I am going to get on that Bradby Train on June 26th

The first Bradby Shied match I saw was the second leg of the 1976 encounter. Kandy. I didn’t know anything about rugby then. I mean, I knew far less than I do now and even now I am pretty ignorant.

Back then, my maternal grandfather, then in his late seventies and suffering from weak eyesight, would get either me or my brother or sister to read to him the Daily News. He got us to read the headlines and if he found anything interesting, instructed us to read out the full report. The editorial was a ‘must’. This browsing (which began when I was about 7 or 8) was how I learned that there was something called ‘world news’. I learnt a lot of things. Word. Names. People. Places. Events. Some of it I could convince myself to be interesting. Most of it was dead boring. Once he was done, the paper was mine. I would then move to the only thing that interested me. Sports.

There are sportsmen and sportswomen. And there are fans. I belonged to the latter category. I read about all sports before I actually saw a real encounter. I still remember eagerly following the World Billiards Championship in 1973, noting Lafir’s progress. My grandfather, contrary to his usual preferences, was also excited. We were both thrilled to read that he had been crowned World Champ. I had not seen a billiards game. I still haven’t.

My knowledge of rugby was therefore scratchy; names and clubs, some technical terms, and not much more. Later, I would watch enough games to get a hang of the rules, which, I found, was enough to attend practices at Peradeniya University, where I tried out for winger and played one half of one practice game against Kingswood.

The year 1976 was special. My friend Ravi Ladduwahetti of the Phenomenal Memory would know all the details, who scored, how the score progressed, the names of the players etc. All I remember is getting to the ground with my parents and siblings just as the Under 17 match ended with Trinity, naturally, creaming Royal. I remember my neighbour, Ajith Aiya who later played in the Under 17 team responding to a Trinitian’s barb (‘this is not football, Royal’) with this: ‘The first match is football, the second is rugby!’

Manik Weerakumar’s team had beaten Trinity 36-0 in Colombo. Trinity stunned Royal with a first-minute try. Converted. Royal scored soon afterwards, but Skanda Fernando (brother of the more illustrious Jagath Fernando) couldn’t convert. Royal went onto win 25-6. I was told that the members of the ’76 Trinity team would attend each Bradby Shield encounter praying that Royal would beat Trinity by a bigger margin. They had to wait 25 years when Zulki Hameed’s Royalists whipped Trinity by an even bigger margin (even if one discounted the extra point given for a try by this time; 5 instead of 4).

I’ve watched quite a few Bradby Shield matches since then. The score ceased to matter (as much as it had) after leaving school. I am not a must-go-for-the-match kind of old boy. There is, after all, a ‘big school’ mentality among Royalists that I am not comfortable with, even as I admire the school, am grateful for what it gave and state without any hesitation that it has contributed to education in Sri Lanka in ways that no other school has. We all warm up to the old alma mater. It is good to remember. Good to meet contemporaries. Good to touch a trace of one’s schoolboy world. Good, but not so great that I would cry my eyes out if I couldn’t make it. But this year is different.

I was told by a young old boy that the Bradby Express is to run once again. It’s a train. Colombo to Kandy. On the day of the Kandy Leg of the Bradby. It will be full of Royalits, old and young. It’s a tradition that got derailed along with a lot of other traditions thanks to the LTTE. It is fitting that it is being revived in a special year, the school’s 175th anniversary.

I don’t know what the organizers have planned. In these commercialized days, I am sure a lot of ‘Royal’ will be up for sale all the way to Kandy and back. That’s ok. One doesn’t have to buy if one does not want to. What’s important is that some 700 people, all who learnt of (or tried to) books and men, will be taking a 3 hour train ride, screaming and singing or just being, absorbing something that will not get described ever.

The organizers are pitching it to get VIP participation. I am not into all that. Royal College is a great school. It has produced VIPs, some on account of gene and wealth, some of exceptional skill and integrity. It has produced crooks too. Like all schools. The retired teachers, the moulders of men, will be there hopefully. There will be people of all ages, hopefully. There will be a good cross section of our society, as has always been the case, despite vilification of the school being a preserve of the privileged.

It’s 34 years since Weerakumar out-hooked his Trinitian counterpart. Saman Jayasinghe, probably one of the greatest thinkers to play for Sri Lanka was quite skinny back then, I remember. Not sure if he played No. 8 as he did for CH and Sri Lanka.

There were two Chinese Sri Lankans, the Scrum-Half and the Full-Back. Skanda was Stand-Off. I don’t know who else was in the team. Rohantha Peiris captained two years later, so he might have been around.

The late Raba Gunasekara too, perhaps. This time I don’t know a single name. It will not matter.

I have never been on a ‘Bradby Train’. I hope Royal will win, but I am not going to smile less if Trinity takes the Bradby (I still read the sports pages and know that Royal has lost three games in a row this season and Trinity has been erratic). I am going to turn myself into a 14 year old on the 26th. I am going to get on a train.

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