And now, finally, a good twelve hundred words into the article, we get to the crux of why I chose to include Shelford on the website this week – his incredible, literally balls-out actions during a match with the French national team in 1986 that was so hardcore and brutal it's simply known as the "Battle of Nantes". Actions that rank very high on the list of the most badass things ever recorded on the field of any sport throughout the course of history.
During his international match against the French, Shelford was basically just running around doing his thing (a "thing" that usually involved charging around the field without any kind of padding more protective than a headband and hitting dudes harder than Ronnie Lott decapitating a receiver on a crossing route) when all of a sudden, about 20 minutes in, he ended up on the bottom of a huge-ass pile of anarchy with a bunch of giant rugby mother****ers kicking and clawing for the ball. In all the fighting and battling for possession, Shelford was jacked in the face with a bare-knuckled roundhouse punch that knocked out four of his teeth. But that wasn't the worst of it – not long after getting de-toothed with a sucker punch, a French cleat found its way through the pile and struck Shelford directly in the ballsack, ripping it open leaving one nut hanging out of his scrote.
You are reading this correctly – the guy got Monkey Steals the Peached by a ****ing spiked boot in the middle of a rugby game. Displaying what can only be the utter, literal definition of balls-out, Shelford amazingly didn't even seem to give a shit about a wound that would have brought even a berserking Viking warrior to his knees in agony. Bleeding badly, missing a ball from his goodie sack, and in what could only have been excruciating pain in both his face and groin, Shelford didn't roll around on the turf crying like some kind of professional soccer flopper punk. He didn't get carted off to the hospital in an ambulance for emergency surgery. He didn't even go to the locker room strapped to the back of one of those little golf cart thingies. This psychotic madman got up, walked off the pitch holding his balls back in place, stood on the sidelines, and waited patiently while the team doc stitched up his nutsack on international television. Without anesthesia. With a cameraman right in his face, taping the entire gruesome procedure. I didn't find the footage of the incredibly-unhygenic surgery, but I'm not going to lie and say that I tried very hard, either. There are some things which can be sufficiently described with text and don't necessarily require people to see things that can never be unseen.
Seriously, are you kidding me with this shit? Not only is this the most insane tale of on-field toughness ever recorded, but shortly after having a threaded needle repeatedly jammed into in an area where most guys aren't particularly keen on inserting pointy objects, this unstoppable Rugby-Bot 9000 came back and played the second half with a stitched-up junkbag and a mouthful of gauze to prevent him from coughing and spitting blood all over the place Alice Cooper-style. Despite being only slightly more well-put-together than Frankenstein's Monster at this point, Shelford continued pushing it to the limit, and didn't slow down, half-ass it, or back down from hardcore contact – while trying to plow through for extra yards later on in the game he took yet another huge hit and ended up receiving a massive concussion. To this day the guy has absolutely no recollection of the game. Maybe that's a good thing… it would be the only game he played for the national team in which the All-Blacks lost.
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