This week Mike Phillips has just made up his mind to retire as a professional rugby union player. For his faithful fans it turned to be quite difficult not to perceive another tie being painfully cut with the game’s glorious colorful past. There’s no doubt Mike Phillips was one of the sport’s last true personages.
Certainly, union still boasts plenty of heroes with extraordinary character and it will keep doing so. It’s because it’s simply unreal to be at the forefront of such a physical, challenging as well as mentally-demanding pursuit without featuring a steel personality. However, exactly in the mature advance of career, the players are starting to resemble automatons.
As we know, there’re robots, capable of shaking their heads in dismay, but they’re just controlled remotely. Impressionable young folks are being trained to within an inch of their ordinary existence as free-thinking human being, as paranoid PR types keep scurrying around just like the fierce controllers in Westworld, patiently waiting for a chance to pounce once one happens to go off the grid.