The life of the rugby Flaneur

Rugby is everywhere man (fatboab n.d)

 The rugby club is the perfect example for Wood, Kaiser, and Abramms’s (2006) “Two People, Two Feet Apart” passage wherein no two people experience the same event in the same way, in this case it is the rugby club. No clearer example in my mind of this is the contrast between the club stalwarts, players who have been at the club since birth, and the Rugby Flaneur (Prouty, R. 2009), the ever present players that drift from club to club.

As a rugby flaneur moving from club to club, it has rarely been with much purpose and I have gone wherever my travels have taken me and played for a club there. It is more out of the love of the game, a sort of comfort within the “place” of the game, and the joyful challenges of being a part of a team that I continue to play despite having not had a consistent physical “place”, or club, to call my own for 7 years. The familiar “place” of the rugby field and rugby club has helped combat the feelings of loneliness when moving to a new space, an important need for people.

(Cacioppo, J. 2013)

Although many of the other rugby flaneurs I have witnessed are similar in kind to me, there are other types. These other types of flaneurs are more akin to the Parisian mobs than traditional flaneurs, they look to impose their will on a club in a negative manner and use the club to their advantage in a financial way via under the table money, or with the club pulling strings to get work. Utilising the power of the unknown, “spatiality” if you will, to their advantage.

As V. Kuttainen wrote in the lecture (2016) “Maps are both mirrors and shapers of place and space” and I’m drawing my own cognitive map of Australian rugby as a flaneur. 

Barnes, G. (1997). Retrieved from http://www.raynbird.com/essays/Passage_Flaneur.html

Cacioppo, J. (2013) The Lethality of Loneliness: John Cacioppo at TEDxDesMoines http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Lethality-of-Loneliness-Joh

Fatboab (n.d) Number of Rugby Union players by country. retrieved from  http://www.targetmap.com/viewer.aspx?reportId=6753

Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002: Our Space, Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place Lecture 4: Maps: Ways of seeing the world.

Prouty, R. (2009). A Turtle on a Leash. One-Way Street. Retrieved from http://www.onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/a-turtle-on-a-leash.html

Wood, D., Kaiser, W. L., & Abramms, B. (2006). Seeing through maps: Many ways to see the world. Oxford, UK. New Internationlist