The Australian Wallabies

A bunch of Sydney students went to a national rugby game last night. It was the Australian Wallabies vs. the South African Springboks. We were all trying to sport the Australian colors - green and gold. I bought my sweatshirt that day from a cool underground marketplace called Paddy's Market. Anyway, Australia won by a landslide and it was so fun to watch the players get pummelled to the ground! Despite the fact that I played rugby for one semester at school, I still had almost no idea what was going on.

While waiting for a train back home, an Australian man told us the story of how American football was created. According to him, the US played rugby until too many players from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton started getting hurt. To fix the problem they came up with a game in which the players wore padding and helmets, and could throw the ball forward to avoid so much direct contact.. and poof. American football was born. Leave it to us wimpy Americans to revise rugby into a "safer" game. But take this fun fact with a grain of salt because the man was definitely not completely sober.