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Squatting in the middle of the Rugby College campus in England is a small monument bearing the inscription. "This stone commemorates the exploit of William Webb Ellis, who with a fine disregard for the rules of football, as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby Game."
Picking up the ball and running with it is not the only distinctive feature of the modified murder that took place in Hanover's mud last Saturday. In fact, the whole spectacle was distinctive to the Green Key weekender. It was the first rugby contest ever viewed at Dartmouth.
The Dartmouth Man--about 500 of him--came green-sweatered and beanied to watch, his Colby Junior College date trotting obediently at his heels. "Hell," explained the Dartmouth Man, "there must be something to it. The whole first string football line in playing."
He was close, but not completely accurate. There were a few mammoths studding the Indian squad, plus Johnny (bootleg) Clayton of forward pass fame. Word got around that George Sella, former Princeton football star now at the Harvard Business School, was performing for the Crimsons.
Word did not get around that forward passing his taboo in the game of Rugby. Word also did not get around that most of Harvard's other first-stringers were in Cambridge nursing broken noses and separated shoulders.
There was never any question--Dartmouth's size paid off. The crowd loved the "scrums" (or as Colby Jr. kept calling them, "Scums") during which nine men on each side formed a tangled mass of flesh and pushed. The crowd chortled when a player fell and was kicked in the stomach. But the crowd left at halftime when the rains came. "That's a man's game," the weekender kept telling his date, "that's really a man's game." That night at the fraternity parties no one knew the final score, or, for that matter, who won.
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