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First there’s been the Rugby World Cup, followed by millions around the globe but with nary a line about it appearing in the local Press since the tournament started on September 7. Fortunately, in a sudden fit of generosity, and recollecting one of my passions, the wife not only got me TataSky but also a new television set all to myself. So Rugby has not only been giving me sleepless nights but it also has been taking me back to that 15-year period when reporting the sport was a hobby for me. In the midst of all this excitement, there appeared one lonely paragraph in a local newspaper stating that the All-India Rugby Championship was won by the Army Reds defeating the Chennai Cheetahs; not said, however, were the facts that it was the first time an Indian Army team had been crowned national Rugby champions, that the Army had taken to the sport only three or four years ago, that it had beaten the reigning champions, and that Chennai had taken to the game only six or seven years ago when the sport was revived here. And the third trigger was Dhoni’s statement that Indian cricket was finding its stars from the smaller towns which produced sportspersons hungrier to become achievers. Both the Army and the Chennai Cheetahs too rely on players with such humble backgrounds.

Now all this has little to do with Madras, but as I said at the beginning it’s a bit of self-indulgence that I occasionally crave - and decided to do something about this week. In this instance, the three happenings listed above took me back fifty years when for 14 years I wrote a sports column as long as this one every Sunday, looking at, whenever the right occasion arose, every major sport in Ceylon at the time. Then as they still are, Cricket and Rugby were the Island’s two major sports – as the Madras Cricket Association and the Madras Gymkhana Club, local hosts for the Gopalan Trophy and the All-India Rugby Championship, will attest.

Both sports in the Ceylon of the 1950s had long been the preserve of the public schools and the clubs that offered membership only to those who came from the elitist tradition. They were also passports to the covenanted jobs. But then along came ‘By The Corner Flag’, which was both byline and the name of the column which made my bachelor hours fun, and stirred the pot rather rudely. It urged that Cricket be spread to the numerous Government Schools that were springing up in the remotest parts of the Island and that Rugby be taken beyond the Clubs and encouraged in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Police. I still remember the rude rejoinders from the old school tie types that greeted these “Trotskyite thoughts” that only “gave the village types ideas”. Fortunately at the time, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s ‘People’s Government’ had come to power – and sport became another means of wooing the masses.

Today, the Sri Lankan Cricket team is composed almost entirely of players from the ‘Provinces’, the mofussil, as we used to call it here, and the Army, till the civil war strife, was a regular winner of the national Rugby title. Today, the elite clubs in both sports also have the majority of their playing members up from the provincial schools. And their results have been all the better for it. It’s nice to recall having been there at the beginning. And to think it’s happening in India too.

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