And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote-- "Play up! play up! and play the game!"

Sir Henry Newbolt was referring to the venerable game of cricket, but his exhortation has suddenly come to fit rugby, the other sport that was born on the playing fields of England and spread around the world. Just change the last line of his verse to read: "'Pay up! pay up! and play the game!'"

In a landmark decision, the International Rugby Football Board last week abandoned its diehard rule that the game be played for love, not money. That means the sport invented 172 years ago at England's Rugby School has done a veritable somersault.

Exactly 100 years ago, rugby split into two factions over whether players should be paid. Those who said yes, poorer club members from northern England, formed the basis of an offshoot called Rugby League; better-off purists maintained the high ground and scrimmaged for free in the Rugby Union. The decision by the Union's IRFB administrators to abandon amateurship, which was made at a meeting in Paris, poses two questions: Who will do the paying, and will the League/Union twain get back together again now that both are professional? The respective answers are Rupert Murdoch, and maybe.

It was the media magnate's checkbook invasion of the rugby field--both League and Union--followed by a similar assault by another Australian nearly as rich as Murdoch, Kerry Packer, that forced the Paris decision. "I don't think we had an alternative," says Welsh Rugby Union chairman Vernon Pugh, who headed the committee that recommended the switch to the 67 member countries of the IRFB. But Pugh added last week, "We have a very strong belief we can properly control the game for the future."

The matter of control arises because of the outpouring of hundreds of millions of dollars by Murdoch's News Corp. to set up his own League series and to buy TV rights to a new Union competition among South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, currently the game's most powerful nations. Said Australian Rugby Football Union president Phil Harry just before the meeting: "News purchased our TV rights, and that's all. Everything else remains under the control of the game."

But set against this is the undeniable fact that Murdoch typically restructures what he invests in, and that television barons like to tweak games to make them fit the medium's never-a-dull-moment mold. Predicted Ian McLauchlan, former captain of Scotland's team: "There will be significant changes in the laws to make the game more attractive." Said Des Seabrook, who has gloried in the title of "honorary commercial manager" of the English first-division Union club Orrell: "In five years' time Rugby Union and Rugby League will be playing together. I am convinced it will end up as one game."

While the majority welcomed it, many players and officials were shocked by the breadth of the Paris declaration that henceforth in Union play "payment may be made at any level of participation."

Union's amateurism--or shamateur-ism, as it came to be known because many top players have for years been receiving disguised payments--helped League clubs poach top Union players. But shamateurism has become less and less hidden, and even before the Paris declaration many Union nations, especially South Africa, openly talked of paying big dollars to keep their heroes.

The professional wing has long accused its older rival of hypocrisy and standoffishness. After hearing the Paris result, Maurice Lindsay, chief executive of England's Rugby League, said, "If they still insist on the ridiculous, hypocritical attitude towards Rugby League, then it will prove that it is nothing more than a snobbish, anti social approach because they can no longer hide behind the amateur principles to keep us belowstairs." An irony of Rupert Murdoch's having planted his feet in both factions is that rugby is again divided along north-south lines, as happened in England 100 years ago. This time, though, the southerners--South Africa, Australia and New Zealand--have become the wealthy half and the northerners, the European rugby nations, are looking on with envy. A new European Cup starts on Oct. 31, with teams from Wales, France, Ireland, Italy and Romania to be joined by England and Scotland next year. So far, though, most of the new money and the focus of television have been aimed more at the southern hemisphere.

The modern north-south division became clearer just over a year ago, when Murdoch splashed an estimated $214 million to buy up Australian Rugby League players and coaches for his own competition, a Super League. Kerry Packer, who has TV rights to Australian League play until the year 2000, fought back, using his own ample coffers. Murdoch repeated his proposal in New Zealand and England, with the outlay for his Britain-based Euroleague put at more than $130 million over five years.

As Union's World Cup finished, Murdoch struck again, stitching together a $540 million, 10-year television deal with a new triumvirate called sanzar, combining the might of the South African, New Zealand and Australian Union authorities.

Packer replied with World Rugby Corp., setting out to sign hundreds of the world's leading Union players for a new international series of his own. But last month he apparently lost heart for a drawn-out war with Murdoch, and the W.R.C. cash volcano now appears to be dormant.

How will all the money Packer and Murdoch have been lavishing on rugby be distributed? Most rugby players will need to keep their day jobs, especially in the financially strapped English clubs and even more so in the smaller rugby nations such as Fiji and Argentina. In New Zealand, senior players' base salaries will range between $97,500 and $162,500 a year--small beer compared with, say, the earnings of top soccer players or even the stars of professional beach volleyball. But with rugby fast overtaking tennis as an international spectator sport, all that could soon change. In South Africa, rumors are that members of the World Cup Springboks team may be able to demand signing fees of about $65,000 and salaries of $16,000 a month. In England, where there are hopes that TV will finance a new European competition similar to the one Murdoch has arranged with sanzar, top players have their sights on more than $75,000 a year. For the world's elite players, such sums will easily be doubled by off-field earnings from sponsorships.

One of those in the six-figure bracket, England captain Will Carling, said last week, "A lot of people will be happy to play just for fun. It should be fun first and money second." Later in the week Carling added, "The game must continue to evolve and progress without letting itself get hijacked by any party, be they sponsors, television or entrepreneurs."

Rugby's officials were also keen to downplay the idea that the game will be pulled apart for TV. Said Australia's Phil Harry: "We might speed the game up, or make it more attractive; nothing major."

The Paris decision was hailed by the Times of London as "inevitable as a try by Jonah Lomu." Its editorial said "ellipse Rugby Union players may now be paid the salaries they deserve, without subterfuge, rancor or any decline in standards. There is an ethos, after all, for every age."

What ethos the enormous injection of media cash might bring to the manly art of rugby wasn't mentioned in the Times, which happens to be owned by...you-know-who.

--Reported by Michael Brunton/ London, Peter Hawthorne/ Johannesburg, Joseph Schuman/ Paris, Tim Blair/Sydney, and Simon Robinson/ Auckland