Can Rugby Finally Conquer America? – The Atlantic

Still, for a century, the widely beloved game remained a prisoner of its hierarchical origins. In the 1970s and 1980s, all-white Union rugby teams broke the anti-apartheid boycott and toured South Africa, where in 1974 their brawlers left their opponents looking “as if they had been in a road accident,” according to Collins. In the 1980s in England, class divisions still ran deep. The forwards had day jobs as grocers and policemen; the backs were officer class, Oxford and Cambridge men who worked as lawyers and bankers. Only in 1995, two years before Britain left Hong Kong, did the old guard surrender and professionalize the game for the first time. This came after Australians and New Zealanders threatened to secede, in pursuit of television fees that could only be garnered legally by a professionalized sport. Since then, World Rugby, known as the International Rugby Board, has modified the rules and turned the television-friendly game into a phenomenally lucrative business.

Today, the amateur ethos survives only in the most professionalized of societies: the United States, where since the 1970s rugby has caught on again quietly but dramatically. And as the rugby revival in the U.S. demonstrates, inclusion rather than exclusion is the spirit of the American game . The country has led the way in the diversification and democratization of rugby. Women’s rugby, pioneered in America in the 1970s, is now a global game too. In 1981, the first wheelchair rugby team formed at the University of North Dakota. In a second innovation, their sport, known as “Murderball,” fielded the first mixed-sex teams. In 2001, the Washington D.C. Renegades hosted the first gay-friendly rugby tournament.

American rugby has outclassed the game’s past, which is no guarantee that it will avoid the risks of popularity and a well-paid future. Yet so far, rugby has become commercialized without the corruption that disgraces football and soccer. A case can even be made that professionalization has raised the sport’s tone. With no urine testing, Collins notes in his book, amphetamine abuse had once been commonplace among the amateur teams. The Oval World describes how in 1986, the French team took a “little blue pill” the team doctor had put by their lunch plates before playing an especially intense game against New Zealand. The All Blacks’ Wayne “Buck” Shelton lost his four front teeth in one ruck, was knocked out in another, and required stitches on his scrotum after being caught on the ground in a third.

Televised rugby just might win an American fan base, but Collins doesn’t expect it to eclipse football—at least not in the men’s game. ​If the sport turns out to have staying power this time, its core ethos of fairness and balance may face a new kind of challenge with the rise of the women’s rugby team. (Even the more developed sport of soccer has seen top-ranked women’s players treated like amateurs compared to mediocre men’s players.) Now ranked third, the USA Eagles women’s team is within sight of winning the World Cup one day. If they do, or if the U.S. men’s team ever defeats England at its home base in Twickenham Stadium, the sport’s traditionalists may mourn the crushing of amateur ethics by television money, and the sullying of rugby’s soul.

Yet the moral value of rugby comes not from amateur ideals, but from the physical courage required to play the game, professionally or not. It’s a sport where mutual responsibility is assumed, where every player is the last line of defense. Pared down to its most basic elements, rugby is a kind of moral tutor, teaching “passion, pride, and meaning,” Collins says. As the sport deepens its roots in the U.S., his book offers a well-timed and deeply informed global history of the game. From now on, he seems to say, we’re all living in the oval world.