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Rugby X marks the spot

Association football, tackle football, lacrosse … sports designed for outdoor play on large fields can be and have been adapted to smaller, indoor venues.

The Major Arena Soccer League, the soon-to-be revived Arena Football League, and the National Lacrosse League maintain the spirit of their original sports while adding unique elements to make things faster and – arguably – more fun for fans.

**Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Spoutable @ScottAdamson, Post @scottscribe, Mastodon @SLA1960 and Twitter @adamsonsl**

And this made me wonder if it had ever been done for one of my new favorite sports, rugby.

Turns out it has.

And I think it’s terrific.

It’s called Rugby X, and it’s the invention of Ben Ryan, the director of elite performance for Brentford FC who gained famed as a rugby sevens coach. (Rugby sevens features seven players playing seven-minute halves, instead of 15 players playing 40-minute halves, which is the set-up in rugby union. If you’re lost at this point, go to the Google Machine, learn about traditional rugby, and then come back here later).

Rugby X entered an experimental stage in 2017 when the England Sevens team took part in a closed-door Rugby X trial, and two years later the following rules were approved:

* The pitch is half the size of that used in rugby sevens, with 55 by 32 dimensions in meters (60 by 35 in yards) plus five-meter run-offs.

* There are five players per side plus seven rolling substitutes that are allowed to come in at breaks in play following tries.

* Scoring consists of five points per try with no conversions, drop goals or penalties.

* Kickoffs are replaced by tap starts on the five-meter line, with the opposing team standing 10 meters back.

* Chip kicks allowed but not box kicks, up and unders (kicks designed for height and not distance) or any kick over 10 meters in height.

* Line outs are replaced by quick throws made by a substitute.

* There are only three persons per scrums with no pushing and hooking is allowed.

*Drawn matches are settled by a “one on one” competition involving one defender on the five-meter line and one attacker 30 meters from the goal. The attacker has 10 seconds to score. It’s conducted like a sudden death penalty shootout.

* Game length is 10 minutes with no break.

“It’s a really interesting attempt to make the game more accessible,” former England captain Lawrence Dallaglio told the Evening Standard in a September 29, 2019, story. “I know that rugby can be complicated and this should be easily digestible with hopefully try after try after try.

“There’s no doubt that 15 a side is not for everyone. This is easy to understand … it’s just full-on and there’s not the complexities of law after law. It’s just fast and furious. You still have full contact but it’s an accelerated version of the game, a sort of rock ‘n roll rugby.”

In October, 2019, the inaugural event took place at London’s O2 Arena, with Argentina winning the men’s title and England taking top honors among women’s teams.

“We have no intention of this game ever trying to compete with sevens or 15s, it’s a really good entry-level to the sport,” Ryan told Sports Gazette in November, 2019. “I don’t see it ever competing with the World Sevens circuit, but I think as a one-off, two-and-a-half-hour indoor venue at international level I think it works, the signs are pretty good. I have been really pleased with the sessions and the player’s feedback has been excellent.”

I have no complaints with traditional rugby; I’ve become a huge fan of Major League Rugby, Premier Rugby Sevens, and enjoy the sport in all its forms. Today, the third round of the Rugby Championship is taking place in Melbourne and Johannesburg. But Rugby X, I think, could become really popular if given the chance.

But will it be given a chance?

The Rugby X website hasn’t been updated since 2020, its last tweet (a retweet, actually) came on July 3, 2020, and my request for more info via the Rugby X press contact has gone unanswered.

But I remain hopeful we haven’t heard the last of it.

Who knows? Maybe MLR can set up an offseason Rugby X tournament, similar to what the Premier Lacrosse League did with its recent championship series.

Until then, go to rugbyx.com and check out highlights from the 2019 event.

It’s worth a look … and something I hope to see again soon.

Becoming a pickleball fan

My last job in the newspaper business (yes, kids, there used to be news that was printed on paper), was in Seneca, South Carolina. When I first started there – in June of 2016 – the staff was busily working on a story about an upcoming pickleball event in the area.

I was told I wouldn’t have to write anything about it because it was being handled by the news division instead of the sports department. That came as a relief; I had no idea on earth what pickleball was.

**Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Threads @sladamson1960, Spoutable @ScottAdamson, t2.social @adamson60, and Adamsonmedia on Facebook.**

Seriously – I’d never heard of it. If you had told me it involved a bunch of morons flinging gherkins at each other, I’d have absolutely believed you.

But even when I read about it, I didn’t care. It just sounded like some sort of gimmicky pseudo-game. In fact, I thought it had just been invented (not realizing its roots date back to the mid-1960s).

For the next few years, I merrily went on my way, aware that pickleball existed but still not having the least bit of interest in the larger pickleball world.

So why is it that earlier this week I was excited that the Major League Pickleball Premier Level team Brooklyn Aces drafted Catherine Parenteau, Andrea Kopp, Hayden Patriquin and Tyler Loong?

And why did I want to know that the Challenger Level New York Hustlers took Jill Braverman, Kyle Yates, Sarah Ansboury and Jaume Martinez Vich?

Because I’m a fan of Major League Pickleball.

And the Aces are my favorite PL team.

And the Hustlers are my favorite CL team.

And I’m unapologetically hooked on it.

Moreover, it doesn’t involve people throwing pickles at each other – at least not that I’ve seen.

I’m not going to go into a tutorial about the sport here; if you’re interested, you either know the rules or are willing to learn more about it. If not, you’ve probably already abandoned this column and are now watching cartoons.

But I will say that it has become a pretty significant part of my life.

I credit my niece, Tina Maluff, with planting the seed. She lives in Jasper, belongs to a pickleball group there, and invited me up to play.

I like staying active and figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try. I didn’t really expect to like it, but she was nice enough to be willing to teach me how to play, so I decided to have an open mind.

Man, I’m glad I did.

Saying it’s like tennis and ping pong had a one-night stand and produced a hard-headed baby might be an oversimplified (and weird) description, but I think it’s fair. I used to enjoy playing both, and pickleball captures the spirit of those games.

Yet, to enjoy playing it is one thing. What I didn’t anticipate was becoming a fan of watching it.

The players in MLP – and members of the Professional Pickleball Association Tour – are incredible.

The first time I watched I was looking for a soccer match on ESPN+ but came across a PPA pickleball event in Florida. A couple of hours later, I was busily eying the TV schedule in search of more.

It’s top-notch entertainment from high-level athletes who are very, very good at what they do. And what makes it more fun for me is that while I can’t play it at their level, I can play it at a level that provides great enjoyment. And considering how many trips I’ve made around the sun, I’m kinda proud of that fact.

Speaking of which, my niece and I will be competing in the Hops and Drops Pickleball Tournament July 29^th at City Walk in Birmingham. We’re in the “Hops” division, which is for players still learning the game and who are more interested in having a good time than winning.

I’m pretty pumped, mainly because it’ll be fun for Tina and me (our team’s name is Kitchen Sync in case you wanna become groupies) to meet other people in the local pickleball community.

I doubt the Aces will be looking to add us to their roster following our performance, but who knows? If someone wants to form the Major League Senior Pickleball Just For Fun League and place a franchise in Birmingham, we’d love to be a part of it.

Football’s finest hoax

As a kid I gobbled up as many football books as I could, and one of my favorites was Strange But True Football Stories.

Compiled by Zander Hollander and originally published in 1967, it featured a variety of off-the-wall gridiron tales, from Alabama’s Tommy Lewis coming off the bench to make a tackle against Rice, to Cumberland’s 222-0 loss to Georgia Tech.

The one that stuck with me the most – even though it took up just four of the book’s 184 pages – concerned Plainfield Teachers College.

Under the chapter “Dream Team,” I learned about a college football program in New Jersey that never even existed, but found itself getting a bit of notice from New York and Pennsylvania area newspapers in 1941.

In a nutshell, members of Wall Street brokerage firm Newburger, Loeb & Company (Morris Newburger was the mastermind of the deception, with help from Lew Krupnick and Bink Dannenbaum) decided to make a up a team – Plainfield Teachers – and call in its scores to publications such as the New York Times and Herald-Tribune. Not only that, they conjured a player named Johnny Chung, a Chinese halfback who was running roughshod over the opposition.

The ruse continued for a few weeks until an anonymous call to the Herald-Tribune caused sports desks to question everything they thought they knew about the “college.”

I was so enamored with the phony school that I once created a “Plainfield Teachers” team in EA Sports NCAA Football (leading them to a pair of MAC titles, if I remember correctly).

Just for fun, I decided to do some research and find out just how popular this phantom team became. Looking through available archives, about all I could find were bogus scores. But according to a 2016 New York Times story, the hoax was much more elaborate:

There was a groundswell of press interest about this small-college football powerhouse. Mr. Newburger gave birth to a sports information director for Plainfield Teachers College. His name was Jerry Croyden, fashioned from Newburger’s familiarity with the Croydon Hotel on the Upper East Side. Mr. Newburger became Mr. Croyden, and was the only one who answered the new, $5-a-month phone line that was installed at the brokerage firm.

Jerry Croyden (Mr. Newburger), with Mr. Dannenbaum’s help, began producing news releases with a Plainfield Teachers letterhead. The team acquired a nickname (the Lions) and was outfitted in the school colors (mauve and puce). Its coach was Ralph “Hurry Up” Hoblitzel, a former Spearfish Normal star who devised the W-formation, in which both ends faced the backfield. One of the ends was “Boarding House” Smithers.

But Chung was the star, and the stats Newburger provided via his press releases (Chung – nicknamed the “Celestial Comet” – had supposedly scored 57 of Plainfield’s 98 points through four games) duped New York Post columnist Herbert Allan into mentioning Chung prominently in his “College Grapevine” column.

In reality, though, the most nationwide publicity Chung and Plainfield Teachers received was when the prank was uncovered. A story written by William Tucker of United Press International appeared in newspapers across the country on November 15, 1941.

“The flying figments not only are unbeaten and untied, they are unreal,” Tucker wrote. “But for the better part of this football season their fabulous deeds on the gridiron received some due notice in some of the nation’s leading newspapers.”

The story revealed that Plainfield’s foes (Chesterton, Scott, Winona, Randolph Tech, Ingersoll, Appalachian Tech, Harmony Teachers and St. Joseph) were also fictitious.

Talk about fantasy football.

In an era when calling in scores was common practice and newspapers were the primary source of information, who knows how long the deceit would’ve continued?

Yet, someone apparently thought the joke was no longer amusing, and his tip on November 11 prompted newspaper employees in the northeast to check Plainfield’s credentials.

They had none.

Tucker wrote:

“Plainfield’s brief but terrific saga as a pigskin power ended last Tuesday when an anonymous tipster telephoned the Herald-Tribune sports department and said: ‘I’ll give you fellows a tip. There ain’t no such college as Plainfield Teachers. Bunch of fellows down on wall street are kidding you.’”

Eighty-two years later, I still think it’s pretty funny.