THE USA AND CANADA: RUGBY’S NORTH AMERICAN DREAM
Rugby matches were few and far between in America in the 1930s. The one place where a fan could reliably see a game was in Los Angeles, where the British expatriate community around Hollywood had nurtured the game alongside cricket, strawberry jam and other reminders of their colder, greyer home five and half thousand miles away.
But, however surprised a casual observer may have been at the sight of a rugby match taking place among the palm trees and endless highways of LA, it was nothing to the shock they may have felt when they caught sight of one of the touch judges. For there, flag in hand running the line, they would have seen the man whose face would forever be known as that of Frankenstein’s monster: Boris Karloff.
In fact, Karloff, who was born William Pratt in London and attended Merchant Taylor’s School, was a well-known rugger fanatic. He had helped establish Hollywood RFC in the early 1930s and became president of the Southern Californian Rugby Union in 1937. Without his efforts and that of similarly dedicated individuals across the USA, rugby in America would have sunk without trace.
American rugby: From Boris Karloff to George W. Bush
If ever a sport experienced a complete evaporation of promise it was rugby in America. The US side that won the gold medal at the 1924 Olympics returned home to almost complete silence. If they had not had the tangible proof of their gold medals, their triumph against the odds in Paris could have seemed like a sporting daydream. The team arrived back in California and promptly disbanded. It would be another 52 years before an American national rugby team would take to the field.
Rugby was barely played in America in the 1920s. This was the golden age of college gridiron football, when the new medium of radio brought the game into the homes of millions of Americans, making colleges like Notre Dame, Georgia Tech and Nebraska household names. College football was also vocal about its amateur principles, if not necessarily their implementation, removing one of rugby’s key claims to uniqueness.
When rugby revived in the 1930s, it was largely because of its British connections. In Southern California the game was resuscitated by members of the British expatriate community. In 1932 San Francisco-based players formed a Northern Californian RFU. On the East Coast, clubs were formed in 1930 in New York and at Harvard and Yale universities by Englishmen looking to play the game they had learned at home, and something of a regular season began to come into existence, supplemented by games with teams from Canada and, in the mid-1930s, annual spring break trips to Bermuda for its rugby tournament.1 In 1934 seven sides formed the Eastern Rugby Union.2
In Chicago, the game was introduced in the early 1930s by way of the Illinois Cricket Association. Its president, Karl Auty, was a member of the rugby-playing Auty family of Yorkshire’s Heavy Woollen District, of whom Wilf Auty had captained the Batley Northern Union team in the early 1900s and Richard Auty played rugby union for England in 1935. The British connection was also instrumental in the birth of rugby in St Louis when history professor Edmond Hoogeworf arrived at the university from England in 1932 and set about organising the St Louis Ramblers rugby club.
In 1934, after being given permission by the IRB, Cambridge University, including Wilf Wooller who had made his debut for Wales the previous year, crossed the Atlantic to play four matches against three Ivy League universities – Harvard, Princeton and Yale – and an Eastern representative side.3 Each was won easily by the Light Blues. Such was the success of the venture that plans were put in place to bring Oxford University over in 1935.
The proposal came to nothing and American rugby fragmented into unconnected regional groups. One of the sport’s biggest advantages was its potential to provide meaningful international competition to the US, something that neither American football nor baseball could do, but the lack of an effective central organisation meant that no internationals could be organised. In 1938 the two Californian unions joined together, partly to consolidate the game in the state but also to stimulate international interest.
In June 1939, desperate to halt the decline of rugby and no doubt frustrated by the IRB’s failure to provide an international profile for the American game, the secretary of the Californian Rugby Union David Nash wrote to the Rugby Football League in England. He explained that California was considering abandoning union for league and asked ‘for the Council’s views on the possibility of terms being arranged’.
At that year’s annual RFL conference the chairman G. F. Hutchins declared that he was confident and happy ‘at the prospect of America coming into the Rugby League’.4 It was not to be. Less than two months after the annual conference, war broke out in Europe and so disappeared the possibility of Californian rugby switching to the 13-a-side game.
Nevertheless, the lure of international contests and the similarities between gridiron and the league game continued to exercise a fascination for American sports promoters in the 1950s. In 1952 former UCLA All Star lineman and budding sports entrepreneur Mike Dimitro put together a side with the intention of entering the inaugural Rugby League World Cup in 1954. Dimitro had seen rugby league in wartime Australia as a serviceman and in 1953 his ‘American All Stars’, a 22-strong team of gridiron converts, including the Pittsburgh Steelers starting quarterback Gary Kerkorian, arrived in Sydney for a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Despite never having played the game before, the All Stars won six of their 26 games.
Al Kirkland, their star player, adapted so well that he was signed by Parramatta and became a first-team regular for them in 1956 before emigrating to England to play briefly for Leeds. Vince Jones, the tourists’ vice-captain, went on to play rugby union for Oxford University against Cambridge. But the All Stars were left out of the inaugural rugby league World Cup later that year, partly because the British league authorities were negotiating with Los Angeles journalist Ward Nash. Nash believed that rugby league could offer the US serious international competition and wanted to use American footballers to play international league matches in their off-season. Nash was also well connected. He was a friend of the vice-president of the USA, a former college football player, who wanted to meet with rugby league representatives. His name was Richard M. Nixon.5
Nixon never became involved in rugby and Nash never got further than organising a couple of exhibition matches between Australia and New Zealand in California in 1954. But by this time interest in rugby union was reviving, thanks to the visits of the 1948 Wallabies and the 1954 All Blacks. Both played two matches in California on the way home from their European tours and helped rekindle interest in the universities. In 1952 the Dartmouth College rugby club was re-established in New Hampshire and in 1958 they became the first American rugby team to tour Britain.
The Dartmouth tour to Britain was financed by President Eisenhower’s ‘People to People’ cultural exchange programme. Part of the US government’s Cold War diplomatic push to take American values to the rest of the world, Dartmouth’s tour got significant publicity in the US press and demonstrated how other clubs could become part of rugby union’s international network. From a handful of clubs in 1954, the Eastern Rugby Union grew to 29 by the start of the 1960s.6 Over on the West Coast, the annual Monterey tournament was started in 1959 for clubs in California and British Columbia in Canada.7
The US game inadvertently had a major tactical impact on rugby, thanks to American Rhodes scholar Pete Dawkins. Dawkins played on the right wing for Oxford in the 1959 Varsity match, when it was still customary for wingers to throw the ball into the line-out. He decided to throw the ball from the shoulder, quarterback style, rather than the usual round-arm or under-arm throw. It proved to be highly accurate and helped Oxford win the match. Dubbed the torpedo throw by the British press, Dawkins’ technique soon became the accepted way of throwing the ball into the line-out.8
The 1960s was a revolutionary decade around the world and a transformative period for American rugby union. The sport grew rapidly in American universities, finally finding itself a niche in collegiate sport. This was a time when American sport was in a state of upheaval. College sports were being desegregated and racial barriers removed. In this uncertain world, rugby seemed to represent a tradition free of political controversy. Much of its appeal was based on its reputation for being played by those for whom partying was at least as important as playing. It is thus not surprising that the most famous American to play rugby in the 1960s was Yale University full-back George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States.
Rugby also had the advantage that it was generally not part of the college-funded sports on university campuses. The introduction of the equal opportunity legislation called Title IX in 1972, which laid down that colleges had to spend equal amounts on men’s and women’s sports, meant that minority sports such as rugby often had their funding withdrawn. No longer answerable to college funding authorities, rugby could conduct itself as it chose.
In June 1975 the USA RFU, known today as USA Rugby, was founded, the first national governing body that American rugby had ever had. Existing league and regional structures were consolidated and greatly expanded over the next two years. The following year, America fielded an international rugby side once more when the Eagles, as it was nicknamed, played Australia in Los Angeles 64 years since the two sides had previously met at Berkeley.
The Eagles quickly became part of rugby union’s expanding second-tier international circuit, regularly playing their Canadian rivals north of the border. In 1978 they recorded their first international win, a 12-7 victory over Canada in Baltimore. In little more than a decade the Eagles established a strong enough reputation for them to be invited to the inaugural 1987 Rugby World Cup. In their first match they defeated Japan 21-18 and competed well against Australia and England in their group. They defeated Japan again at the 2003 World Cup and in 2011 defeated their old superpower rival Russia 13-9. By that time there were over 88,000 registered rugby union players in the USA, slightly more than in Australia.
American rugby league also re-emerged in the late 1980s. In 1987 the first league international between the USA and Canada was staged and the national side took part in the 1995 and 2000 Rugby League World Cup Emerging Nations tournaments. In 2013 they reached the Rugby League World Cup proper, where, against all expectations, they topped their group and reached the quarter-finals. Yet, if union remained a marginal game on the American sports landscape, league’s smaller footprint was confined to the margins of the margins.
Both union and league, as well as American football, also benefited from the rise in Polynesian immigration to the United States from the 1990s. American Samoans had long had unrestricted access but the increased pace of global population movement in the 21st century, as in Australian and New Zealand rugby, widened the pool of players available to the game beyond its traditional constituency of the universities and the university educated.
Perhaps most importantly, for a country in which the Olympics is the pinnacle of international sport, the entry of rugby sevens into the Olympic Games offers American rugby its greatest-ever opportunity. Yet as the profile of rugby grows, the seemingly unshakeable stranglehold of American football on the nation’s sporting consciousness also continues to tighten. The efforts of American rugby, of whatever code, to gain a place in the nation’s sporting consciousness remains as it always has been, an heroic struggle.
Maple-leaf rugby
As befits its geography, Canada in the 20th century found itself torn between the rugby that was played by its fellow ‘white dominions’ of the British Empire and the gridiron game that dominated its American neighbour to the south.
Indeed, for the first third of the 20th century there were two sports claiming the title of ‘rugby’: rugby union and Canadian gridiron football. To make things even more confusing, the governing body of Canadian football was called the Canadian Rugby Union, while the rugby organisation was called the Rugby Union of Canada.
By the 1920s the popularity of the native gridiron game had pushed what became known as ‘English rugby’ to the very fringes of the Canadian sporting scene, with it being played seriously only in British Columbia in the far west and Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces on the east coast. In 1929 Canadian football severed its last link with its parent game and legalised the forward pass, bringing it closer to American football, but it was not until 1967 that it finally abandoned the title of Canadian Rugby Union.
The 1929 adoption of the forward pass coincided with the founding of the Rugby Union of Canada. A Canadian team had played in the 1919 King’s Cup military tournament immediately after the First World War, but had fared badly, losing all five matches and scoring a solitary try to 31 conceded. The 1925 and 1936 All Black tourists stopped off in British Columbia to play two matches on their way home from Britain but these were essentially exhibition matches. The true level of Canadian rugby was seen in 1932 when, underwritten by the government, the national team toured Japan and lost both Test matches to the Cherry Blossoms.
Outside its British Columbia heartland, rugby floundered in the 1930s and 1940s. To some extent this reflected the gradual decline of Canada’s imperial link with the British Empire. As its close ties to Britain began to fray, and the link with American culture and sport became stronger, rugby’s importance also faded. Instead, nationalistically minded Canadians looked to ice hockey and Canadian football to express their patriotism.
In eastern Canada rugby union had been so decimated by Canadian football that in 1943 rugby officials in the Maritime Provinces decided to abandon rugby union for rugby league. In late 1943 the Rugby Football League in Leeds received a letter from John MacCarthy, the secretary of the Halifax (Nova Scotia) Rugby Union. He told the RFL that they had ‘changed over from rugby union to rugby league’ and asked for rule books to be sent to them.
However, the RFL couldn’t provide any practical assistance until after the war and it wasn’t until 1946 that the rugby strongholds of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island made the switch as a whole. Nevertheless, the new game was quickly hailed as a success, having, in the word of the Halifax Herald, ‘speeded up play and eliminated much that was deadly dull under the old Rugby Union code’.9 Despite this positive start, rugby league also began to struggle in the 1950s as television helped Canadian football to increase its popularity. When British RFL secretary Bill Fallowfield visited in 1954, he found the game in very poor health and Canadian rugby league withered on the vine, finally dying out altogether in the early 1960s.10
But by this time, rugby union had started to reclaim some of the territory it had lost. In 1957 the Barbarians made a six-match tour of the country, taking in Ontario and Quebec as well as the British Columbia heartland. In March 1958 the Wallabies arrived in Vancouver, following in the footsteps of the 1948 Wallabies and the 1954 All Blacks. The 1948 and 1954 tourists had each easily won their games but this time, British Columbia triumphed over the Wallabies in one of the most surprising tour matches ever.
The Wallabies had lost all five Test matches in Europe and the match in Vancouver took place just six days and a long flight after a 19-0 defeat to France in Paris. The Canadians surprisingly led 5-0 at half-time and despite a fightback by the embarrassed Wallabies in the second half British Columbia hung on to win 11-8. The 6,643 crowd at Vancouver’s Empire Stadium could barely believe their eyes. Canadian rugby had begun a new era.
Over the next decade, the game was reorganised and in 1962, 60 years after Canada’s first and only tour to the British Isles, the national side undertook a 16-match tour of Britain. The Canadians managed just one victory and a draw but the tour raised the profile of the game at home. In 1965 the national rugby union, which had been dissolved in 1939, was re-established.
Part of this reinvigoration of the game was due to a new wave of British immigrants bringing their love of the sport with them, along with coaching and administration experience. Among English-speaking Canadians, the game started to claim its place in elite schools and among the professional classes. The ease of international travel meant that rugby also became a way of forging new links with the English-speaking world. Yet, despite the prominence of France in international rugby, the game made little headway among French-speaking Canadians, as a glance at the almost entirely Anglo-Saxon names of players in national sides over the years demonstrates.
The rebirth of Canadian rugby was announced in the most dramatic fashion on 14 September 1966, when, once again at the Empire Stadium, British Columbia defeated the British Lions, who were returning home from their tour of Australia and New Zealand. The British Columbia team boasted a number of players who played both rugby and Canadian football and who were not intimidated by the British pack, even one led by Irishman and future Lions’ captain Willie John McBride.
As if to confirm the Canadian victory in the battle of the forwards, the decisive try of the game was scored by loose-head prop Peter Grantham. Scrum-half Ted Hunt stole the ball near the British Columbia try line and raced 80 yards before cross-kicking towards the Lions’ goal, where the ball was scooped up and plonked down under the posts by Grantham. Full-back Don Burgess converted and the match ended in a historic 8-3 win to British Columbia.
It would not be the last time British Columbia would defeat a national side – they would also beat Scotland in 1985 and Japan in 1976 and 1989 – but this was a triumph that announced Canada as a serious rugby force. In 1983 the national team recorded its first win over a European side when it defeated Italy 19-13, and it was on the basis of its improving form that Canada was invited to take part in the inaugural Rugby World Cup in 1987.
The side started on the front foot with a completely unexpected and sweeping 37-4 victory over Tonga but they were brought down to earth with consecutive 40-point defeats by Ireland and Wales. But the vast improvement that had taken place over the previous two decades was highlighted in 1990 when Argentina were defeated home and away, and then at the 1991 World Cup when the side reached the quarter-finals.
The 1990s were the golden age of Canadian rugby. The success of the 1991 World Cup was followed by a victory over a touring England XV in May 1993, a last-minute 26-24 victory over Wales in Cardiff in November 1993 and an 18-16 win over France the following year. At the heart of this rise to prominence was Gareth Rees, unquestionably the greatest Canadian to play the game.
Rees’s Welsh parents had been part of the post-war wave of British immigration that had such an important impact on Canadian rugby. His father had played for London Welsh, and Rees himself had been educated at the self-described rugby powerhouse of St Michael’s University School in British Columbia. He made his debut for Canada at 19 in 1986 against the USA and then played a key role in the 1987 World Cup campaign.
Rees was instrumental in shaping and guiding the Canadian team throughout the 1990s, playing in all of the first four World Cups and masterminding victories over the England XV, France, in which he kicked all of his side’s points, and Wales, where he converted Alan Charron’s try with the last kick of the game to win the match.
Much like Hugo Porta in Argentina, Rees’s kicking ability and tactical nous meant that the Canadian strategy was based around him and his strengths as a kicker. But unlike Porta, who only ever played club rugby for Banco Nación, Rees became a major figure in British club rugby, playing for Wasps, Harlequins, Bedford and Newport, as well as a short spell in France with AS Mérignac.
His transnational career anticipated the globalised, professional careers that many players would follow after 1995 and the legalisation of professionalism. Yet the platform for Canadian rugby that Rees and his teammates had established in the 1990s did not turn out to be a springboard. As with so many other emerging nations, the advent of professionalism cut the ground from under the potential new rugby power.
Unable to compete in terms of finance and resources with Canadian football and ice hockey at home or the rugby superpowers abroad, the promise of the 1990s stalled.
New directions from North America
If the United States and Canada were unable to break into rugby’s global elite, they did play a crucial role in challenging the very nature of the game. In 1976 a group of Canadian quadriplegic athletes in Winnipeg designed a new sport for wheelchair users, male and female. It was initially called Murderball because, unlike existing wheelchair sports, it allowed its players to crash their chairs into each other to stop their progress or to dislodge the ball. This was rugby – but on four wheels.
Wheelchair rugby quickly spread to the United States and the first team was formed at the University of North Dakota in 1981, the same year that the sport began in Australia. In 1989 Toronto hosted a triangular tournament between Canada, Britain and the United States and in 1993 the International Wheelchair Rugby Foundation was founded. It made its first appearance in the Paralympics in Atlanta in 1996 as a demonstration sport and is now a recognised medal sport at the Games. Furthermore, this was a sport that allowed the bone-crunching physical contact of rugby to be enjoyed by those who would otherwise be excluded from such pleasures.
In the late 1990s, the United States also became the centre for the emergence of gay-friendly rugby clubs, once again challenging some of the fundamental machismo traditions of the game. Although the London-based King’s Cross Steelers were the world’s first openly gay rugby club, formed in 1995, it was in America where the impact of shifting attitudes was strongest.11 The Washington Renegades blazed a trail for American rugby in 1998, and in 2001 an invitational international sevens tournament was held for gay-friendly teams in Washington.
Organised by the newly founded International Gay Rugby Association and Board (IGRAB), it was renamed the Bingham Cup the following year after Mark Bingham, one of the stalwarts of the gay San Francisco Fog club who had been killed on United Airlines Flight 93 during the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. Held every two years, the 2014 tournament attracted 15 teams from around the world, by which time IGRAB itself had grown to 51 member clubs in 15 countries.
Gay teams slowly emerged elsewhere, and in 2004 the Sydney Convicts became the southern hemisphere’s first gay club. In 2005 the Union Cup began as a tournament for European clubs, and by 2013 had 17 clubs taking part. But the strength of gay-friendly rugby remains centred in the United States: almost half of IGRAB’s member clubs are based there.
Beyond this, rugby has struggled to reflect changing attitudes towards sexuality. In 1995 Australian rugby league international Ian Roberts came out and played without incident as an openly gay player in the National Rugby League for the next four seasons. But it would be over a decade before another professional player felt able to do the same, when Gareth Thomas, the first man to win 100 caps for Wales, declared his sexuality in 2009, although leading Welsh referee Nigel Owens had also come out in 2007.
Given the thousands of professional players of both rugby codes, the fact that only two players felt comfortable enough in the game to be open about their sexuality shows how, despite an official stance of toleration, rugby is still largely trapped in the stereotypes of the past. In 2008, Johan Prinsloo, the then chief executive of the South African Rugby Union, said in an interview that ‘being gay in the rugby world is like going to war and having a disco in the middle of the battlefield – it’s inappropriate’.12 Given such attitudes, it is perhaps not surprising that the impetus to challenge them has come from a country outside the traditional rugby-playing nations.
This willingness of North Americans to challenge traditions within rugby also provided the basis for possibly the greatest social change in the nature of the game around the world. Wheelchair rugby was a mixed sport that for the first time allowed men and women to play rugby seriously together. Gay-friendly teams questioned some of the macho conventions of the game, but perhaps the biggest breakthrough made in the United States and Canada was the emergence of women’s rugby in the 1970s, a development that no doubt had the founders of the game spinning in their tombs.