Rugby

Rugby School in Warwickshire, England, gave its name to the sport. The founding myth — that William Webb Ellis picked up the ball during a school football match in 1823 and ran with it, inventing a new game — was first published in 1876 by Matthew Bloxam, an old boy of the school. The story appeared fifty-three years after the alleged event and has no contemporary evidence. A committee investigated in 1895 and found the claim unprovable. The sport was named after a school anyway.

What actually happened was less dramatic. Rugby School played its own local variant of football, as many English schools did. Rugby's version allowed handling the ball. Eton's version did not. Harrow's version used a smaller pitch. Each school's rules were different. When alumni from different schools wanted to play together at university, they needed standardized rules. The Football Association (1863) codified the no-handling version. The Rugby Football Union (1871) codified the handling version. Two sports split from one.

Rugby spread through the British Empire and the English-speaking world. New Zealand's All Blacks, South Africa's Springboks, Australia's Wallabies — the game found particular success in the southern hemisphere. In France, rugby became the dominant football code in the south and southwest. In 1895, a dispute over payments to players caused a split: Rugby Union (amateur) and Rugby League (professional, with different rules). The word 'rugby' now names two different games.

The town of Rugby, Warwickshire, population 70,000, is otherwise unremarkable. Its name comes from Old English Hroca's burg (Hroca's fortified place). An Anglo-Saxon landowner gave his name to a town, which gave its name to a school, which gave its name to a sport played by hundreds of millions of people. Hroca could not have predicted this.