Pros vs Joes — Stateside rugby competing on an uneven pitch

JACK CLARK sits back in his chair at the University of California, Berkeley, and fields your question about rugby’s place in America with ease.

Former national team coach, now Berkeley coach, rugby lifer, Clark puts the sport in context.

“On this campus rugby is our oldest sport. We’ve been playing the game since 1882, and our rugby team was the first school team to play an outside opponent. We slowly morphed into American football – a young country, looking to play its own sports – so rugby became our second sport, and we still play it, 130 years on.

“It’s an intercollegiate sport and we’ve had some success – we had seven players on the US World Cup team, which is significant, and a coach, so we provided eight members of the squad. We’ve won our share of national championships, too.”

Colleges recruit aggressively and competitively for basketball and American football, but that’s not as much of an issue in rugby.

“We’re getting more and more high schools to play, so that’s putting more university-capable players into the system, but there aren’t really recruitment battles. We’re a non-scholarship programme, they don’t get bursaries and they pay their own fees.

“And it’s a difficult school to get into – maybe the finest public school (college) in the world, and we’ll have 50,000 highly qualified applicants for about 4,000 places, but if you’re a good rugby player that can help.

“But we don’t have the significant recruiting wars you have in our own sports. The pool of players is growing, which helps us, and which helps our competitors.”

Clark is realistic about rugby’s place within the world-famous university: “I don’t think the academic administration spend much time thinking about the added cachet brought to the university by the global sports that we play.

“We do well in Olympic sports, not just (American) football, basketball and so on.

“There have been Olympic games when the university has won more gold medals than many countries, and not just for America, whether those are Croatian rowers, swimmers from all over the world and so on.”

The recent Rugby World Cup got more attention in the States than previous tournaments, says Clark, though it’s all relative.

“More so than previous World Cups because one of the major networks brought the final in, and about 20 games were available, some on pay per view, some on free to air. That was a larger platform than had been in the case, and it helps, because if your sport isn’t on TV in America it doesn’t exist.”

Mention of Ireland leads us to Eddie O’Sullivan, recently departed as US coach. Did he leave American rugby in a good place? “Mostly, I think,” says Clark. “These are hard jobs, but Eddie did a very solid job with the team. I think he would probably have liked to stay on, but I think USA Rugby just decided to go in a different direction.”

The job’s made harder, of course, by a country so large that the national squad is spread over three time zones, but Clark is refreshingly honest about that challenge.

“It’s harder, right? But it would also be pretty wrong to talk about the disadvantage of having an entire continent to draw your players from, 300 million people and then saying, ‘oh, poor us’.

“The logistics of assembling the team is hard, but we should get over that at some point. This should be about our advantages. We have more and more people playing the game, more playing at a higher level – a level directed at performance and competition rather than hearty recreation. I think that’s the level most of our rugby is played at – train Tuesdays and Thursdays, give it a lash on Sunday and have a beer afterwards.

“And that’s great but we have to have, at the high end, in high-performance culture, which is what professional rugby has done in the rest of the world.”

The lazy view, of course, is that all the US has to do is convert a few American footballers...

“There’s nothing wrong with that – attracting a crossover athlete, whether it’s a discus thrower or an American football player. But it’s very competitive here. There are some nice things that can happen to a guy playing rugby here, but there’s no money in the sport in America.

“In our professional sports, though, the money is ridiculous, it’s European soccer level, and that makes those guys mini-corporations. Athletes want a basketball or football scholarship and to have a crack at a pro career, where they may become a multi-millionaire before they ever play a minute professionally.

“You can’t blame them for that so it becomes hard to poach them. You’re talking about players who’ve tried that route, the door’s been closed, so you’re trying to convert them when they’re in their early to mid twenties, and by then it may be too late.”

Professionalism in rugby has thrown up a clear distinction, says the coach.

“It’s pros versus joes – when the game became open back in 1995 some of the mature rugby nations had pretty big war chests. They were able to throw significant money at the game. I was coaching the national team at the time and I was proud we not only stayed in touch, we maybe closed the gap a little. But that gap is very real now. You can see fitness levels continue to rise, the ability of players to maintain a tempo and skill level is remarkable, and the game is improving as a result.”

He pauses.

“Even if I think there are still a few changes in the law that could be made.”

Forget the accent, doesn’t everyone?