Rugby’s More Perfect Union

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opinion/rugbys-more-perfect-union.html

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In Dublin next Saturday, Ireland and England will play the final game of the Six Nations Championship. Thousands of miles away, in an office in New York, I will follow every pass, kick, tackle, ruck and scrum.

Were it not for my day job, I would watch the game in a pub. Probably the Red Lion in Greenwich Village, with expats not only from England and Ireland, but also from Wales and Scotland. France and Italy, too. New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and maybe Canada, Argentina or Uruguay, even Japan. All of us watching — intently, passionately — a game of rugby union.

To a great majority of Americans, this is rugby: a strange game loved by foreigners. An Englishman who came to live in New York, I thought the simple fact of distance would dull my love for the game. But what I discovered is that rugby is American, too. After five years in and around the American game, I have only fallen further in love.

Rugby, or something like it, was first played in the United States in the mid-1800s. It gave birth to football: The first college game, Rutgers against Princeton in November 1869, was played under “rugby-like” rules. Rugby also is a brutal game, often violent, but as football faces increasing questions over safety, the number of rugby players is growing. Coaches say it’s because their contact sport is safer: The absence of helmets and significant padding results in safer tackling, while strict rules reduce blows to head and neck.

Maybe. But I think rugby is rising in America because it is extreme. It is rising here because it has not yet, like football, been commodified. It is played by men and women in colleges and clubs. There is still something pure and unspoiled about the sport.

To adapt a question asked by the great Caribbean historian C. L. R. James, who was writing about cricket, what do they know of rugby who only rugby know? Most important, American rugby is participatory. Most of its fans play it, or did before their knees gave out. And it is not, for the most part, an occupation that pays. It is something you live for, training on a wet Wednesday for a game on the weekend. And a drink afterward. On field and off, American rugby is built on team spirit.

In the scrum (never “scrimmage,” which is not a rugby word) each player binds on to another and all work together to achieve their goal: to push the opposing pack off the ball, to subdue them — and to not get hurt.

Rugby is gloriously counterintuitive. Players know it is not remotely a sensible thing to do. And despite this, they love it.

All my rugby playing was in England, starting when I was 3 or so, and joining an organized team at 7. For the next 15 years, I played once, twice or three times a week, across the North of England, in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland and Durham. Later, I played in London.

I’m big, so I played in the second row of the scrum. Ears taped, mouthguard in, I held on to another big bloke and pushed. In loose play, I tackled, rucked and mauled — these are technical terms, though every bit as gloriously ugly as they sound. As a lineout jumper, I scrambled to a reasonable level: County junior teams, my university First XV and — just twice — a Premiership Second XV. By my mid-20s, I was playing for the second team at Rosslyn Park, one of the better amateur clubs in London, though our opponents were often youth players from professional teams.

It wasn’t the big injuries — two concussions, a broken arm — that ended my playing days. Nor even the spectacularly dislocated elbow: a burst of static behind my eyes, whirling trees at the river end of the Otley ground. It took five doctors to pull and push the joint back in.

That kind of thing was survivable; it was the little hurts that did me in. Black eyes and worn-down knees; a hairline crack in a rib, sustained in a tackle that failed to stop a try that lost a game. By the time I was 25, the soreness and stiffness from Saturdays made Sundays otherworldly. I would browse the bookshops on the Charing Cross Road, wincing at my bruises.

Something had to give. As I was working more and more on weekends, that thing was rugby.

A few years later, I met a girl from Cambridge, Mass. We married and moved to New York City. I got a job, we had three children in quick succession, and I thought my rugby days were done.

But the rugby world is small, and it was not done with me. It turned out that a former coach of mine in Otley, Yorkshire, was now the chief executive of USA Rugby, based in Boulder, Colo. I called him and we talked. He even remembered the day I dislocated my elbow. That conversation started my second life in rugby — not playing but writing about rugby. American rugby.

My first experience of the American game, in fact, came long before I moved here. It was in 2002, on a brisk autumn night near London, when I played for Rosslyn Park against West Point, whose cadets were on a European tour. The pace was high, the hits were huge, the rucks ferocious. Later, over drinks, we swapped mementos. Then the cadets went home, and off to war.

More than a dozen years later, I set out to find those officers. Through the summer of 2015, I traveled the East Coast, called bases and offices in the Midwest, the West and the South. I spoke to cadets who had become soldiers, executives, fathers. Three were dead; I spoke to their parents. With one father, in New Jersey, I toured small-town memorials to his son. More than anything, that experience of writing about the cadets bound me tighter to the game.

Some of those West Point alumni have become my friends. A few months ago, my former counterpart in the second row, a giant who went into the oil business, flew in from Texas. We met at the Village Tavern, in a back room where rugby shirts hang on the wall. The captain of the 2002 team, a fullback who fought in Mosul, Iraq, is in investments in Boston. He lives two towns over from my wife’s family’s summer place; his kids play mini-rugby against my niece.

So here I am, an Englishman still reveling in the Six Nations but settled into American rugby. I’ve written about rugby played in Philadelphia, Boston, Saratoga and Chicago. I aim to reach California, where rugby has a strong presence in the inner cities, as well as at Berkeley and Stanford. There’s even a Google Rugby Football Club. (Don’t believe me? Google it.)

There are still plenty of stories I want to tell. Of Mark Bingham, a rugby player for Berkeley, who tackled the hijackers of Flight 93 on Sept. 11 and whose name now adorns the trophy at the gay world cup. Of Morehouse in Atlanta, a celebrated historically black college that was the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where students today play rugby. Presumably, not entirely nonviolently.

American rugby is youthful, scattered and raw. But a strong spirit unites it: On Saturday, the Irish and English teams in Dublin and those watching them will share something vital with any two teams or band of spectators on the rougher fields of Dublin, Ohio; Dublin, Calif.; or Dublin, Ky. Which is perhaps why, outside of my family, rugby has done the most to give me the sense that I belong here.