As an avid sports fan growing up, my exposure to rugby was pretty abysmal. In Canada, it ranks shockingly low on our national depth chart for spectator sports, competing for airtime with coverage of billiards trick-shot challenges, competitive five-pin bowling, celebrity hold’em tournaments and even the Lumberjack World Championship. While I won’t get off on a tangent regarding the bizarre frequency with which sports networks in North America show events that barely qualify as “sports” (as a general rule, if you can play something at a championship level while holding a beer in your hand, it’s not a sport), it’s clear that my surroundings offered little opportunity for me to get excited about laterals, scrums and dudes with massive quads.
Living now in Hong Kong, I’ll admit that Rugby Sevens is not technically my first encounter with the sport. I was once at a bar in Auckland during an All Blacks match against the rival Aussies, and while I thought I would learn something about the rules I wound up picking up only two key pieces of information: one, that you never challenge a Maori to a chugging contest; and two, that a rugby player can be shockingly cavalier during a television interview despite torrents of blood pouring out of his forehead. I also attended a rugby match once in Brisbane, but when people have since asked me “was it Union or League?”, I respond by telling them that I’m not sure I was sober enough at the time to identify whether it was night or day. So, thanks to alcohol, I’m still nowhere. What the shit is a “try?”
With the city’s biggest sporting event just around the corner, I decided to dedicate an afternoon to drinking Pabst and watching Hong Kong Sevens matches on YouTube. Based entirely on this research with not so much as a Google search to supplement my observations, here’s what you need to know about the rules of Rugby Sevens:
1. “Sevens” refers to the seven players on each side and the seven minutes in each half. It also refers to the number of beers a woman would have to drink to find it desirable to sleep with any of the 12 men in the front row dressed as High Court judges. It’s nice to see hordes of white people proving that with enough booze you can forget not only how to act like a decent human being in a public space, but also that Halloween falls in October rather than March.
2. You definitely want to run the ball into the end-zone. That’s for sure a good move. Doing so will result in five points, a tame celebration made homoerotic by curiously small shorts, and the Cantonese-speaking play-by-play announcer screaming like he’s in a mahjong parlor.
3. When you’ve made the end-zone, you get to dropkick the ball in the direction of the uprights for two points. Fans of American football (or Canadian football, which is similar to American football except that the ball is bigger, they have three downs instead of four, and players are legally allowed to marry one another) may note that a special player does not exist to exclusively kick extra points. This means that in rugby, every player is a “real athlete” and teams actually have to “employ a water boy.”