PEOPLE OFTEN do not appreciate just how deep rugby&rsquo;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 &ndash; especially at the Ivy League universities &ndash; 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 &ldquo;ruggers&rdquo;. Bill Clinton played while at Oxford, George W Bush was an enthusiastic player at Yale, and Ted Kennedy was Harvard&rsquo;s star man in the 1950s. Indeed, so many prominent US politicos &ndash; 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 &ndash; are former egg-chasers that The Guardian newspaper jokingly nicknamed America&rsquo;s ruggers &ldquo;the illuminati&rdquo;. Nor are their ranks restricted to Capitol Hill. Prominent American ruggers include billionaire industrialists the Koch brothers, singer Kris Kristofferson, actor Dwayne &lsquo;The Rock&rsquo; Johnson, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and HR McMaster, the three-star general who was Donald Trump&rsquo;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 ferociously competitive. Finally, however, the powerhouse of world sport appears to be getting its act together when it comes to rugby, with several factors playing their part. The professionalisation of rugby has changed attitudes towards the game, while American Football&rsquo;s concussion issue means that many parents are now open to alternatives. The enforcement of the Title IX law also means that as much money must be spent by schools and colleges on sport for women as for men, contributing to a huge spike in the number of women ruggers (with more than 20,000, America has comfortably the highest number of any country). But by far the biggest contributor has been the 2009 decision to make rugby (or at least its abbreviated version) an Olympic sport, a decision which simultaneously unlocked funds in a country obsessed by the Games while also giving rugby huge exposure. Since that decision the explosion in numbers playing the game has been remarkable, with an increase in participation of 350 per cent in the four years from 2010-2014 alone, followed by another 18.7 per cent increase in participation between 2016-2017, making it the fastest growing sport in the US. The stats (and boy do the American like stats) are remarkable: World Rugby say that there are now one million players in the US, a Neilsen study says that 33 million Americans are &ldquo;interested or very interested&rdquo; in the sport, while the Las Vegas Sevens each February now attracts more than 60,000 fans. At the highest level the Americans finished second in the World Rugby Sevens Series to qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, while in the last year the US Eagles have beaten Romania, Samoa and Scotland. Once eclipsed by Canada, since 2013 when they were beaten by the Canucks for the seventh time in succession, they have now beaten their neighbours in nine out of the last 10 times (they drew the 10th). The latest &ndash; and surely most significant &ndash; step forward is the launch of a fully professional league, Major League Rugby (MLR), which also includes one Canadian team in Toronto Arrows. This has been tried before, with the PRO Rugby competition &ndash; which recruited Kiwis like Mils Muliania, Orene Ai&rsquo;i, Timana Tahu and Jamie Mackintosh - playing just one season in 2016 season before being wound up through lack of funds. This time, though, it seems as if MLR is here to stay. Launched in 2018 with seven teams who played between January and June, this year there were nine teams, and in 2020 a further three teams will join to make a total of 12 teams, who will play home and away matches in two six-team conferences before coming together for semis and a final. In 2021, Dallas and another franchise in the West will also come on board. The league is unique among pro sports in the USA in that it had a three-year national television deal in place, with CBS, before the league began, while all of the teams have also sold rights locally. &ldquo;Unlike lacrosse and hockey, rugby is really telegenic, and it has that mix of physicality and velocity that you get in the NFL and which appeals to Americans,&rdquo; says MLR commissioner Dean Howes. &ldquo;Rugby is growing in popularity here, and Americans love stats, which rugby gives you in abundance &ndash; yards carried, tackles made and missed, rucks hit, all of that.&rdquo; It may not be sexy, but financial governance will be the key to whether or not MLR succeeds where PRO Rugby failed. On that front the portents are promising. Each team has a salary cap of $1m, and a limit of 10 foreigners in their squad (of which five can play at any one time). Some big names are already plying their trade Stateside &ndash; Steffon Armitage is joining the San Diego Legion and Samu Manoa is at the Seattle Seahawks, while Mathieu Bastareaud and Ben Foden are both at Rugby United New York &ndash; but with crowds averaging 2,300 (ranging from a sold-out 3,750 for Seattle Seawolves to barely 1,000 for Austin Elite, with the final drawing 6,000) baby steps are still the order of the day. However, the potential for growth is eliciting interest from around the rugby world. The French Federation is said to be negotiating a partnership with MLR and individual investors have already waded in. The Scottish Rugby Union has invested in new franchise Old Glory Washington DC, while Stade Francais&rsquo; Pierre Arnald has invested $1m in RUNY, and Canterbury/ Crusaders are understood to have invested in Seattle. Crucially, MLR is run as a member organisation, where each of the teams have a slice of the central pie. &ldquo;That means that everybody has a vested interest in the team down the road being successful,&rdquo; said Howes. &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s also about financial discipline when it comes to salaries, and about choosing the right partners so that we can incubate the sport in America and allow it to be financially sustainable.&rdquo; Howes talks about the day when the Eagles become properly competitive at the top level, and about how sevens and the Olympics are fast-tracking the appeal of rugby in the US. But he is also keenly aware that the MLR&rsquo;s dream scenario is to unearth a star who can win American hearts and minds. When Psalm Wooching, a Hawaiian of Samoan descent who excelled for the University of Washington Huskies, turned down several NFL teams to play rugby for the San Diego Legion, it attracted endless column inches. So, too, when Nate Ebner, who had won three Super Bowls with the New England Patriots, took a sabbatical from the NFL to represent the US at the 2016 Olympics in Rio to honour his murdered father Jeff, a lifelong rugby player. Ebner has yet to decide whether he will play at the Olympics next year, but says that: &ldquo;Rugby has the hearts of Americans, no doubt. The excitement and the feedback that I got from people watching in Rio, that have never watched rugby, that watched simply because they heard my story with the Patriots and they were watching the Olympics, it has been amazing.&rdquo;That need for a role model is concentrating minds in the MLR and American rugby more generally. &ldquo;Rugby hasn&rsquo;t got the legacy that they have in New Zealand or England, so they haven&rsquo;t got the history whereby every young player wants to be an All Black or play for England,&rdquo; says Mike Friday, who coached the USA Sevens men&rsquo;s team to second place in the World Rugby Sevens Series this year. &ldquo;They want to be Tom Brady.&rdquo; But keeping hold of any stars unearthed could be tricky, with talent-hungry European clubs already viewing the MLR as a potential feeder league and already whisking away three of MLR&rsquo;s best players. Kiwi-born Paul Lasike, who represented NFL teams Arizona Cardinals and Chicago Bears before going on to excel with the Utah Warriors, was poached by Harlequins, Pro14 finalists Glasgow Warriors enticed another Utah Warrior, David Tameilau, to Scotland, while London Irish signed collegiate superstar Bryce Campbell from Glendale. Ultimately, though, the MLR has learned from the mistakes of Pro Rugby and the North America Soccer League. Finances are on a tight rein, the teams are encouraged to play an attacking brand of rugby. The majority of games this season were commendably close, and the two finals &ndash; both won at the death by Seattle &ndash; were epically entertaining encounters. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re selling something we think America will want to buy,&rdquo; said Howes. &ldquo;This is a great game, and it&rsquo;s up to us to give as many American sports fans as possible the chance to find that out. If we do that, MLR will succeed.&rdquo;

The Sleeping Giant Awakes

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