Rolland Courbis never claimed to belong to rugby. He spoke about it, though, with a rare, almost disarming sincerity. “My history with this sport doesn’t date from yesterday“, he said in an interview with Rugbyrama, recalling his years in Toulon, a border town between two major sporting cultures: popular football and identity-driven rugby.

Arriving in the Var as coach of Sporting Toulon, Courbis discovered an environment where RCT shaped local life as much as OM did in Marseille. Rugby imposed itself first out of necessity: he had to understand the town, its passions, its angers. Then came the pleasure. That of a sport he described as more legible, more rooted in a direct relationship with the public, without idealising it for all that.That outsider’s eye was what made him singular.

Courbis loved to recount his exchanges with rugby players, those “big units” he rubbed shoulders with at shared sporting events. At the Midi Olympique Oscars, he would joke about the difference in size, mixing self-deprecation with respect. Behind the joke lay genuine admiration for the physical and mental commitment demanded by professional rugby.

But Courbis was not a man to settle for a romantic vision. He also probed the grey areas: violence, popular pressure, the risk of seeing rugby slide towards some of football’s excesses. Without ever lecturing, he asked questions, compared, put things in perspective. His experience of white-hot stadiums fed a valuable line of thought on player protection and the role of supporters.

Curiosity and amusement

His death drew reactions beyond the round-ball game. Mourad Boudjellal, the former RCT president, spoke of “a little bit of rugby going with him“, underlining that atypical but real bond between Courbis and the oval-ball game. The two men also shared the airwaves on RMC.

Rolland Courbis watched rugby with curiosity, sometimes with amusement, always with intelligence. He was never a central figure in it, but he understood its soul. And perhaps that, in the end, is what earns him today a place apart in the obituary pages of French rugby and French sport.