BANG UP JOB

He's a rough-and-tumble Scot who was raised on rugby, but don't be fooled. Richie Gray, aka THE COLLISION KING, is using a cerebral approach to change the way NFL teams think about the way their players hit each other—and make the game safer

- GREG BISHOP

A DISILLUSIONED rugby lifer walks into a local pub in his small Scottish Borders hometown in 2006. But the only walks-into-a-bar joke that day is on him.

For the previous 12 years, Richie Gray had worked for the Scottish Rugby Union as its development czar. Note the past tense. Earlier that month, the organization laid him off. “I was disillusioned,” he says now, 19 years later. “A real kick in the teeth.”

That night, Gray gathers with his mates from childhood; rugby gladiators, all. These scarred, squatty men grew up here, in Galashiels, a town of 12,600 where textile mills churned out cashmere and Gray’s father coached the province’s team. There’s a family-run cinema, an architectural trail and manicured gardens. The town is a living postcard, its quaintness in contrast with the worn faces of the tough bastards raised on rugby.

Gray orders a malt whisky, same as always. He’s more than disillusioned. He’s newly married, with a child on the way, a mortgage he just closed and no job. He doesn’t doubt he could find another gig in rugby. But that’s no longer what he wants. He’s thinking bigger, broader.

After a whisky or three, Gray drops his cautious stance on his own future and says the quiet part, what he really wants, out loud. “I’m going to be different. I’m going to concentrate on contact and collision only, and I’m going to become the best in the world at it.”

When these mates reaffix their respective jaws to their faces, they start... laughing. Big, belly guffaws, doubling over, wondering if he’s delusional or joking or both. “You'll never work again,” one tells Gray.

Gray, in contrast, sees the future. Contact sports, he argues, are played by ever bigger, ever faster, ever stronger people, each trained, conditioned and fortified with modern performance and recovery methods. Meaning... more collisions. More forceful collisions. And, in all likelihood, more injuries from the physics involved alone.