Every four years, with more than 100 million people watching, a big bloke hoists a golden trophy called the Webb Ellis Cup. Casual viewers might assume this guy Webb Ellis to be legit, what with his name etched across the most valuable stretch of metal in his sport.
A quick Google would reveal him to be the man whose audacious intervention in a 19th-century game of football is supposed to have invented the very sport. As the profile of the World Cup grows, so the boy in that field all those years ago bestrides the rugby world ever more surely as the hero who created it.
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