The Playing And The Partying Were Loovly

"Nomads, get a bloody grip!" one of Toronto's supporters urged in alarm.

"Oh, well done, scrum!" shouted a Notre Dame player with an American accent when teammates moved the ball upheld with a series of short kicks. Suddenly a Nomad intercepted a lateral.

"That'll give their chaps something to ponder on," a Toronto man murmured.

But a Nomad ballcarrier was hit from the blind side.

"Kill 'im!" a less pensive Notre Dame rooter shouted.

Gay Pang, a 145-pound Hawaiian who plays fly-half for Notre Dame, was bowled over by a Toronto player. He slid 20 feet on the grass and five feet more on the cement bordering the sidelines. Before he had come to a proper rest he was up and rejoining the melee.

"Loovly, loovly," somebody said.

The teams were evenly matched. The Toronto Nomads, an amateur club made up of Englishmen, Scotsmen and Australians as well as Canadians—and the best team in eastern Canada—knew the game better than the Notre Dame boys and had the advantage in kicking; Notre Dame had the faster backs and stronger, more determined forwards. "The first half ends nil-nil," intoned the announcer, and the players took a five-minute rest.

Rugby, a game that originated in England in 1823 when a soccer player picked up the ball and ran, is the direct father of American football, but few Americans find it easy to get the hang of the daddy sport. They have to learn terms like scrum-down and line-out and the special duties of positions like hooker, prop, lock, loose-forward, inside three-quarters, second row and scrum-half. They have to learn to punt while running, to tackle high to prevent the ballcarrier from passing the ball to a teammate and to give up the ball instead of trying to run with it. "American players have a tendency to take the ball and die with it," says Bob Mier, who helped bring Rugby to Notre Dame. "If you don't keep possession of the ball, a long run is useless. The trick is to pass just as you're about to be tackled."

The game is full of gentlemanly traditions. Players are not supposed to bait the referee. When a fight seems likely, teammates hurl the incipient combatants apart and persuade them to shake hands. This gesture calls for applause. It is also a tradition to be stoical about injuries. If a player decides he is so badly hurt he cannot continue, his team plays a man short since substitutions are not allowed. In the first half of the Notre Dame-Virginia game, Notre Dame Forward John Mauro took an awkward fall and broke his arm, but he kept playing. When the arm became almost intolerably painful in the second half, he carefully shied and took the brunt of punishment on the other arm.