On Saturday night at Gaelic Park in the Bronx, New York’s first professional rugby union team played its first game in the city.
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Rugby United New York [RUNY] draws players from two senior clubs, New York Athletic Club and Old Blue, and others throughout the tri-state area. It is an associate member of Major League Rugby, a seven-team competition that will begin play across the south and west next month. RUNY will enter next year.
So for co-owners James Kennedy and John Layfield, Saturday was a test. How many in the city and its surrounds would pay $30 to watch?
Between them, Kennedy and Layfield know a thing or two about the dark arts of promotion. The former is a fast-talking Irishman who made his money in construction, the latter a WWE champion turned Fox Business analyst and rugby union evangelist. As a curtain-raiser to their game against a team from Boston, this modern-day Barnum and Bailey had the annual game between New York’s cops and firefighters. They touted it as a blast, a battle, an old-time internecine scrap. In Kennedy’s words, “Gangs of New York with a ball somewhere”.
In the event, the FDNY beat the NYPD 19-15 in a fierce but fair contest that was solemnly preceded by the Bravest and Finest’s pipe bands, a police honour guard and a minute’s silence for three firefighters killed in Iraq and Harlem in the past month: Christopher Raguso, Christopher Tripp Zanetis and Michael R Davidson. In front of piled snow and parked subway trains, the game that followed was a slice of the city.
But Kennedy’s sales pitch was not without real meaning. Come kick-off for the main game the sold-out bleachers and the enormous, u-shaped clubhouse bar were filled by members of many rugby tribes.
“We know the RU New York guys are trying to promote this on a local club level,” said Alex Gingher, a member of the gay/inclusive Gotham Knights who was sporting an impressive dent on his nose, having played three games that morning. “So if you actually look around you’ll see your teams from New York and adjacent. Everyone’s here, we’re showing up, we’re here for New York’s team and the future.”
In America, rugby is a grassroots sport: most fans own and use a pair of boots and a mouthguard. The Gotham boys were still in their kit. So were the men and women of White Plains, Lansdowne and the Village Lions, the students of Seton Hall, Potsdam and Oswego and the high-schoolers from Fordham Prep, Xavier and Play Rugby USA, an inner-city nonprofit.
“Look around,” said Gingher. “This is all people who love rugby actually coming to a stadium to watch and it’s not some international game. These are people who we know and recognise and some of the players on the RUNY team we know too, we’ve played against them. It might depend how much everyone drinks after their own games, if they make it down to watch after playing. But, yeah, early kick-off? It works.”
Up in the bleachers there was a different scene, three dads chaperoning a happy swarm of small boys and girls. A family outing of ordinary New Yorkers, curious to see a new sport? Not really. Hernán Magarinos, Sean Meehan and Thomas Fallon used to play and now their kids do too, elsewhere in the Bronx for Pelham.
‘The bar will go dry’
Kennedy and Layfield’s promotional knowhow went into the main game too. New York teams need rivals so Mystic River, a leading amateur club, were sent out to play as Boston. Perhaps inevitably they were well beaten, 50-0. The city to the north also has a strong club scene and may yet establish a presence in MLR but for now, New York is leading the way.
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RUNY are playing a short run of games. They beat the Ontario Arrows, also building for 2019, at Iona College in New Rochelle last week. A return at Mystic and a game in Canada will follow.
The enterprise is in the spirit of MLR’s founders: Houston, Austin, San Diego, Seattle, Salt Lake City, New Orleans and Glendale, Colorado. Be realistic, tie into club rugby but think big all the same. MLR has cleared one major hurdle already: all 31 games in its first season will be shown on CBS or ESPN. RUNY duly gained visibility of its own, attracting 2,000 to watch.
“We’re very happy,” Kennedy said. “The bar will go dry. And it’s the longest bar in New York.”
Really?
“It’s been said over the years. And if you write it, it’s true.”
“I told him,” said Layfield. “And I’ve been at the bar since Thursday, so that’s long.”
The two of them are a double act, Limerickian and Texan takes on a rugby archetype: never a great player (never a player at all, in Layfield’s case) yet fallen hard for the sport in all its ugly glory. Such passion will of course be tested. For one thing, no one expects to turn a profit for years. For another, MLR year two may well begin in February. Up in the Bronx at the tail end of March, snow was piled high by the field. RUNY may have to play their first competitive games out west, in warmer and drier climes.
But such concerns are for the future and there is talent to show right now. On Saturday the flanker James Denise was a wrecker of Mystic attacks while a second row of US Eagle Nate Brakeley and former Connacht pro Dave Gannon powered an overwhelming effort up front. Behind the scrum, fly-half Jack Fitzpatrick was another Irish influence, albeit one capped by Canada.
There are other Eagles: head coach Mike Tolkin took the USA to the last World Cup, scrum-half Mike Petri and centre Seamus Kelly played for him there and elsewhere. And as the sun went down on Manhattan College and the cliffs of apartment buildings that loom over Gaelic Park, a cameo by a replacement suggested how rich the local mine might be.
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Jake Feury is a stocky centre from a New Jersey rugby family with a brother, no kidding, named Blaze. Late in the game, as fans in the stands stamped their feet to keep warm and tried out chants of “RUNY, RUNY”, he blasted clear to set up the long-range try of the night.
The fan from Boston who had been yelling praise of Tom Brady fell silent. The New York supporters yelled back their ferocious approval. Some were a few drinks to the wind. In the depths of the Bronx, something seemed to be stirring.
“Marcus our scrum-half had a good story,” said Kennedy, meaning Marcus Walsh, once of the Connacht academy. “He’s doing his drills in a gym in Williamsburg and some guy comes up to him and says, ‘Is that a rugby drill?’ And Marcus says yes, it is.
“And the guy says, ‘You know there’s a new team in New York called RUNY? I’m going to go see them play.’ And Marcus says, ‘No, I haven’t heard about it.’ The guy says, ‘I played in France, I didn’t know there was rugby in New York, I’m going to go check it out.’ So Marcus says he will too.
“So people are talking about us, at least.”