SCORING CHEAPENS:

The Battle of Waterloo may have been won on that hallowed turf,

but minds, limbs and nerves are lost there every year. For Eton

fields a riot of homegrown sports played nowhere else in the

world yet celebrated everywhere for their mad brutality. Of all

these curious traditions, the most peculiar and the oldest is

the Wall Game. Few who have seen it are alive, and none who have

played it are well. During my five years at Eton, I built a

career at the Wall that was glorious though, in its way,

typical: I never scored a goal; I never saw a goal scored; and

in terrible fact, I never set eyes, let alone feet, on the ball.

For all that, the Wall Game has a breathtaking simplicity. A

soiled and soggy ball is placed along the eponymous Wall, a

278-year-old structure 11 feet high and roughly 355 feet long. A

small boy sits, henlike, on top of the soccer-style ball. About

15 of the game's other 19 players--called seconds, walls and

longs--pile on top of the small boy, forming a rugbylike scrum

known with killing aptness as the bully (rugby, you may recall,

was devised at another of England's high schools). Then, after a

signal from the umpire (usually a teacher in mufti), the boys

push, shove and tackle one another, while the bully shakes

around in a many-legged frenzy that, as one appreciative former

housemaster put it, resembles the "death throes of some

monstrous crab." After 30 minutes of this fun the players change

ends and blearily set about knocking heads for another 30

minutes. The Wall Game, they say, is an acquired taste.

Yet there is to the madness a demented method. At the northern

end of the playing area (a strip of grass 15 feet wide running

along the redbrick Wall) a tiny black door that opens onto a

private garden serves as a goal; its counterpart at the southern

end is the trunk of an ancient elm. In between pummeling

princelings and potentates, the players in the bully try to move

toward the goal by clutching the ball between their ankles and

hopping through the mess of enemy forces, all the while keeping

the ball in contact with the Wall. This is not much harder than

balancing an egg on one's nose while crawling through the

trenches of Verdun. Far behind the bully, the other two players

on each team stand around idly, painting their fingernails. One

is called a flying man or fly. Both, however, might easily be

mistaken for spectators. If the ball makes one of its biennial

appearances outside the bully, the job of these "behinds" is to

lumber up to it and kick it toward the opponents' goal. This

happens with the frequency of lunar eclipses.

Scoring is therefore virtually impossible. But the beauty of the

Wall Game is that it makes a mockery of the very notions of

victory and defeat. Since kicking an unseen ball into a tiny

target from 178 feet away is beyond the reach of all mankind,

some allowances are made. If one player close to the opposing

goal lifts the ball up the Wall with his feet (as if juggling a

soccer ball) and a colleague touches it while crying, "Got it!"

their team is allowed to pick up the ball and fling it goalward.

But should that throw be touched by any of the 10 players

defending the unreachable target, it does not count as a

goal--even if by some miracle it hits the target. Scoring by

this method is, therefore, also impossible. In desperation some

benign lunatics declared that the very attempt to make a "shy at

goal" would count for a point. Spurred by this, perhaps, the

Wall Game recently witnessed an offensive explosion: two goals

in the space of 27 years. And Americans think soccer is a snooze!

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