You’ll know it when you live it”, as the gamut of sensations and emotions that it encompasses are beyond mere words, and thus would also be different for anyone who has traversed that gulf. But within that spectrum of experience, two elements undoubtably remain true: it is omnipotent in the moment, and you will never be the same again.
Rather, this is an instantaneous overwhelming of everything that is you and you thought normal. As you sense your feet leaving the ground, as you see your boot laces fly past your face, and as your spine takes on a shape explaining the origins of the question mark, this is a nanosecond of such Big Bang universality that your world, and your place amongst it, simply ceases to even exist, let alone matter. It’s a sudden blanket acceptance that what you formally knew as ‘you’ never did really exist at all, and THIS is your everlasting universe now, as you are carbon-frozen like some sort of perverse Hans Solo in a state of shock, pain and base atomic-level survival. And I must stress that whilst the average scrum lasts barely 10 seconds from engagement to clearance, I promise you, the perception of time is just that – a perception only. For in this state of suspended quasi-animative existence, you will seemingly live years before you re-enter the Milky Way again, let alone re-find your body, and then hopefully come rushing back to ear-roaring consciousness seemingly almost before you even left it.
When you do re-find yourself in the cosmos, with luck the physical immediacy of your Scrumception will be over. At best, you will reawaken face first in the turf and you will go through a natural, reflexive body-check, starting with wriggling your toes, fingers and gradually reconnecting and pulse-checking your physical functions up until you flutter your eye-lids and reopen your jaw to gingerly pick out the grass and spit out the mud and occasional earthworm that had gathered therein. In that moment, you will actually welcome the head-splittingly screaming pain from your twisted shoulders, contorted ribs and knotted legs as at least those sensations confirm the fact you did in-fact return from the Nothingness. And yes, you will very likely have shat yourself in some manner (which is why I’m always wary of white shorts and why to this day I still wear budgie-smugglers and not cotton undies).
From there, reversing down the steeply inclined driveway of luck, if you regain awareness any earlier in the process, you may resurface in increasingly worsening states of either developing repose (think ‘human pretzel’), or God Forbid, still in the maturing throes of said scrum somewhere and thus still locked inescapably in the vortex of physical and emotional turmoil in-which you instinctively realise that you would have preferred to still be unconscious. That said, I’ve heard it whispered in back-alley bars of ill-repute and smelly incense, that there are dark chapels in unspoken places around southern France (who precise locations I’m blood-oathed to not disclose) in-which can be summonsed by Ouija board, the poor souls of the Forever Unawakened – those banished ghosts, lost and trapped in an eternity of perpetual flailing about outside the walls of Rugby Valhalla in the Afterlife. For them, their scrum never ended and thus they cannot join the revelry and rummery inside.
Some of you may scoff at what I say. And that’s ok. Someone has to be the poncy Backs or the smart-arsed Loosies I guess. What that tells me is that you’ve not ever seen the other side. That door has not ever opened before you, whether you wanted it to or not. And so you’ve not ever stared into the Abyss as it vacuumed you through to the Nothingness beyond. To you I feel no ill-will. I feel no indignation. In-fact, despite the tumult of the experience, I feel almost a passing sorrow for you that you’ll happily live your life without having such a revelation. But that said, I would not ever wish the experience on anyone. For whilst it is an enriching experience no-doubt, it is a revelation that must be embraced only if it comes for you, for to seek it out would be beyond folly beyond measure.
Those of us who have tasted Scrumception, and so briefly entered the Underworld beyond, recognise others who have tasted it on sight. We/They have this sort of hollowness around the eyes, a certain presence not entirely dissimilar to what the military types call a ‘thousand yard stare’. But it’s not quite that either. It’s a greyness, a slightly harrowing haunting that sits in the dim background of our now-elevated consciousness like some sort of squatting, indefinable leech that by its malevolent presence alone reminds us to set a bit lower and to seek the cold comfortable security of jamming our face into the grass a bit quicker if we must, unless we wish to tempt the great Bellerophon beast to come Tango again. And no one does that.
But despite the risks and the horrors it entails, to go through Scrumception, to experience that moment and come out the other side, is to be reborn, is to be remade, and so is to be revered and reflected on with great solemnity. Why? Because to survive the crucible is to mount the summit and straddle the beast – for you are now, and may with integrity call yourself, truly among The Row. And as a scarred and legitimised member of that global fraternity, I tell you there is no place in the rugby-verse that I would rather be.
Why am I telling you of this? Why do I tempt the wrath of the Gods of Rugby to share such unspoken secrets with those outside the fold of The Row? Because it’s good for folk to understand that for true Fronties, ‘victory’ is not found on a scoreboard. For us it is not measured in tries or goals. Rather it is hinted at in the bottom of collapsed masses, it is vaguely smelt in the blackness of rucks, it is fleetingly tasted in the maelstrom of mauls, where not just your physicality but the very strength of your soul is tested. For to survive and compete therein lies respect, strength, commitment and recognition of honour. In there lies a victory beyond the reach of some poncy scoreboard or some interfering Referee. But the greatest, finest, and the most singular expressions of such places, struggles and emotions are found in the scrum. Nowhere else. And thus in the scrum lies the origins of Scrumception: Scrumtopia.
Why do I tell you this now? Because tomorrow our Wobblies face Georgia. And within that, because within the next 24hrs, our Wobblies will face the Georgian scrum. In those moments of exquisite contest that lie ahead, at least one Wobbly Frontie, if not a few more, will have their Scrumception at the hands of a group of guys who exist at a sub-molecular level for very little reason other than to scrum. And then scrum again. And then to keep on scrumming until your legs are beyond collapse, your ribs well past jelly, your shoulders and neck beyond any point of short-term recovery, and your very grasp on reality has slipped beyond tenuous and into the greyness of the Void.
Please believe me when I say that these Georgian lads are almost the purest expression of Scrumception. And the evidence for that statement is inarguably in the numbers as, from a country that only has around 9,500 registered rugby players, Georgia currently has around sixty professional front rowers exported throughout the rugby world, with something like 40 of those plying their trade in the scrum-luvvin’ environs of France alone. So be in no doubt that these guys live to scrum and not much else. And they’re bloody good at it. And tomorrow the best they have are facing down the Wobbs. So, dare I recognise them for what they are: citizens, nay denizens, of Scrumtopia.
And again, folk may scoff at me. For our Wobbly Fronties know what they’re about right? They can bench-press engine blocks yeh? They can squat small cars yeh? They’ve packed more than a few scrums right? They’ve got this Yeh? Right?
Yeh, Nah.
Our Wobbs are about to have their smug, “What’s going on ‘ere?” happy-go-lucky ignorance and fleeting sense of confidence won over the last fortnight, morphed into a fundamentally life-changing ordeal that will initially scar them and will genuinely give them troubled dreams for a time. But those wounds will heal. With time and copious amounts of whiskey, those legions will scab, callous and age into one of those silvery, meandering ‘life well lived’ scars that, with the passing of years and even more whiskey, will meld to become but another seam of discoloured skin on the back of their forearm, lost among the multitude of life’s other scars. But this a scar that the bearer will never forget where it came from nor what it entailed. For that will be the scar, won against Georgia, on his Scrumception Day.
Thus tomorrow, somewhere inside what others will dismissively call ‘a game’, a couple of our boys may just face their Scrumception. And whilst it may be ugly for them in the instant, it will no-doubt help shape who they become. For they will have earnt their scar against those who may be the best there is – the Georgian scrum.
And so, as an older Frontie with my Scrumception well behind me, I can’t help but acknowledge that I’m a little bit jealous of those boys. But putting that selfishness aside, I do also acknowledge that after the final whistle I will also raise my glass to them all, Georgian and Wobbly alike, and say “Welcome.”
