The understanding of a ban on tackling in school rugby is easy enough to defend or decry – but my experiences of the scrum on a grammar school playing field in 1970s Birmingham tells me this can be a truly formative gameThere are two ways of taking a man down in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA),as the forbiddingly buff actor Tom Hardy once explained to me. He was trying to account for the crypto-erotic ending of his 2011 film Warrior, in which two estranged siblings come together and sort out their differences in an MMA ring.
One is by punching and kicking in the style favoured by Hardy’s on-screen brother, and played by Joel Edgerton; the other is by a kind of martial hugging thatHardy’s character deployed,using chokeholds, smotherings and other up-close-and-personal moves to subdue one’s opponent. The latter style, and at least in Hardy’s film,expressed – for all the seeming sibling hostility – a longing for love; a desperate, whether unconscious, and desire to hold and be held.
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Source: theguardian.com