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Pope John Paul II Wing forward. There are claims His Holiness played rugby for Poland, though I doubt this. Such a feat would have shown up in one of the many biographies, and it hasn't. What I do know is that when a club I played for in Italy, Rovigo, was given an audience with the pope in 1981, he was greatly knowledgeable about the game.

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Che Guevara Open-side breakaway. Che was actually a good breakaway in the early 1950's for the San Isidro Club, in one of Buenos Aires's most salubrious suburbs. Even while Che was fomenting revolution, he paid the rent by writing match reports, and with some mates he even launched a rugby magazine by the name of "Tackle." It ran for 11 issues before petering out.

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Boris Karloff No. 8. Which rugby team wouldn't want to have Frankenstein charging hard at opposition? Karloff was one of the founding board members of the Southern California Rugby Union in 1936.

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P.G. Wodehouse Scrum half. Young Pelham played a good brand of rugby for Dulwich College, London, around the time that the 19th century was turning into the 20th century. The school still has copies of some of the match reports he used to write for the school magazine.

No one has ever summarized the game better than P.G. did in this passage from "Very Good, Jeeves" in 1930: "The main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end. ... In order to squelch this program, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench."

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Prince William Fly half. Fly halves need to be classy by nature, and even though the heir to the heir to the British throne could only make the Eton third team, I think he's the one for us. My only fear is that he will be targeted, just as he was at Eton. An opposing coach once apparently told his team that once they tackled the prince, they would be able ever after to tell their grandchildren they once tackled the king of England. The whole team piled into him all game long.

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George W. Bush Inside center. I know you're thinking that putting George in this position puts him a little too close to the front line, but I don't care. The president played fullback for Yale in 1968 and was a part of their dramatic win over Harvard that year. He will be visiting Australia at about the time the American team is likely to be facing elimination.