How oval ball was draped in stars ‘n’ stripes
In that world, the Superbowl is played out with conversions and lineouts, and Jerry Maguire represented a winger.
But it isn’t this one. It almost was, though. The Doc Hudson Field House might sound like a location from the animated movie Cars, but it’s a cosy cottage tucked away in Strawberry Canyon — again with the cartoon names — above Berkeley in northern California, right next to the Witter Rugby Field, property of the University of California, Berkeley.
Jack Clark, who coaches the university’s rugby team, shows your columnist a framed photograph on one of the walls, an action shot taken at the Big Game — the annual local derby between Berkeley and Stanford, the college 20 miles to the south — over 100 years ago.
It takes a minute, maybe, to register that the players in the middle distance are not aligned in the clashing phalanxes of American football; they’re in a dog-leg line across the field, with one individual scragging down another in the centre of the picture.
They’re playing rugby.
“There you are,” says Clark, pointing at the crowd in the background, “you had 50,000 people at those games. Rugby games.”
Rugby enjoyed a boom in the early part of the last century because of what was happening in American football at the time. The notorious flying wedge tactic was being employed in gridiron, which involved a mass of players charging ahead of a ball-playing team-mate. It was successful, but success came at a price.
“There were deaths, people were killed playing the game and getting seriously injured,” says Clark.
“Rugby had been popular first, going back maybe 120 years, but American football then took over. Once people started to get killed in games, obviously its popularity decreased, and the public took more interest in rugby.”
It didn’t last. One of the men who reformed American football was Theodore Roosevelt, who spearheaded the removal of the flying wedge tactic. American football was wrapped up again in the warm embrace of the US sporting fan, where it remains to this day. Rugby returned to niche status in the States, where it, too, remains to this day.
American football in Roosevelt’s time meant the college game. The professional side didn’t take off until the 1950s, and though the NFL now dominates the landscape, college ball is still hugely popular.
“There’s a part of you that thinks, ‘what if’ about rugby,” says Clark, “but it is what it is. Sport’s a big part of this university, though academic standards are very high, obviously. We may have 50,000 people chasing 4,000 places, for instance, and it may be the best public university in the world.”
After chatting with Clark, the extraordinarily helpful UC Berkeley press officer brings your columnist over to watch the college gridiron team practice — on the rugby field, as a matter of fact — in a setting straight out of Hollywood.
The sun is shining, the astroturf is gleaming, the football team are running drills to the bark of the coaches: it’s Friday Night Lights but without the angst.
Watching the training session from a few feet away, you’re struck by a number of things.
Up close the sheer speed the quarterbacks can put on the ball is extraordinary — even the long, swooping passes which look like they’re travelling almost in slow motion when you watch on television arrive in a hurry, whizzing into the receiver’s hands with a slap audible 50 yards away.
In the session, the quarterbacks must also wear green bibs over their tops: the thinking is that if a 300lb defender comes pounding past, intent on burying an opponent, the green bib is an instant visual warning not to put in a full-force tackle on a player who, while crucial to the team’s success, may not have the physical presence to get up and walk away after colliding with someone weighing over 20 stone.
Quite apart from the green bibs, the quarterbacks might have been identified in other ways: even those with no interest in American sport will recognise the status of the high school’s star quarterback, and the boys who are recruited by top colleges are among the most accomplished athletes in their age group. That means confidence, and the young men spiralling passes all over the field last weekend in California looked the embodiment of self-belief.
The trouble for Jack Clark and co is that such confidence won’t be tested with a drop-goal attempt to win a game in its dying minutes.
A century ago, maybe, but not now.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
