Spent this weekend cheering for the Nomads at my first Manila 10s. It's an international rugby festival. I've seen a music festival, flower and food festivals, a chocolate festival, and loads of religious festivals. Didn't know what a rugby festival would be like, but I happily found out this weekend. For a while I pretended I was in the Quidditch World Cup.
'Rugby is a hooligan's game played by gentlemen.' -An old cliche
(I was really chuffed to finally shoot for myself again)
Photographs by me, words by Jonny
Manila 10s is a ghost. No, actually it’s the opposite of a ghost. If a ghost is all shape and no substance The Tens is all substance and no shape. In a time when every minor event comes with instructions to spectators and participants alike on how to hashtag, tweet, instagram, and check-in, where the documentation of the event sometimes seems to outweigh the event itself, the Tens has next to no presence online.
Still, it exists. Passed on by word-of-mouth and first-hand experience the two-day tournament at Nomad Sports Club is the largest social rugby tournament in Southeast Asia, with close to 40 teams from places as far-flung as Australia, the UAE, and Wales. The finals in four divisions, played in the afternoon and early evening of the 2nd day of the tournament, draws more than 2,000 spectators to a tiny ground in Parañaque, travellers, expats in Manila and around Asia, former residents, but here in Manila, where it’s been happening for 24 straight years, it’s barely known.
In a way, that’s perfectly fine. Manila 10s isn’t run to make a profit, no entry fee is charged to spectators, and none of the players are paid. A few of the teams in the top division are sponsored by large companies, but the large majority of the players pay their own way to get to Manila, stay here, and play in the tournament. The Tens are a holdover from the days before the time of professional rugby, when live telecasts featured player information cards that listed a player’s occupation below their vital statistics and playing position. Though you won’t find any telecast of these games. And that’s probably a good thing.
The top division, known as the Cup division, features many soon-to-be and just-recently-retired professionals playing an incredible standard of rugby, and the plate division is filled with never-going-to—be professionals risking life and limb for a day’s glory. But it’s the lower divisions: the Bowl, and the Shield, that bring the festive atmosphere. Here the old, strange traditions of the sport are still upheld: teams playing dressed as Care Bears, samurais, and Scooby Doo, live goats on the sidelines as team totems, first-time tournament players, known as ‘tour virgins’, dressed as women, and streaking naked men tackling becostumed beer-drinking mascots during breaks in play. Sunday night of Manila 10s is the night I most look forward to every year.
Even in the lower divisions though, rugby is an intensely dangerous sport. Between 2011 and the end of 2012 personally I suffered, in no particular order: a broken tooth, 7 stitches in my lip, 9 stitches in my forehead, a broken and dislocated finger, and probably a partial ligament tear in my ankle (I’m not sure since I never got an MRI). And those were just the injuries that sent me to the hospital. Medics and an ambulance are a sideline necessity in the sport, at any level.
Most people reasonably assume that we are paid to endure this kind of battering. When my team won the second division last year and I ended up with a lasting scar on my face many people unfamiliar with the sport asked me what the prize was and were baffled by the response of ‘well... nothing, actually.’ This year at the tournament at least two players broke a leg, one suffered a knee injury that will require surgery, and an untold number suffered bruises, cuts, black eyes, and sprains. Most of us woke up Monday morning half-broken.
After the tape and the bandages, the wraps, the painkillers, and the ice, after two gruelling days of matches we lost in the finals, convincingly. Even if we had won, ultimately nothing concrete would have been gained. There would be no extra money, no endorsement deals waiting for us, no spotlight, and no fame. But those rewards aren’t the reasons we play. As adults, life can be isolating. We pursue our individual goals, professionally, socially, romantically. Trust can be hard to come by. The reward for us is in the trying, and trusting the others to try with you.
The Manila 10s is an annual mens rugby union tournament featuring a variant of rugby union popular in Southeast Asia called Rugby tens organized annually by Nomads Sports Club in Parañaque, Manila. The tournament is held one week before Hong Kong Sevens every year, allowing clubs from around the world to participate in the tournament prior to watching Hong Kong Sevens. Manila 10s features 4 divisions of varying skill levels (Cup, Plate, Bowl, and Shield) as well as a veteran's division for teams featuring only players over-35.
While the tournament is technically an amateur tournament the cup division often features ex-professional or internationally capped players such as former Welsh Captain Colin Charvis, former Australian Captain Jeremy Paul, world cup winner Joel Stransky and former British Lion John Bentley, featuring as 'guest' players for the tournament. The tournament draws most of the major amateur clubs in Asia such as the Shanghai Hairy Crabs, Seoul Survivors, Tokyo Gaijin, Taipei Baboons, and Hong Kong Football Club as well as teams from further abroad such as British light infantry regiment The Black Watch's rugby side, who have been regular participants in the tournament since the late nineties.