THIS PHOTO TELLS YOU EVERYTHING you need to know about the game of rugby as it is played these days. I am addressing this observation to a lot of you "back in the day" rugby players who haven't tied up the laces on your boots in earnest since a try was was worth four points. I'm also addressing you younger guys who are just breaking in to this exciting, enigmatic and yet elemental lifestyle called rugby.

To give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I'm the guy who years ago came up with an idea for a bumper sticker to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the tragic crash of an airliner into the Andes mountains. The charter flight of 45 passengers and crew members was filled with players and supporters of a Uruguyan rugby club on their way to play an away match in Chili. The plane crashed on Oct. 13, 1972. Seventy-five days later, long after the families and the world had given up hope of finding any survivors, two rugby players -- a 22-year-old second row and a 19-year-old winger -- walked out of the mountains after an heroic trek through snow and ice that saved the lives of 14 other survivors huddled miserably at the crash site. Soon the world discovered the answer to the miracle of how they all stayed alive without food for more than two months. And that's when I printed up bumper stickers that said, "RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR DEAD."

Rugby has always been a edgy sport with edgy people attracted to it Sure they hold responsible jobs and raise families and pay taxes and sometimes, lord knows why, even vote Republican. But I don't know a single rugby player who wouldn't eat a dead teammate if he had to. (Well, at least a dead teammate who wasn't Italian.)
When I started playing for Whitemarsh in 1968, rugby was sort of the outlaw motorcycle gang of contact sports. It's reputation -- well deserved, I might add -- preceded it. Rugby was everything people said it was. And my team -- Whitemarsh -- was even more of that. We prided ourselves on being bigger, tougher, faster, harder on the field, with more of us than them singing louder, funnier and longer at the party. We wanted it all. And then not to get arrested on the way home.

But in our wildest dreams none of us "back in the day" rugby guys could imagine a future where white second row forwards could routinely jump seven feet in the air in a single bound. And yet you see this sort of counter-intuitive, anti-gravitational, anabolic-steroid-free leaping ability at virtually all levels of rugby as it's played in the first decade of the 21st Century .

It's marvelous to look at when it's done right, such as this Kodak moment yesterday afternoon in Cherry Hill, N.J., where Phitladelphia-Whitemarsh forwards out-skied their Rugby Super League rivals from the black-clad Chicago Lions. But in a competitive contact sport context, let alone a rugby football context, these unnatural teammate-assisted pyramids seem as contrived as a routine by Big Five cheeerleaders during a college basketball time out at the Palestra.

Don't get me wrong, I love watching the cheerleaders lift their perky pals over their heads. But if I saw Dionte Christmas and Ryan Brooks hoisting Mark Tyndale overhead and then holding him high above the hoop until he scored Temple's winning basket over St. Joes in the Atlantic Ten Tournament championship, well sir, I'd be thinking that something hinky has happened to basketball.

I'm not saying that rugby isn't better a game than it used to be. I'm just saying that these days we bury our dead. And I miss the meat.