North America Proves Europe Counts Better

Let's establish one thing - Rugby makes any major American sport look as masculine as My Little Pony. American football players would be winded, bleeding and crying by the end of a normal match. Basketball players would be broken in half. Baseball players would swallow their chew. Rugby players don't go for phantom fouls, flopping, or acting like they're hurt. Unless appendages are actually ripped off - and even then, it depends on the appendage - they're going to play and not delay the game. Long story short: don't mess with rugby players.

And Europe for years has had a near monopoly on rugby. Sure, rugby is popular on American college campuses. But there is no level of rugby in the US to rival the 6 Nations Tournament, in which England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France and Italy put their toughest SOBs on the field each year and pummel each other... while occassionally moving a ball around. The tournament itself dates back to 1871, when it was only played between England and Scotland; the other four were added over the next 80 years. To say it's passionate is an understatement. Rugby fans in those 6 countries during the tournament each year make soccerites look like tepid Arizona Cardinal enthusiasts.

Now, America and Canada are trying to capture that... although in a rather embarrassing way. As mentioned in Recent Fringe Sports Results, the North American Four Tournament is in high gear, with one more day of games before the medal round. And this is great - I'm all for taking cool sports from other countries, adopting them, and then dominating those other countries in what was once their own sport because our pharmaceutical companies can create better illegal performance enhancing drugs than their pharmaceutical companies. It's sports imperialism.

What bothers me is more of a semantics problem. With a name like North American Four, you'd think the tournament would have, you know, four countries, like the US, Canada, Mexico and the Iroquois. But no. The North American Four is really the North American Two. Canada and the US divided their national teams into two teams to make four, with clever names like Canada East and the US Hawks. That seems a little pathetic to me. Like they were desperate to have a bigger tournament, but Mexico and the Iroquois had better things to do, so the Yankees and Canucks decided to shadow box for a while and call it a heavy weight bout.

Seriously, guys - call a spade a spade. Canada + America = 2 nations, not 4. American kids score badly enough in math without broadcasting that fact to the fans whose sport we'll dominate and whose will we'll crush in a few years.