Bliss it is to be alive in a World Cup year, as Wordsworth might have written had rugby union existed then. But to be in America is very heaven.
We are seven months out from the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan, and there has never been better time to be an American rugby fan, or a fan of American rugby, or just a rugby fan in America.
Since the last World Cup, in England in 2015, the U.S. men’s 15-a-side team, the “Eagles,” has reached as high as No.12 in the world, after winning nine international “test” matches in a row.
In the same time, two professional men’s leagues have launched on U.S. soil. The first fell dormant after one season but the second, Major League Rugby, is in its second year with nine teams across the country and three more set for 2020.
In “sevens,” the seven-on-seven form of rugby played in the Olympics, the U.S. men are joint-best in the world with the mighty New Zealand All Blacks. The U.S. women are No. 2.
Vitally, all this can be seen on American television screens. The men’s national team are in the Americas Rugby Championship on ESPN, which also has the World Sevens Series stop in Las Vegas next month. MLR is broadcast on CBS, and NBC has Europe’s Six Nations Championship and the English Premiership. And men’s and women’s club and college rugby can be easily found online.
American fans, such as they are, have always had close ties to the game, which they play or once played at college or with a club. But now they can easily watch from the couch, no longer reduced to dodgy Internet streams or bars with steep entry fees.
Perhaps more importantly, people who are idly curious or just passing, but who might become fans in the future can also get to see the action. People such as the Chicago cab driver who, after watching the All Blacks beat the USA, told me with considerable glee, “Man, if someone hit me like that, I’d shoot him.”
For lovers of contact sports, the menu is rich and inviting. But, as with the French Revolution, which as Wordsworth noted began hopefully, the future could be terrible. So there must be caveats about American rugby.
The U.S. men blasted Canada in World Cup qualifying but their reward was a game against Argentina in which they were crushed. On Feb. 9, coach Gary Gold’s Eagles were pummeled 45-14 by the second-tier Argentina XV, in round two of the ARC. The South Americans were faster, fitter, and more skillful than their dazed “Yanqui” victims, who struggled in the heat of Rio Negro.
The humbling loss is a cold shower on aspirations surging around the U.S. team. The Eagles might beat Tonga, a tiny island nation that stocks international rugby with frighteningly enormous islanders. But most likely, that will have to do.
Luckily, the average American rugby fan is no stranger to weary realism.
America is often called the sleeping giant of rugby. If the U.S. ever took rugby seriously, the thinking goes, if it ever introduced even a fraction of the talent that plays football to its collision cousin, it would take over the world.
It’s a seductive idea; it might even be true, on some ludicrously macro scale. More accurately, however, it’s an easy point for commentators to make without bothering to get to know the American game, its challenges as well as its strengths. As such, most American rugby folk, as committed and knowledgeable as rugby folk anywhere, utterly loathe the motif, which they deride as a patronizing cliche.
They’re right. But, nonetheless, the World Cup is coming and the U.S. team enters it on the back of sellouts at Chicago’s Soldier Field, sevens’ highlights on the SportsCenter Top 10, and MLR off to a promising start. Such talk will surge once more.
To raid revolutionary literature again, this might be both the best of times and worst of times. Rugby might yet make it in America. It might well not. The Eagles’ hopes are up. They will probably come crashing down.
I’ve lived here six years but I’m still a British subject, which makes me a rugby fan in America rather than an American rugby fan. But my wife and children are locals, and American rugby has generously taken me in. I love it, deeply.
Win or lose, I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Martin Pengelly is the weekend editor for the Guardian U.S. He played rugby in the second row for Durham University and in London for Rosslyn Park FC, but soon realized he was better at writing than playing.
