Story“Professional friendships” (3/6). It is with balls, toffees and provocations that these terrible children of the oval have, in the 1990s, forged their relationship. After two titles of champion of France, the two men had moved away. To better meet, in 2014, to conquer the leadership of the French Rugby Federation.
Let’s start from the beginning: the kick-off. To try to understand what can link for more than thirty years Bernard Laporte and Serge Simon, this antinomic team, this duo of opposites and finally complementary ones, yesterday as players, today as president and vice-president of the French Federation of rugby (FFR), take the entry of two teams on a lawn. Here, for example, quite at random, choose this round of 16 first leg of the French championship, April 28, 1991.
The match opposes Bègles-Bordeaux, their club at the time, to Toulon. It is played on the harbor, at the Mayol stadium. A match taken perfectly at random, therefore. Or almost: this “meeting” is considered by the initiates as one of the most violent in the history of this sport, which nevertheless has a rich anthology of ball kicks, scarifications with crampons, metaphorical “phalanx salads”, fork in the eyes and other villainies, reclassified in the lax penal code of Ovalie as “bickering”.
“We shared the same fear and overcame it together. »Serge Simon
Eighty detestable minutes, punctuated by multiple general brawls, an endless fist fight where the ball and the referee were two very useless ingredients. “ In Mayol, we are preparing to take humanity back two thousand years “, Serge Simon had predicted without being wrong.
Ave Caesar! They are therefore the first to enter the arena, sorry on the ground, our two gladiators. This time, Simon is in front of Captain Laporte. What does precedence matter! They are the leaders of a team whose harshness of the game has toured the grounds of France. The left pillar Simon wears a flattering and medieval bowl cut and an escaped gait from the penal colony of Biribi. With his neat first-communion hair, scrum-half Laporte, in comparison, seems a naive stalker, a dadais pushed into the grass, as if out of the Grand Meaulnes.
“Crazy Bernie”
No more appearances! It was he who lit the fire the previous week, with provocative words towards the opponent. It is all man, to stir up a blaze and to immolate himself in it, dragging those who are ready to follow him. This will earn him a nickname: “ Bernie the crazy “. The nickname is by Serge Simon, and he wants to be flattering on behalf of the one who will have so often and so willingly accompanied in the flames. How many times has the forward already plunged into the “rucks”, this fair with arms and legs, this open-air vivisection table, to offer his teammate at the scrum half post a clean ball? like a new penny to pass from a pass to the light horses of the back lines?
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