The Sleeping Giant Awakes

Richard bath is an award-winning writer based in the UK.

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PEOPLE OFTEN do not appreciate just how deep rugby’s roots go in North America. One of the first ever cross-border games in world rugby took place in 1874 when Harvard played McGill University of Montreal, and despite the game being banned by Yale for being too violent, it remained popular enough – especially at the Ivy League universities – to challenge American Football, especially on both coasts, before fading away after America won gold medals in the sport at the 1920 and 1924 Olympics. Although often derided Stateside as a college game for Frat boys with a drink problem, rugby has stubbornly persisted in North America, particularly in its elite academic institutions, with the result that a surprisingly high number of its most senior politicians are what the Yanks call “ruggers”. Bill Clinton played while at Oxford, George W Bush was an enthusiastic player at Yale, and Ted Kennedy was Harvard’s star man in the 1950s. Indeed, so many prominent US politicos – the Democratic rising star from Pennsylvania, Conor Lamb, played at Penn; Connecticut senator Chris Murphy was on the team at Williams College, in Massachusetts; Republicans representative Alex X Mooney from West Virginia chairs the Congressional Rugby Caucus – are former egg-chasers that The Guardian newspaper jokingly nicknamed America’s ruggers “the illuminati”. Nor are their ranks restricted to Capitol Hill. Prominent American ruggers include billionaire industrialists the Koch brothers, singer Kris Kristofferson, actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and HR McMaster, the three-star general who was Donald Trump’s national security advisor. But if there have always been plenty of Americans who love the game, translating those relatively high numbers into a viable professional sport or a successful national team has been problematic in a huge country where the professional sports arena is fero