High Seas: The one where Kyle talks about rugby

By Kyle Hynes

I woke up groggy at around 10 o’clock on Sunday morning to a text from Eshaan, our sports editor. It was just two words and an emoji. To wit:

“high seas”

“[insert pleading emoji]”

He made a very good point. I’d made a solemn vow a week before that I’d write him a piece on the Bucs each and every week, and a man doesn’t break his vows. (Well, a man can break his vows, but the ones that seem to be the most difficult are “…and nothing but the truth? I do” and “…til death do us part,” and unlike another of our sportswriters with Tristan Jarry, I’ve found myself in neither predicament with Eshaan.)

But that brought up a dilemma. On the one hand, I do like writing about the Pirates, but on the other hand, I don’t have anything to say about them. By the time you read this piece, unless you’re an exceptionally early Monday morning riser and your first stop on campus is a Tartan newsstand (in which case, God bless you and God help you), spring training will be over and the Buccos will be down in Miami to open the season. But I already wrote the pre-season blurb, explaining my hopes, dreams, and fears, and I don’t know if three years at Carnegie Mellon has taught me how to be a good enough conman to pretend to be optimistic about the Pirates two weeks in a row.

But there was that nagging voice in the back of my head. “Well, you know, you did promise him something…”

But wait a minute. Maybe I can write High Seas without needing to be optimistic about the Pirates.

You see, the original high seas, and indeed, the original pirates, were to be found on the brutal waves of the North Sea, wedged between the Celts of Scotland, the Vikings of Scandinavia, and the troubling levels of Nazi sympathy in the Netherlands. And if any country could possibly encapsulate those three cultures, would it not be the land whose people are Celtic, who were first civilized by the Vikings, and who became the only foreign state to send a letter of condolence upon Hitler’s death?

Perhaps the original High Seas, then, were about my ancestral homeland in Ireland.

And the Ireland of today is a far cry from the Ireland who painstakingly drew ink from their last potato, like water from a stone, to send a tear-stained letter of sympathy to the Führerbunker. In fact, today — 79 years later — the streets of Dublin better resemble a Guinness-infused replica of the Volga, as proud Irishmen and Irishwomen trumpet their victory in the Six Nations.

If you’re not acquainted with the particulars of brutish European sport, you might be asking, what is the Six Nations? And if you are, you might be thinking, good Lord, there is no way this guy actually turned a baseball column into a rugby column.

Not entertained? Go ahead. Put it down. No one is watching. No one is judging. (I’m watching. Don’t you dare put it down.)

For the more civilized among you who haven’t been introduced to the game of rugby, or have heard its name only in the context of uppity Europeans claiming moral superiority for having a more elegant version of football, it’s a fifteen-a-side game on a roughly soccer-sized field where burly men with anywhere between eight and twelve teeth try to, without passing the ball forward, score a touchdown, which they term a try. (Why is it called a try, if in fact, you succeeded? I don’t know.) As you’re not allowed to throw the ball over the burly men opposite you, that leaves only two options — kicking it over them, or attempting to run through them. Kicking and keeping possession rarely goes well, although it’s beautiful when it does, so the game more often devolves into massive shoving matches that both feel much too primitive to still be allowed, and yet are simultaneously beautiful in their simplicity.

Too primitive to be allowed and beautiful in its simplicity? It appears that, for the second time, we’ve accidentally described Ireland. Surely Ireland is good at this game?

Indeed, they are. The national side, as of last weekend, are champions of what’s universally seen in Ireland as the world’s most prestigious rugby tournament. Now, it is worth noting that said tournament, like I mentioned, is the Six Nations, which includes — wait for it — six teams. Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Italy, and France. Where is South Africa? Or New Zealand, the best team on Earth? Doesn’t matter, because they didn’t have the good sense to be born in western Europe, so for this, they’re left out.

But those six teams, each playing five round-robin games against the others each spring, leave everything on the field each and every match. The rules are quite simple, and to make it easier, we’ll use football terminology. As I said, no forward passes, laterals only. If you get tackled, your team is allowed to keep the ball; there are no downs. On any play, you can give up mid-play and punt it; you can either punt it to the other team, or to your own team. You can also give up mid-play, if you’re close enough, and kick a field goal. Five points for a touchdown, three for a field goal, and two for the extra point. There are some other eccentricities — things with names that sound fake, like scrums and mauls — but that’s the gist.

And no one is better at this than Ireland, who missed out on becoming the undefeated champions of Europe thanks to one ill-timed kick from England’s fly-half Marcus Smith, but had been racing to perfection up until then.

In the first match, Ireland humiliated France 38-17, which they followed up with a massacre in Italy by the almost unfair score of 36-0, and then a 31-7 win against the Welsh. Horrifyingly, the one Irish loss came to England — it’s always England, isn’t it? — in a painstaking 23-22 loss in which Ireland led right up to the final second. But, as the English had been humiliated by France and Scotland, of all people, the Irish could take a single loss — and indeed, when they finished the tournament against those same Scots the next week, the result was a 17-13 Irish victory that never felt as close as the scoresheet indicated.

At the end of the tournament, poor Wales was saddled with the Wooden Spoon, the trophy annually awarded to — and this is real — the team who did the worst in the Six Nations. I’d feel bad for Wales, but they have somehow managed to eternally make their prince the English dauphin, so my sympathies are limited. In fact, I’m proud, because Italy — usually the laughingstocks of the tournament — avoided the Spoon this time around. (How bad has Italy been? Before this tournament, they’d won a single match since 2015, and said match was by a single point. Every single year from 2016 through 2023, the Spoon went home to Italy. Now, am I upset? Not particularly, because let’s face it, Italian chefs probably have more use for a wooden spoon than any of the other countries in the tournament (French chefs fashion themselves too self-important for such a crude instrument, and the other four nations should probably be forbidden from cooking).

I feel myself running out of words, so what’s the moral of the story? There are three.

One, if you have the chance, you really should give rugby a glance. It’s not the prettiest sport, it’s not the most skilled, it’s not the most violent. But in good measure, it’s got a dash of all three, and it may be the most fundamentally human of all the sports I’ve gotten into. There are no arbitrary rules, no breaks in play every five seconds, no silly bans on using your hands. It’s just one country’s most cube-like men pushing and shoving their way down the field. One man will run into the wall of opponents, be forced to pass it back to a teammate, and said teammate will dutifully do the same exact thing. When it doesn’t work, it’s almost endearing, sort of like seeing your dog attack the mirror time after time; when it does, it’s a sight to behold.

Two, if you’re of Irish blood — and thanks to the need for farmhands a century and a half ago and the lack of ways to kill a wintery evening on the Emerald Isle, there are no shortage of you who are — here’s yet another reason to be proud.
And three — and this is a solemn promise — the article will be about baseball next week.