Let's face it, even as the world continued to shrink and ESPN continued to expand, most Americans still understood less about rugby than they did about the Bhagavad Gita.
Sure, the game's collared shirts were cool and a few terms from its vocabulary - scrum, halfback, forward pass - had seeped into ours.
But for the most part, rugby remained submerged in that vast pool of international sports that couldn't capture our attention with the help of a team of Navy SEALs.
"The question has always been 'Why is rugby - which is played at thousands of high schools and universities, played by lots of CEOs, [and is] the fourth- or fifth-biggest sport worldwide - not even a top 10 or top 15 sport here?' " said Dan Lyle, one of American rugby's greatest stars.
Now, thanks to a convergence of developments that include the popularity of a condensed version called Rugby Sevens, its renewed Olympic status, its appeal to content-hungry TV programmers, and its links to football, America's historic neglect of the sport devised 188 years ago in the English midlands may at last be coming to an end.
"Every American is familiar with the terms rugby and scrum, but they've never had a chance to expose themselves to the sport," said Donal Walsh, a longtime player and coach with the Blackthorn Rugby Club of Elkins Park. "But now, with Sevens, they're getting a quick version of how to understand the game, and they're getting hooked right away."
On June 4 and 5 at Chester's PPL Park, 16 men's and eight women's teams will compete in the 2011 USA Sevens Collegiate Rugby Championships, a two-day event that, for a second straight year, will be televised by NBC.
Read the rest of the article by Inquirer Staff Writer Frank Fitzpatrick and posted on Philly dot COM »