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Originally Posted by me

punts from the soccer goal crease was cross-training for my punting the rugby ball...The other cross-training was wrestling takedowns as Rugby tackles; utterly indispensable for a small hooker vs a 280 lb prop or second row behemouth!!

The upcoming game for the NFC:San Francisco 49ers vs Philadelphia Eagles (at Philly) promises to be interesting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jordan-...ip-11674701653

The biggest player in this NFC Championship game is a 6-foot-8, 365-pound lineman who grew up playing the wrong sport. Long before he was dwarfing the NFL’s most menacing pass rushers, Jordan Mailata’s real dream was to play professional rugby league in his native Australia.
The only problem was that even rugby league thought he was too huge.
So on a long shot, Mailata flew to the U.S. ready to give up his rugby league future and learn a sport where he might never carry the ball again. Five years later and nearly 10,000 miles from home, he’s Philadelphia’s favorite Sydneysider, because the man from Down Under is the one keeping quarterback Jalen Hurts right side up.
“He’s not a rugby league boy anymore,” said Jamie Eid, Mailata’s youth coach in Australia. “He looks like an NFL player now.”...Once the Eagles took Mailata, though, his roster spot was far from guaranteed. That’s true of all seventh-round picks, but this one was a complete novice at football with no experience from college or even high school. But oddly enough, he didn’t consider this to be a disadvantage. In fact, he thought it helped him as he mastered the craft of blocking.

“It was just easier to pick up everything like a clean slate,” Mailata said before the start of the 2018 season. “I didn’t have any bad habits.”

Still, the learning curve was steep. The dense NFL playbooks may as well have been written in Cyrillic. When he played all four quarters of a preseason game that rookie year, he was flagged for two false start penalties. He then suffered season-ending injuries during his first and second years in the league before ever stepping on the field for a regular season game.

His progress since then has been remarkable. He took over for an injured starter in 2020, beat out a first-round pick for the full-time job in 2021 and is now widely considered among the best tackles in the league. The Eagles didn’t hesitate last year to lock him into a lavish contract—one that pays him more than 10 times the salary of the NRL’s biggest stars. That’s why his performance will go a long way toward determining whether or not the Eagles advance to their fourth Super Bowl this Sunday.

Oddly, my former security guard partner, a huge Samoan, who had my back in some of the worst Federal sites in San Francisco ca: 2000, had a cousin, Jessie Sapulo, who played front-line for the 49ers: 15 NFL seasons, winning four Super Bowls with the 49ers and earning two trips to the Pro Bowl. He did this despite a torn aortic heart valve, a dangerous condition that left him short of breath at times. All Samoans have a knowledge of Rugby and football and are leaving their mark on both. <seen in practice at front line for the 49ers! When I say "Behemouth"...I'm probably thinking Samoan! https://www.thepostgame.com/blog/men...moa-hawaii-nfl