When I was around 8, a neighborhood kid was swinging around a light pole, just a plain metal pole but it had the wirenut box attached to the side about a foot from the ground, which he was standing on while spinning.
His foot slipped, the corner of this box ripped his ankle open, cut right up from the top of the shoe about 6 inches into his lower calf/ankle.
He screamed and ran home, blood pouring everywhere. Saw him a few days later with massive stitches and bruising all over his leg. Wasn’t as bad as it looked, but fuck me it still makes me wince thinking of my ankle being sliced by a dull metal corner by weight and gravity alone.
Worst rugby injury I saw firsthand was a woman taking a hard hit to her shin and her tibia shattered. Her lower leg sagged at a very unnatural angle as she screamed and then passed out from the pain. Multiple players on the field vomited at the sight.
College women’s rugby is an insanely brutal sport.
The skill disparity is just waaaaay to high. Like, I saw a guy’s scrum half get his arm snapped like a twig by a prop who put maybe 30% into the tackle. But that was more a fluke than anything.
But there were women who could hold their own with the guys in full speed scrimmages who would just go out there and destroy everyone. In a women’s game one single player can be the strongest, fastest, most agile, and have the most endurance of anyone on the field. For Men’s it’s rare for someone to get two of those.
It’s like doing a pickup basketball game full of 50 year old dudes at the YMCA, but also Shaq is there. The only thing that matters is which team Shaq is on.
Just 80 minutes of highlight reel every game. It’s why I always legitimately like watching the women’s game more. I wanna see 5 stuff arms in a row then a 50 meter break that ends intentionally veering into the fullback for a sixth stiffarm.
Yeah, I didn’t realize it as I was playing, but that was the first time playing a full contact sport for most of my teammates. And let’s just say some were using rugby as an alternative to therapy. Woo, there were some intense people playing. Excellent and unhinged athletes.