All Hail Rugby

Rugby is gaining wide exposure with the film Invictus, the story of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, where the spectacular success of the hometown Springboks helped bring together whites and blacks in the dicey first year of Nelson Mandela’s presidency.

Previously, the most-watched rugby action sequence in the United States was not credited to the sport itself. It occurred in a college football game-the 1982 Big Game between Cal and Stanford, when the Golden Bears returned a kickoff the length of the field by executing a series of backward passes that culminated in the toppling of a Stanford trombone player in the end zone.

“Everybody in the game of rugby gets to run with the ball and make decisions about what happens,” said Kevin Battle, director of the Santa Barbara Rugby Academy and UCSB’s rugby program. “The coaches sit in the stands, and the captains run the game on the field. There are no timeouts. It has the physicality of football and the fluidity, or whatever you want to call it-the music, the poetry-of basketball or soccer.”