RUGBY TOO ROUGH.

Free Lance, Volume XIV, Issue 720, 18 April 1914, Page 4

RUGBY TOO ROUGH.

American Universities Go Back to Their Old Game. THE University of California has decided to abandon Rugby football, and it is said that other American universities will follow suit. They revert to their old American game. Rugby is too rough. Nice boys have been known to get bruised and scratched playing Rugby. In the American game the nice boys are padded and protected at every point, so that the only serious risk run is the constant risk of suffocation. They don't mind suffocation—because that, after all, is a genteel death; but they hate to have their pretty skins hurt. The American student -is nothing in his self-conscious moments if he is not genteel.. All his life he labours to-per-suade himself that he is a real gentleman—"one of Nature's gentlemen." "Waughj waugh! * * * * But Mr. G. H. Mason, of Christchurch,- who managed the All Blacks' recent conquering tour through California, is to the fore with another explanation. He. conjectures that the cable really reflects, the opinion of Mr. Schaefer, the football coach at the University of California. Schaefer was sent out to Australia and New Zealand several yearn ago to observe arid report upon the Rugby game in these latitudes. He feeling happy now because his own University is being badly beaten at Rugby by Stanford University, which took it on some time later. Hence these tears on the part of the coach, according to Mr. Mason. So the cable news is open to doubt. The chances are that Rugby will take root in California in spite of professional coaches.