A Note On Three Types of Ball Game.

I watched some football tonight and realised what a vastly over-rated sport it is compared with rugby. Perhaps it’s because I’m a man of the valleys, but football lacks all the physical aggression that I find in rugby. Then, of course, it all links to stripping, but most things in life have some connection to the noble art of thongateering if you care to look carefully enough.

Rugby, for example. It is all about passing an object to somebody while in a highly nervous state. And that's prettu much what the strip is all about. It takes some nerves to hand your last item of clothing over to a complete stranger, and, like rugby, this tends to take place while you're being threatened by somebody weighing over twenty stone and preparing to drag you to the ground by anything that’s handy and shaped like a handle.

And then there’s another difference. Footballers have the hard tackle where rugby players prefer to have a much softer tackle. Now, this makes rugby very much like the strip. We have soft tackle too. I often have to coax the ladies off me without hurting them. Occasionally, we do have the twenty stone sheet metal worker come running at us, but most of the time, they fall on us softly, in a relaxed kind of tackle, which we have to carefully brush aside while getting on with the dance.

The final point I want to make is about all the cheating we find in football. Rugby is a true sport because it’s exactly how you see it. And so too the strip. There’s no half-way in stripping. You’re either naked or your not. You get paid or you go home empty pocketed, if indeed you’ve got any pockets because the management are so disappointed with your performance that they wouldn’t let you pick your clothes up at the backstage.

You might laugh but I’ve seen that happen on more than one occasion with these young lads who think they’re God’s gift to women! I remember one poor lad had to travel all the way home to Chester without a stitch to wear. He made it alright and he never tried stripping again. In the end, he become a weatherman. I sometimes see him on the TV and I always think of him standing naked in Bangor's highstreet waiting for his bus home. I imagine that’s when he realised he a natural ability to tell when it was cold. But that as they say is another story.