Finding true heroism high in the Andes

LOCKER ROOM: Nando Parrado's inspirational book has softened the hardest of anti-rugby hearts

THE SPORTS Editor, bless his little argyle socks, likes a laugh. His latest wheeze came early in the run-up to a week when 82,000 southsiders in sheepskins were due to march northwards towards Croke Park and, more worryingly, towards my house. This provocatively triumphalist parade was designed to make me feel like a resident of the Garvaghy Road.

Anyway in order to affect the studied cool of a man light-heartedly playing with matches while atop a speeding oil tanker, the Sports Editor chose to heighten tensions between the rugby community (them) and the non-rugby community (me and some friends who decline to be named). An old archive piece was dug up and run in a recent Wednesday supplement. Written by a younger version of the graceless curmudgeon, the piece called for rugby to be driven underground and for those continuing to practise eggchasing to be granted the courtesy of a show trial followed by burning at the stake. It seemed reasonable at the time, which was eight years ago, a time when I was going through one of those phases where I felt that the revolution was imminent.

Anyway, the first I knew of this particular piece of propaganda being resurrected was when I opened the e-mail account only to find that the regular batch of missives from people promising to make me bigger here and smaller there had been replaced by an avalanche from posh people promising to make me dead, here, there and everywhere. The Bloody Golden Circle have too much time on their hands now that the revolution really is imminent.

In the years since the piece was first published (there was rioting in a deli in Blackrock and a fatwah was issued against the company chairman) my views on rugby have mellowed, evolving from outright hostility and disdain to mere snooty indifference and disdain.

I have learned when generalising about rugby people to always make a point of excluding Munster people from the excoriations. Munster people, I will announce, are the salt of the earth, the choice condiments of the universe and so on. I don’t know why, but this goes down well and usually buys me an ally when in company. For a lot of people who should know better, watching Munster has been a sort of gateway drug on the road to hardcore eggchasing. If they feel that watching Munster is okay they feel that they are still okay. I don’t judge them.

The strange thing about the Sports Editor’s timing in putting my life in danger and forcing me to resume wearing this ridiculous disguise (prosthetic stomach, adolescent-style beard) is I was actually going though a dangerously benign phase in terms of my attitude toward rugby.

I had just finished reading Nando Parrado's, Miracle in the Andes, wherein a rugby team are forced to eat each other after their plane comes down in the mountains back in 1972.

Now a spot of cannibalism is the sort of thing which forms the basis of many a rousing rugger song (or is that bestiality?), but like a lot of people I had read Alive!by Piers Paul Read as a young fella. Practically all I remembered was the same thing as everyone else remembers.

The survivors were faced with a choice of starving to death or eating the flesh of dead comrades and friends. They chose the latter course and I can remember boring maybe a thousand people to death with the hypothetical “ would you or wouldn’t you?” poser in the weeks after reading it. Several acquaintances began gnawing through their own flesh just to prove the point and make me go away.

Anyway Parrado’s book, written years later, deals with his 72 days in the frozen tomb of the high Andes and it is impossible to read its pages without another hypothetical inserting itself in your brain. The questions is not whether you would or would not eat human flesh; Parrado presents this dilemma as he saw it at the time, as a matter of mere common sense. The question is, do you know what is inside you in terms of character and, in terms of that oft- abused word, heroism.

Parrado is faultlessly modest about that very area, one he is uniquely qualified to address. Heroism. Having taken a severe blow to the skull as the plane crashed into the mountains, he came to some days later to find his mother dead and his sister dying, his skull fractured and many of his friends dead.

Yet he emerged as the leader of the group and he and the man he still calls his best friend, Roberto Canessa, opted to defy death by heading off through the Andes, through the impossibly thin air and the crippling cold on an expedition which lasted 10 days before they spotted a man on horseback and got word to him. The book is fascinating and offers tangential points of interest in the intersection of the team’s character with the social dynamics of the group who survived.

The Old Christians were an alumni rugby team populated by graduates of Stella Maris College in Montevideo. They played, and still do, wearing a shamrock on the chest, a mark of respect to the Irish brothers who insisted on teaching them the game. The brothers had a belief in the denial of ego and the precondition of sacrifice for the better good which rugby demands. When the Fairfax plane came down that belief was put to the ultimate test.

There is, naturally, an unbreakable bond between the men who got off that mountain and one doesn't read Miracle in the Andesexpecting Parrado to diminish the legacy of any one of his friends. What is fascinating though is how again and again he describes the various degrees of heroism which each man finds himself capable of in the most desolate and horrifying circumstances and he notes how this aspect of character was known to him from the life on the rugby field.

Having spent several months of my life with my shoulder placed heroically and selflessly against the buttocks of the front row in front of me, I felt that secondrows would most likely be the best bet for supreme acts of heroism with outhalves most likely at the other end of the scale, being capable of no greater gesture of humanity than sharing their hair straightener.

Perhaps I should have stuck to rugby longer than six months. The company of secondrows might have inculcated in me an exaggerated sense of heroism, the sort you wonder if you possess every time the plane you are riding gets a buffeting due to turbulence.

Then again, as we all get ready to eat each other after the economies crash into the high Andes, perhaps Parrado’s beliefs about rugby and high selflessness won’t hold up.

Anyway the extent of my own heroism after opening those e-mails and weeping for an hour was to contact the Sports Editor and to tell him half-jokingly, but mainly in earnest, that I should be paid extra for reprinting articles and double extra if they put my life at risk. I could tell he had probably been reading Nando Parrado himself and that he was having much the same thoughts, for he looked up briefly, shoved the last flapping corner of salami onto his mouth and told me to take a hike.