USA

The first-ever Olympic rugby tournament wasn’t supposed to be won by the Americans, just as they weren’t supposed to win the inaugural women’s Rugby World Cup. But they did. And then? Pipe bombs, Dan Lyle, MLR, expelled champions, bankruptcy, sevens success, fifteens failure, and two Rugby World Cup bids. This is American rugby. It’s anything and everything, but never dull. 

The first incarnation of rugby in America came not from British influence but from Canadian. In 1874 Harvard University invited Montreal’s McGill University to play ‘Boston rules’ football – which was akin to soccer. The Canadians said yes but only if they could also play Harvard under their own ‘McGill rules’ – which allowed for carrying the ball.

Harvard comfortably won under Boston rules, yet much preferred playing the unusual rules of their opponents the following day. So, they adopted them and persuaded other American universities to join them. Collectively they brought organisation to the chaos, a ‘scrummage’ became an organised ‘line of scrimmage’, whilst tackles saw the game stop and re-start. This new sport became known as American football. Or, as the Americans call it, football.

At the turn of the twentieth century, young Americans were dying in alarming numbers while playing football at university, with twenty deaths on average, every season. Cerebral haemorrhages and broken necks were commonplace and there were other ways to die too. In one instance, a crush of players saw someone’s rib puncture their own heart. It wasn’t just the physical nature of the game, nor the absence of protective clothing (this would emerge in 1920). Violence went unpunished. Kicking, kneeing, stamping and punching were all tolerated, so too was ‘free lunching’ – the term given to biting your opponent’s legs at the bottom of a mass of bodies. Some uniforms even had handles on so they could link arms with teammates and steamroller opponents into the ground. The Chicago Tribune dubbed the 1905 season ‘the death harvest’. Things got so bad that year that President Theodore Roosevelt called the heads of the premier university teams to the White House and told them to curb the violence. His son was playing football at Harvard at the time. But it didn’t stop. 

A year later, some enlightened universities came up with a radical answer: they would drop the sport entirely and take up rugby instead.

So began a rapid period of rugby development in the USA, with universities in California taking up the sport most keenly. With no football to play, the best athletes at universities such as Stanford, UCLA, St Mary’s and Santa Clara, turned their considerable talents to rugby. The sport was a brilliant replacement for football, capable of developing players physically yet with much stricter adherence to the rules. Morally it was deemed superior. But most importantly, it didn’t kill them.

As well as playing against each other, Californian universities looked further afield, inviting teams from Canada, Australia and even New Zealand to come and play them.

However, not long after rugby had started to make tracks – after just a decade in fact – its momentum dwindled. Football had become safer by changing some of its rules, the key change being the introduction of the forward pass, opening up the field and bringing an end to the mass mauling and brawling that had been so lethal. 

By 1915, UCLA returned to playing football, while Stanford – which had established itself as the most successful rugby university in the state – followed suit in 1920. During this period, the longest stretch that any Californian university played rugby was twelve consecutive seasons.  

Even though rugby was on the wane, there was enough talent in California for its universities to put together a rugby team to represent the USA at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. 

In just a two-team competition between themselves and France, the USA won the only match 8-0, and thus became rugby’s inaugural Olympic champions.

But the win did little to re-energise rugby at home. In post-war America, there was a greater appetite for patriotic sports like football and basketball, and rugby receded into the backwaters of the national sporting conscience.

Four years later, in early 1924, an invitation arrived at the US Olympic Committee (USOC) headquarters in New York requesting the USA – as defending champions – send their rugby team to the Olympic Games taking place that year in Paris. The USOC were sceptical but were keen not to disappoint their hosts at their grand forthcoming event. So, they asked the general athletic coach at Stanford University, Harry Moloney, to take the problem off their hands, yet didn’t offer to cover the team’s travel to Paris, nor their lodging. Undeterred, Moloney was confident he could pull together a team that would be competitive once again, and raise the funds to get them to Paris. 

He held trials in an old baseball stadium in San Francisco and invited players from across the state to attend. Chances are most of those that attended hadn’t played, either at all, or since the last Olympics. The team he went on to select eight players who had never played a game of rugby in their life. He was, however, able to call upon a handful of the team that had won the gold in 1920, including captain Colby “Babe” Slater. 

Almost everyone in the team knew each other from playing university football in California. They also knew they were being sent to France to satisfy Franco-American relations rather than to win gold. As one of the players who made the team, Norman Cleaveland, would later recount: “They were looking for a punching bag. We were told to go to Paris and take our beatings like gentlemen.” 

As you can imagine for a group of young, athletic and talented Americans, they didn’t see themselves as a punching bag in the slightest. 

In early April 1924, the US team set off, traversing their homeland by train to New York, then boarding the S.S. America for a nine-day crossing of the Atlantic, which was slow-going even in those days. They first stopped in England to play three warm-up matches, winning against Devonport Services RFC, and losing to Blackheath and Harlequins, at Twickenham.

The reason there was no Great Britain team competing at the forthcoming Olympics was a British Isles tour to South Africa had been scheduled for later in the year, a first tour in fourteen years because of the war, and British attentions were focused on that.

Buoyed by their experience in England – Cleaveland reported that the tour party was “royally entertained” adding, “rugby, that’s just…I could spend the rest of the day recalling experiences” but tantalisingly doesn’t – the Americans made their way to France, landing in Boulogne. After a rough crossing, they were told by the French authorities that they couldn’t get off the boat as they didn’t have any visas.

So, the Americans took matters into their own hands. Cleaveland again: “We said, ‘That’s what you think. You watch us, see if we get off this boat.’ We charged through the gendarmes and through the barriers.”

The American consul in Paris had to smooth over the situation as best he could but the following morning, French newspapers were full of the Americans’ behaviour. “Oh, we were really taken apart in the press,” reported Cleaveland. 

As a result, the atmosphere for their first game against Romania was very anti-American, and their comfortable 37-0 victory only intensified that feeling.

In just a three-team tournament, France had also comfortably beaten Romania so the stage was set for a re-match of the 1920 Olympics, in which France would surely win the title they had conceded four years ago and get Paris’s hosting of the Olympic Games off to a golden start. Or so they thought. However, the French press – and the Americans themselves, given their behaviour in Boulogne – had engendered such a negative sentiment among Parisians that the French Olympic Committee feared a riot. Ahead of the big match, they issued a plea for civility from French fans, publishing the following statement in the press: “The Americans play hard but never brutally or with bad intent. The Californians, who have come over 12,000 [kilometres] to play a sport which is not theirs, should have the applauds and the feeling of the French sporting public.”

For their part, the Americans felt aggrieved that the French public were turning against the nation that helped swing the war in the Allies’ favour six years before.

The match began and the written-off Americans were soon over-running the French. As a contemporary French journalist wrote after the match, the USA “were a class higher from a physical point of view and showed a knowledge of the game significantly greater than that which was attributed to them”.

As the match turned against France – two of their players, including the influential Adolphe Jauréguy, went off injured – the home fans saw red. American spectators were attacked with canes, while rocks were thrown towards the pitch, hitting photographers and officials. Injured American spectators were laid out on the pitch so the ambulance could enter the stadium and take them away. It didn’t deter the American players, however, who went on to win a crushing 17-3 victory. The newsreels of the day didn’t capture any of the fighting but plenty of the flowing movement from the American team, while their far superior muscular physiques also stand out.

After the victory when the American flag was raised and their anthem played, it was drowned out by boos and hisses from the crowd.

The match is now known as the ‘Bullfight of Colombes’ and the violence on display was undoubtedly part of the reason why rugby didn’t appear at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, only returning to the Olympic fold in 2016. 

Yet in perhaps rugby’s best example of  ‘what happens on the pitch stays on the pitch’, or least in the stadium, a day after the match, the Americans found themselves being lauded by Parisians around town. Cleaveland describes how “the French newspapers switched sides and we became great heroes. After that, we would walk into a restaurant or a saloon, and receive an ovation. And Paris, I can assure you, is one of the best places in the world to be a hero.”

From the gutter to the stars, the USA were the toast of Paris. Yet, as with 1920, their victory did little to spark interest in the game. Rugby it seems slunk its way back over the Atlantic, back to California and to its universities where pictures of the 1924 Olympic champions might have been hung up in gymnasiums at Stanford, St Mary’s and UCLA, but otherwise the game was cast aside as a mainstream sport. Over the next thirty years, rugby wouldn’t make much of a dent, if any, in the national sporting consciousness of the United States. But it did survive, principally as a summer sport that American footballers, basketballers and wrestlers might play in between seasons. Although it was no one’s first sport, there were enough people wanting to play rugby after leaving university for a club scene to emerge in those states where the sport had a foothold among students.

Fast forward to the 1960s, and the country’s grass-roots club scene was taking shape. So much so, that in the decade which followed there was an obvious need for a central body to organise rugby in the USA. The United States of American Rugby Football Union – now USA Rugby – was inaugurated in 1975 and a year later the USA played their first International since their Olympic win in 1924, against Australia in Anaheim, California. They lost 12-24 but, according to the Rothman’s Rugby Yearbook “were by no means outclassed”. A decent crowd of 7,000 people turned out for it as well. Buoyed by this flying start, the USA set out in earnest to re-connect with the international rugby community, once again inviting the best nations in the world to come and play. In 1981 they even defied the boycott of South Africa due to apartheid to host the Springboks, amid controversy at home and abroad.

The Springboks arrived in the USA from New Zealand, where their presence had caused seismic civil disturbance, with protests and riots commonplace at matches, and even flour bombs being dropped from a plane ahead of the final Test in Auckland. Despite the lower profile of rugby in America, the Springboks still met significant resistance in the States. A pipe bomb was exploded outside the Eastern Rugby Union’s headquarters in New York ahead of one match, while a lawsuit was filed to try and stop the final Test match taking place. It failed. However, these events spooked organisers enough for them to switch the venue and date of the Test match at the eleventh hour.

Denis Shanagher played centre against South Africa and recalls how the furtive re-arrangements were relayed to the players. “The day before the Test we had our usual team meeting at ten o’clock,” he says. “The guys had just had breakfast, they’re a little sleepy and the coaches announced, ‘okay guys, get your gear on because we’re gonna play the game today’. We’ve got an alternative pitch, and we’re gonna play today because we’re concerned about some protests at the stadium.

“We’re kind of like ‘whoa’,” admits Denis. “But we all put our gear on, jumped in vans, and they drove us out into the countryside, just outside Albany, New York. Literally, it was a farm field that had just been mowed, and when we get there, they’re putting the goalposts up, right. And you know, the Springboks, guys like Naas Botha and Ray Mordt, were warming up in the bushes over there. Well, we played the game, and there were maybe twenty people watching, extra US players, some officials and some people hanging around just because they saw it. It was a bit surreal to be honest because we’re just out in the middle of a farm field someplace, playing an international match.” Although the USA fared well against their illustrious and controversial tourists, they lost 38-7. 

Denis continued to represent the USA until 1987 when he played the last of his nine Tests against Wales in Cardiff. That year the Eagles competed in the inaugural World Cup in New Zealand, winning a match against Japan but suffering heavy losses to Australia and England. That win is just one of three wins that the men’s national team have picked up at Rugby World Cups – their other coming in 2003 (also against Japan) and in 2011 (against Russia). 

But that promising start in 1987 would soon be topped by their women’s team at the first ever women’s Rugby World Cup in 1991 in Wales. Just like the USA men’s team in the 1920s, the women were considered no-hopers going into the tournament, with USA Rugby providing little to no support, save for giving the team a handful of ties that could be exchanged with their opponents after games. But yet again, the Americans were ready to defy expectations. With a healthy contingent of California-based players, a Welsh coach and a pair of lock forwards known as “the locks from hell” (Tam Breckenridge and Tara Flanagan), they won their first match against the Netherlands, then beat the Soviet Union to make it the semi-finals. And that’s when they really turned it on, defeating New Zealand 7-0, then England in the final, 19-6. 

It was an achievement of such improbability that it perhaps stands above even the Olympic triumphs of the 1920s. Happily, their achievement did meet with more recognition back home and the team were invited to the White House to celebrate with the First Lady, Barbara Bush.

In the meantime, the men’s game wasn’t standing idle and was about to unleash its first genuine superstar onto the world stage: Dan Lyle.

Dan Lyle shared many similarities with the USA’s Olympians of the 1920s. He too was a crossover athlete from football and, with a short, military-issue haircut on top of a hulking physique, he even looked like them. He was Hollywood handsome in a 1920s way. 

Like so many rugby players of the era, Dan had come to rugby by chance. “I was trying to make the NFL out of college,” Dan tells the Rugby Journal  from his home in Colorado. “I had a few try-outs, one with the Washington Redskins. And when I was doing that, I was looking for an outlet. I had a cousin who played for Washington Rugby Club so I went out and ran around with them. And, you know, within two or three games, somebody called me from the US team.”

One can only imagine what a prospect the US coaches felt they had on their hands. Although Dan had gone undrafted – meaning no NFL franchise had wanted him directly out of university – he had been the third-leading receiver in history at the Virginia Military Institute. “Within a couple of months, they [the USA] asked me to come train and they fast-tracked me, and I got my first cap within six to eight months of first picking up a rugby ball.”

His first cap was against Ireland at Lansdowne Road in 1994 and although the USA lost, Lyle caught the headlines, throwing thirty-metre quarter-back style passes and being impossible to beat at the lineout. He won the man-of-the match award.

In his second Test against Canada in 1995 – just two weeks after rugby had turned professional – he displayed a similar mix of heady athleticism and ball skills that had rarely been seen on a rugby field.

A scout from England happened to be watching the game, as was a coach in the NFL. They both contacted his agent afterwards. It wasn’t long before Dan had two contracts in front of him. One from Bath for what equated to $52,000 per season, and one from the Minnesota Vikings for $116,000 per season. Yet Dan chose the offer from Bath, turning down twice the money, and the chance to achieve his childhood dream, for a sport he’d been playing for less than two years.

The Bath team Dan joined were all-conquering, having just won England’s First Division title for the sixth time in eight seasons, achieving it with style and swagger. The team included heavyweights of the era, such as Jeremy Guscott, Phil de Glanville, Nigel Redmond, Eric Peters, Gareth Chilcott and Steve Ojomoh. Yet Dan rose rapidly through the ranks, something he credits to his crossover skills from football, and to his experience of training professionally when trying to make it to the NFL. “I was at an advantage because most English players don’t play sports where they’re actively engaged between the chest and the height of their hands, right? In rugby, everyone was catching like this,” Dan holds his hands in front of his chest to show where the English game was being played at the time, then his hands above his head to show where he was able to operate. “So, I was doing some stuff that, you know, they had not seen, and for the first two or three years I was at Bath, everyone was like ‘holy shit, what are you doing?’. And, you know, it was like men and boys. They had never thought about catching up here, let alone being able to manipulate the ball and do the offloading and wraparound passes behind the back. I was doing all that stuff but I wasn’t flamboyant, I wasn’t trying to do it for the sake of doing it. I might pull up because I saw three or four players in front of me, and I would look across the pitch and there would be nobody over there, so I would throw the ball, football-style, forty yards the opposite way.”

Dan and Bath were a match made in heaven. The aristocrats of English rugby had built their success in the 80s and early 90s around an entertaining brand of rugby but with Stuart Barnes, David Trick and Tony Swift all having left the club by the time Dan arrived, ‘Captain America’ – as he was known – was a welcome dose of excitement. And his new teammates embraced him, extending the ultimate changing room compliment by taking the piss out of his virtues. “They used to make fun of me because I would say to Brian Ashton and Clive Woodward and other guys ‘hey coach, hey coach’ when to them they were ‘Ashy’ and ‘Woody’. I was from a military family, and a military school, so they were ‘coaches’ to me.

“But they were very welcoming to me when they could easily have rejected me. I was an American and they had not seen an American in any way shape or form in their sport.”

After a couple of second-team games, Dan made his Bath debut off the bench against Bristol early in the 1996/7 season. He started the following week against Will Carling’s Harlequins, was man of the match, and from that game on, started 125 consecutive matches for Bath unless he was injured. He was never once named as a substitute.

His time in Bath included winning the European Cup in 1998, captaining the club in the 2001/02 season, and meeting his wife-to-be Rebecca, with the couple marrying in 2004, in Bath of course. 

All the while he captained the USA national team, winning 36 of his 45 caps during his time as a Bath player. He retired internationally after the 2003 World Cup.

The impact which Dan had on English rugby extended far beyond the west country. While coaching England, Clive Woodward even coined the term the ‘Lyle line’ to describe a running line that cuts back against a drift defence, often taken by a forward off the scrum-half or fly-half. Dan was known for running it particularly well. And English forwards were told to add it to their repertoire. Even after the Woodward era, England number eight Martin Corry ran the ‘Lyle line’ to great effect at international level.

Such was his success, it felt like a production-line of American talent was inevitably going to follow Dan across the Atlantic. Surely every club in the northern hemisphere could unearth their own all-star American? Yet no one of Dan’s quality has yet emerged, and it’s been twenty years. Not many have even been deemed worth the gamble. A few notable exceptions include Takudzwa Ngwenya at Biarritz, Blaine Scully for Leicester and Cardiff, Samu Manoa at Northampton, Paul Emerick for the Dragons, Ulster and Wasps, and Chris Wyles, who won an impressive haul of trophies in his decade at Saracens. But, overall, the pickings have been depressingly slim. The absence of a well-run professional league goes a long way to explaining why.

In 2018, Major League Rugby (MLR) was introduced and, even though it is comparatively in its infancy, the league has already had to ride out plenty of storms, including some of its founding clubs folding, and the small matter of the bankruptcy of USA Rugby – but more about that later. 

While the MLR hasn’t yet proved its long-term viability in the ultra-competitive US sports market, its sheer survival proves its resilience, underlining that those stakeholders are in it for the right reasons, and for the long haul.

Those stakeholders include the Utah Warriors and their CEO Kimball Kjar, who is the last remaining CEO from the inaugural MLR season in 2018.

So, what’s kept the former USA international scrum-half going when other have fallen by the wayside?  “Call me a masochist or call me stubborn,” he chuckles, “but I really believe in this MLR model. Imagine the league as a table with many legs supporting it. If each club is a leg, then if one of those legs begins to falter, the other legs can still hold up the tabletop. That’s the MLR model and it’s similar to the construct of Major League Soccer (MLS). 

“In their early days, they had teams that fell off. MLS went up (in team numbers) and down, and then eventually they began to skyrocket in about 2005 but it took them ten years to get through all those growing pains. It really came down to that simple fact that you need to have a broad base to share the load.”

MLR has already seen one of its founding members, the Glendale Raptors, withdraw from the league and another two (including another founder, originally known as Austin Elite) removed/withdrawn/kicked out (whichever way you look at it, MLR is poorer without the wonderfully named Gilgronis and Giltinis) yet it has still expanded up to twelve teams from its initial seven.

The Utah Warriors have been there throughout and Kimball is continuing to see interest in the team grow among local sports fans. Last season, attendances at their 4,500-capacity stadium were at ninety per cent, including three games which sold-out, and there are ambitions this season to sell out every home match, and even plans to take a game to a 20,000-seater stadium.

Although Kimball ascribes to the philosophy that getting fans into rugby is not really about the quality of the contest on the field but the overall experience they have at a rugby match – something he succinctly summarises as “the thing is not the thing” – he knows MLR needs to develop its own superstars, citing the impact that Michael Jordan had on the NBA.

“Even into the 1980s, the NBA was not something that was readily consumable to the general public in the United States,” he says. “Until, you know, a guy by the name of Michael Jordan came along. But in rugby, when has there been another player that’s captured the attention of so many people, like Jonah Lomu? Maybe Siya Kolisi? Maybe Dan Carter? But even then, are we truly transcending and getting to that level where people are saying ‘oh this guy’s a superstar’. 

“That’s something that I think rugby can do a better job of,” he continues. “And that’s something I think you’ve got to do through better marketing and narrative storytelling. Hopefully some of the stuff we’re seeing with, you know, the Six Nations Full Contact series will begin to help globally. 

“Domestically, in the US, I’ll give you some anecdotal data,” offers Kimball. “When Utah have talked about signing big-name players, those stories have received fewer reads and eyeballs, or whatever measuring stick you want to use, than a moment when one of our absolutely homegrown born-and-raised in Salt Lake City kids, Danny Christensen, came in as the third-string scrum-half for a match against Atlanta, had a barnburner of a performance and scored three tries. The local press latched on to that local-kid-done-good story and it just went like wildfire. One of our key ambitions for 2027 is actually to have a homegrown domestic Utah Warrior as the face of MLR. If I’m being selfish and just honest, when people think of MLR, we want them to think of the Warriors.”

Like every team in the MLR, Utah have to juggle giving space to the Danny Christensen’s of this world, and bringing in international talent. The league stipulates that no more than ten overseas players can be included in the 23-man squad for any one match, ensuring that thirteen players eligible for the national side are taking to the field every weekend, in every MLR team. 

That said, with no system ensuring that US-qualified players play for their clubs in certain positions – such as scrum-half or fly-half – the development of American talent in key positions is at the whim of coaches who operate under the burden of needing to win first and foremost. 

Come the play-offs last season, this led to a situation where just one of the six starting fly-halves in MLR teams had caps for the USA: Will Hooley of the San Diego Legion, and Will has since retired. While at scrum-half, just one player was eligible to play for the national team: Connor Buckley of New York Ironworkers. Most of the players in these positions hailed from New Zealand and South Africa and were pushing thirty, if not older.

With World Rugby having relaxed the international eligibility rules in recent years, it must be remembered that some of those overseas players may go on to qualify for the USA and represent their adopted country. But if they have come to the USA later in their careers, as most have, for how long can they hope to play internationally?

Although it’s a problem that has not yet been squared, it does at least mean that US-qualified players that are making the grade for their clubs are playing in a vastly superior rugby environment than in the days before MLR. In 2024, a new franchise – Anthem Rugby Carolina – is also entering the MLR with the express aim of giving a greater opportunity to US-qualified players. A sensible and far-sighted approach.

Another obstacle which MLR teams face is the geography of the USA. The vastness of North America may have allowed the country to become the economic powerhouse it is, but it’s a major challenge to a league which features teams from all four corners of the USA, from Seattle in the north-west, Miami in the south-east, San Diego in the south-west and New England in the north-east. MLR has a dedicated travel agency to help keep costs down but the costs are still eye-watering. Travel is also a major issue for the USA national teams when organising training camps and trials. Dan Lyle puts it best: “If George Ford was based in Ireland and Danny Care was in Istanbul, and England wanted to bring them together for a kicking session in Croatia, it would be hard, right? That’s America.”

Nonetheless, MLR continues to progress and is undoubtedly a good-news story in American rugby. As is the success of the USA’s sevens programme in recent years, which regularly produces men’s and women’s teams that are among the best in the world. The men’s team even came within a whisker of winning the HSBC World Series in 2019, with ex-NFL player Carlin Isles scoring 52 tries and Perry Baker – another ex-college footballer – also making his mark. While not pulling up trees in quite the same way, both the men’s and women’s teams have nonetheless qualified for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games this summer. 

These achievements have been a much-needed counterweight to some of the bad news that has stalked the game in the USA. 

USA Rugby filed for bankruptcy in March 2020, citing “insurmountable financial constraints” accelerated by the pandemic. In truth, Covid was the straw which broke the camel’s back, as financial issues had been adding up over a number of years.

The problems began due to the poorly thought-through commercial deals that were struck when the USA won the bid to host the 2018 Rugby Sevens World Cup in San Francisco. In the words of Denis Shanagher “everybody else made money, except USA Rugby”.

Denis – who was brought in as the chair of the Finance Committee after the bankruptcy to help improve governance, and who played against the Springboks in 1981 – added: “The event was played at the home of the San Francisco Giants. They made a fortune and they were thrilled. But the union didn’t do a particularly good job of negotiating its contracts. And so, everyone else made money and the union had to then pay off a number of the debts, and had to borrow money from World Rugby.”

A year later, USA Rugby’s financial hole deepened when those with their fingers on the purse strings concerning the USA men’s national team over-spent their budget by a staggering margin around the Rugby World Cup in 2019. “Firstly, there were not the appropriate financial controls in place with respect to spending,” explains Denis. “And, you know, the team gets over there [Japan] and obviously they want to have the best training facilities and the best food, and they want that stuff.

“So, they went on a bit of a spending spree without enough controls from back home. And before you know it, they’ve overspent their budget by a very, very, very significant amount. To the point where the union couldn’t meet its ongoing obligations as they were already paying off their debt from the Sevens World Cup. 

“That’s what really prompted the bankruptcy filing,” he continues. “And it also prompted a bit of a revolt, if you want to call it that, from the dues-paying members of USA Rugby who said, ‘hey we don’t pay our dues to fund the men’s World Cup team, who, by the way, didn’t win a game man’.”

By this stage, bankruptcy had become the only sensible course of action but it still had to be ratified by a vote in USA Rugby’s own congress. Former women’s international Jamie Burke was one of the members that voted that day, and remembers how much anger there was among congress delegates at how filing for bankruptcy had come to pass. “It was a very contentious time,” says Jamie, who is the most capped USA women’s player of all-time with 51. “A significant portion of the congress – the most angry portion and the most mistrustful portion – were kind of like ‘burn it all down’. 

“There was a lot of blame passed around. Whose fault was it? Who did it? The community blamed the national teams, the national teams blamed the national office, etc. So, there was a lot of blame passed around.”

Part of the deal in filing for bankruptcy was the introduction of financial safeguards to ensure nothing like this could happen again. A simple example of these safeguards was the introduction of separate bank accounts so that every entity under USA Rugby wouldn’t see its own pot of money diminished to pay debts off somewhere else.

The safeguards were as sensible as they were stringent but Jamie admits they may have been a bit too extreme, with the measures introduced hindering USA Rugby’s ability to grow. It seems a period of re-balancing is now required. 

Naturally, the bankruptcy has had plenty of consequences – one of which has been the under-performance of the national fifteen-a-side teams in recent years, most notably, the men’s side who failed to qualify for the 2023 Rugby World Cup. Given three shots at qualification over a thirteen-month period, they spurned them all, missing out on a place at the World Cup for just the second time. 

Their first chance passed by in October 2021, when they lost to Uruguay 34-50 over two legs. That meant they had to play Chile in the summer of 2022, which they lost by a single point 51-52, again over two legs. They were left with a do-or-die showdown with Portugal in Dubai. Due to an inferior points difference in their previous matches, the USA had to win while Portugal only had to draw. And Portugal, trailing 13-16 in the closing stages did just that with the last kick of the game from Samuel Marques.

USA international fly-half Will Hooley – who been ruled out of the final qualifying push due to injury – recalls that it was the dashed hope that hurt the most. “My brain was completely in the World Cup,” admitted Will, who retired last summer and is now a technical director at MLR. “When we didn’t qualify against Uruguay it was a case of ‘don’t worry, we’ll do it against Chile’, then that chance faded and it was, ‘don’t worry, we’ll get it done in Dubai.’ It was just awful, I’m not going to lie.

“I think it was a realisation as a group – and I say this being partly in and out of the group due to injury – I think we were slightly underprepared,” admits Will. “I don’t blame coaches or players but coming out of Covid we didn’t get it right. We were dealing with bankruptcy, it was a bit of a shitstorm for USA Rugby. No one in the USA can say that we got it right. I don’t think I’m taking a shot at the USA in saying that.

“The fact that we have now had to hit the re-set button I do believe is a good thing. And the right things are now happening to get rugby in the US to where it needs to be. Scott Lawrence has just been appointed as head coach and he is absolutely the right man for the job. I do believe rugby needs America, and I also believe America could really do with rugby. Whenever you see Americans experience rugby, they love it.”

Will knows a thing or two about what an engaged rugby fan-base looks like, having played for some of the best supported clubs in England such as Northampton, Exeter and Bedford. An England Under-20 international in 2013, Will pursued his international aspirations with the USA – his grandmother being born and raised in Los Angeles – and made his USA debut in 2018, winning eighteen caps in all. 

From his mid-Atlantic viewpoint, Will sees the potential for rugby in the USA to hit the big time, especially now they have won the rights to host the 2031 men’s World Cup and the 2033 women’s World Cup. It’s an incredible scoop for the USA, who were awarded the rights just two years after USA Rugby filed for bankruptcy. The decision underlines just how much faith World Rugby has in the USA to become rugby’s next boom market, and in its ability to host mega events. Think USA ’94 and Atlanta ’96. The FIFA World Cup is also coming back to the USA in 2026, while the Olympic Games will be held in Los Angeles in 2028. Some dress rehearsal.

With regards 2031 and 2033, the USA has already got to work, rolling out an ambitious grass roots project called ‘Imagine Rugby’ which is designed to get a million more young people playing the game by the time they host the World Cups. “It’s about getting a rugby ball into kids’ hands early,” explains Will, “rather than finding the diamond in the rough who can go and play professionally, although it’s potentially a pathway for that as well. It’s more about teaching the motor skills and the morals of the sport. You’ve got to go out there and put rugby in front of Americans, and that’s what this does.”

Will is also one half of the podcast The Rugby Rundown, covering all things rugby in the States. His co-presenter is former England prop and British and Irish Lion Alex Corbisiero, who has been based in the USA for more than eight years, and who grew up in Queens, New York.

Having played for London Irish and Northampton in the English Premiership for the bulk of his career – winning the 2014 Premiership title – Alex is now bringing his experience to the San Diego Legion as their scrum coach, and is also one of the most respected rugby pundits in the country. 

Today he and Will are working on their podcast from Alex’s home in the coastal town of Carlsbad, not far outside San Diego. It’s about 18 degrees outside (in January) and Alex is in a singlet. He is still bearded though – the Californian heat hasn’t yet claimed his facial hair.  “America has always had pockets of rugby areas,” says Alex. “But with the MLR you’ve now got twelve teams across the country that are investing enormous amounts of capital to grow the game at the top and bottom, because they want success all the way through. And this is where I get excited because it’s not just USA Rugby that is worrying about it on their own anymore. World Rugby are invested, MLR are invested.

“In England you can pretty much play rugby all year round as a kid. America is very different and often kids are three-sport athletes, in football, basketball and track for example. For rugby, a realistic aim is not to take kids away from those established sports to play rugby but for rugby to find its own place in the American calendar so kids can be four-sport athletes, or at least have rugby under their belt when growing up so they can come to it later in a more serious way.

“What they’ve already done in San Diego with ‘Imagine Rugby’ is incredible. In the last couple of months alone, 20,000 new kids have played flag rugby. What’s that going to be like in ten years when those kids are older, and a World Cup has been staged in their country? This is just the beginning.”

If Alex and Will are right, and this really is just the start of rugby being taken to heart in the USA, then watch out world. So far, the history of rugby in America has been one of improbable highs – two Olympic titles and one World Cup – set against an overall failure to make America care, properly, about the sport. Something always seems to get in the way. Bankruptcy, geography, the popularity of other sports. And it’s been this way for 130 years. The next decade, however, may well be different. In fact, it must be different. 

The USA has seven years until it hosts the men’s Rugby World Cup and nine years until it hosts the women’s global showpiece. The starting gun has already been fired in the race to make rugby matter to Americans. And who bets against America in a race?

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Davey Wilson, Getty Images & Shutterstock

This extract was taken from issue 25 of Rugby.
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