These are supposedly the rules of rugby, but they’re all wrong. This isn’t even rugby! I don’t care if you call it “rugby” and have the world rugby association notarize it, I don’t believe anything is rugby anymore. Regardless, here are a bunch of oily, almost naked ladies explaining the sport to you in Zack Snyder slow motion, so enjoy that. (via Bob’s Blitz)

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Links

Alberto Del Rio and Ricardo Rodriguez, from Don Quixote to Lord of the Rings |The Mandible Claw|

How Justin Timberlake Went From Boy Band Laughing Stock To Pop Culture Icon |UPROXX|

Matthew McConaughey was shirtless at Whole Foods |Film Drunk|

Broadway Theatergoers Can’t Stop Taking Pictures Of Naked Emilia Clarke |Warming Glow|

The Best Of Jose Bautista’s Reddit AMA |With Leather|

PETA Condemns ‘Assassin’s Creed IV’ Whaling. Ubisoft Responds With Pretty Sweet Zinger |Gamma Squad|

On D’Angelo, Questlove And An Album 13 Years In The Making |Smoking Section|

This Week in F–k You: Rich Kid Concierge Services |Kissing Suzy Kolber|

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The following hilariously-accurate, beer-spilling headshot took place on Tuesday at a rugby game. I want to say it’s rugby because the YouTube channel is “PremiershipRugby” and the title involves the phrase “Man hit on head at rugby match,” but I’m not saying for sure, because I never get it right. When I write about rugby, it’s Australian Rules Football. When I write about Australian Rules Football, it’s rugby. I’ll just say this: this guy got hit in the head with a ball during rugby, Australian rules football, freestyle soccer, Super Dodge Ball, European rules quidditch or HeadBeerBall. One of those six.

The one guarantee from the clip is that it didn’t happen in the United States, because the guy who got cranked with a rugby ball was a good sport about it and laughed it off instead of flipping out about it on Twitter and suing everybody. Two concession stand beers is a small price to pay for rugby fan viral video glory, right?

This should happen in every sport. The Big Lead mentioned that they’d like to see this happen in more in the lower deck at NBA games, but hell, let’s make it happen across the board. I want to see Aaron Rodgers knock the cheese off somebody’s head for fun.

[h/t to Last Angry Fan]

I have a running list of types of injuries that just sound horrible to me, and right at the top is a ruptured testicle. I’ve been kicked in the nuts before by some less-than-pleasant ladies, and on various occasions I have also experienced the unimaginable pain of sitting on the ol’ nads. (Ladies, I will never know what giving birth feels like, but you’ll also never know the pain of sitting on your marbles, so let’s call it even.) But I am fairly certain that if I ever ruptured one of my boys, I would not have much of a sense of humor about it.

However, that’s not the case with Warrington Wolves prop Paul Wood, whom I had never heard of before today because I am an ignorant American when it comes to rugby, but now consider a much, much braver and more grizzled man than I. During his team’s 26-18 loss to Leeds on Saturday, Wood not only experienced a ruptured testicle, but he played the entire game with the injury. And even after he went to the hospital and had the testicle removed, he joked with his fans on Twitter about it.

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Zimbabwean-born rugby union player Tendai Mtawarira is nicknamed “Beast”, and if you need validation of that nickname please consult this clip of him hoisting Sharks teammate Anton Bresler into the air to make a catch, then holding him there by his shorts so he doesn’t fall over backwards. I believe Last Angry Fan described it best as a “clean-and-jerk using a grown man”. The moment comes to us from the Super Rugby League, which I’m going to assume is like regular rugby except everyone has Thor strength and magical powers.

Video of the incredible feat of strength is below, but know going in that he doesn’t hammerthrow Besler into anyone from that position. I think in pro wrestling terms he was setting up him for the Vertebreaker.

Anyway:

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Jharal Yow Yeh: the Brisbane Broncos player who gets injured in this video, and the noise you make when you land wrong and snap your ankle so badly that a sock is the only thing keeping us from seeing your leg guts.

The injury took place in a round 4 National Rugby League match between the Broncos and the South Sydney Rabbitohs*. I can’t provide a lot of in-depth analysis, because every time I try to do that with rugby I end up horribly wrong (examples: “That’s not rugby, that’s Australian Rules Football!” or “That’s not rugby, that’s curling!”), but I can say with confidence that the only thing grosser than an ankle shard protruding through your skin is how rugby enthusiasts on YouTube respond to jokes about it:

Yeah, the theater joke the guy made is way worse than what you said.

[h/t The Last Angry Fan]

*That’s how people in anime say “rabbit”.**
**It’s also the original name for Trix cereal.

I need you to understand that headline.

“Having a gay stroke” isn’t British slang for hooking up with a guy, at least not here. I’m talking about a literal gay stroke, wherein you rapidly lose brain function due to a disturbance in the blood supply and when you come out of it you’re a homosexual. That’s what happened with Rugby player Chris Birch (pictured above, left) when he pulled an Afro Ninja.

Chris Birch, 26, told the UK’s Daily Mail that after he awoke from a stroke he suffered after trying to do a flip at the gym (and failing, and breaking his neck): “It sounds strange but when I came round I immediately felt different.”

“I wasn’t interested in women any more. I was definitely gay.”

“I had never been attracted to a man before — I’d never even had any gay friends. But I didn’t care about who I was before, I had to be true to my feelings.”

Of all the sports blogs in the world, With Leather is the one I’d least like to see be homophobic or fill itself up with antiquated notions of what makes a “real man”. And who the hell knows how the human brain works? People can a stroke and wake up without the ability to speak, or think straight. They can get shot in the brain and end up communicating with Ritz Crackers. Knowing that who you love and what you find attractive is essentially a function of the brain, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that if your brain is moving, that function could get switched in the move. The paragraph where he makes sure to explain how before the stroke he had never been attracted to men and didn’t know any gay people is concerning in its inclusion, but whatever, if this version of Chris is happy then we should be happy for him, right?

And then you read a little more, and it sounds a lot like this guy backflipped onto his head and used it as a really badly-timed excuse to come out without being judged.

“I started to take more pride in my appearance, bleached my hair and started working out. I went from a 19st skinhead, to an 11st preened man.”

Seems like he’s got those classifications ready to go, doesn’t it?

Sometime after that he went to the Daily Mail UK and posed for photos holding a hair dryer, because the notion that wanting to have sex with a man makes you disinterested in sports and super into hairdressing isn’t the most stereotypically new-money thing you can do. I’ve got an itch that makes me resistant and unsure of anyone who tries so hard to be a stereotype of ANYTHING, so here’s the most reasonable way I can conclude — no matter who Chris is and no matter how this happened or why, I hope that he can find what he’s looking for and, eventually, stop feeling like he’s got to keep proving what he is.