In May of 2011, a South African court found a high school rugby player from Stellenbosch culpable for breaking the neck of another rugby player during a scrum. Rugby coaches I knew said that they were dismayed by this decision, because they believed that they themselves could be plausibly held responsible—by extension—for actions undertaken by players they coached. They saw, in effect, the judge to be making an unwelcome (and, to some coaches, inappropriate) incursion into a space that had been previously delineated as safely separate from the law. This extra-legal space—which was sanctified by 1) the consensual willingness of players to tolerate the embodied consequences of reasonable violent action and 2) the dominant social convention in South Africa of accepting the actions on the field as permissible—was now cast in doubt. Was a tackle still a tackle? Or was it an assault-in-waiting? Drawing from theories of art and aesthetics, this paper examines the conceptual parameters of this space and its framing as a playful one. It investigates in particular how this framing distorts and complicates the significance of the actions it contains, and it pays special attention to the cultural and political pathways that move a scrum action from playful gamesmanship to an act of violence by means of a broken neck. Because this movement opens up the question of what actions enter and leave sporting fields, how, by what means, and with what implications, this paper also considers the implications that a theory of playful frames carries for expressions of creativity and politics on sporting fields more generally.