Rugby Player Gets 70-Week Ban For Eye-Pokin’
I have to laugh whenever one group or another rages about some hard hit on the ice or a bad bit of geometry that made a football tackle more dangerous than it was intended to be. Save for the occasional outlying incident, American athletes don’t often find themselves in situations where intentional injury and willful maiming are par for the course. At least not in comparison to other sports in other countries. Take rugby for example.
Stade Français’s David Attoub was banned for 70 weeks for a particularly brutal eye-gouge (pictured above) on an Ulster opponent last month. You’ll notice the deep knuckle penetration Attoub achieved on this, um, “foul” let’s call it. Almost a double-knuckler. That’s unheard of in the States (we’ll occasionally stomp a head, but rarely will U.S. athletes break the plane of the face with our appendages – it gets gooey) but common enough that competition organizers ERC had to ban Attoub nearly 16 months because this is the fourth (fourth!) time he’s been caught committing this style of crime.
If other countries didn’t paint baseball as a sport for puffs, perhaps they would have adopted the sport’s “three strikes, you’re out” rule and Stephen Ferris would still have an eyeball.
In the States too, the teams affiliated with the wrongdoer often abandon the player once it has been proven they are truly guilty of the crime. Look at the Gilbert Arenas banners in D.C.’s Verizon Center if you don’t believe me. Although I must warn you, you’ll have a hard time looking at them because they’ve been removed for weeks.
Stade Français? Nope. They’re behind Attoub despite demonstrable evidence that the crime was committed. They claim the organizing body judged what Attoub intended (subjective) instead of what happened (objective).
“We will appeal,” Stade Francais coach Jacques Delmas told Reuters. “Everybody in the team is very affected by this. [The ERC] judged an intention rather than a gesture. With them (ERC), it’s still the Hundred Years War.”
And this is a glorious difference between our country and countries that give a hoot about rugby – there are shades of gray in the intentional poking of another man’s eyes. Here in the U.S.? You throw a punch – you’re out. You land the punch, you’re out longer. You do something harder or crazier than that, your career suddenly takes a backseat to all sorts of other problems. In Europe, eye-gouging is treated like an intentional face mask penalty or, in slightly rougher cases such as Attoub’s, like publicly discharging a firearm from the safety of one’s sweatpants.
Potato, potahto.
Attoub never intended to pop Ferris’ eye out. He just wanted to show the Ulster lad that the boys in the candy pink uniforms were the real men on the field.
“This is the worst act of contact with the eyes that I have had to deal with,” judge Jeff Blackett said in a statement posted on the ERC website.
The best part of Blackett’s quote is the implication that he “deals with” contact of the eyes regularly. And he does!
There’s a larger problem here that most of the reports gloss over – you’ll see this for yourself with all the rugby readin’ you’ll now undoubtedly fill your days with: Stephen Ferris’ eyes. Go ahead and revisit that picture above. Where do you suppose his eyeball went off to when Attoub gave him that knuckle-plug? It had to have shifted somewhere and you have to assume wherever it went, it’s not good. Like when a man crosses his legs too quickly.
But wait, it gets worse. Attoub wasn’t the first player to go after Ferris’ sockets during this match. France scrumhalf Julien Dupuy was also suspended 24 weeks for gouging Ferris. His ban was reduced to 23 weeks last week following an appeal.
Three things can be deduced from that last passage. 1) At a ban of only 24 weeks, Dupuy must only have been able to fit a distal phalange into Ferris’ eye. 2) Attoub’s appeal should get him two or three weeks reduction (sweet!) and 3) Stephen Ferris must be one monumental sonuvabitch to warrant two guys giving up nearly two years of rugby in order to blind him.
Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with Ferris. You’d be forever angry too if Dakota Fanning graced the front of your uniform.
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Photos courtesy of Flickr
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