Eva Holland: I can still hear the quick crunch of his vertebrae cracking. That’s the meddling of hindsight, of course — he was too far away, out in the middle of the night-dark field, and there were too many people around me and around him: the fans heckling, the grunts and dull thud of 16 men crashing together in the scrum, then an ominous silence. People breathing hard, whispering, yelling for help.
But whatever I heard or didn’t hear, whatever tricks memory has since played, I knew as soon as the scrum collapsed in on itself that something was wrong. It was clear in the collective intake of breath from the crowd, in the way the other players shifted their feet and paced in circles while they waited for the stretcher to arrive. I was in my ninth year of competitive rugby and I had seen plenty of men and women carried off the field, but in all those other instances the spinal boards had been only precautionary. Everyone knew, this time, that something was different.
By the next day, or the day after, the news was all over the rugby community in the small-town British university where I was a graduate student, and a member of a women’s team. He’d been in the front row when the scrum caved in, and he’d been driven headfirst into the ground. His neck was broken, and apart from a twitching bicep, he was paralyzed from the shoulders down.
“He was so young,” people said, defaulting to the past tense. “He was only 20 years old.”
And then, the inevitable Band-Aid: “He was doing what he loved.”
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