RUGBY IN U.S.A.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 29, 3 February 1934, Page 7

RUGBY IN U.S.A.

IN EAST AND WEST.

"A GAME PLAYED FOR FUN/' NEW ZEALANDER'S PART. A New Zealander, P. de Q. Cabot, formerly a New. Zealand University Rugby "blue," has played his part, in tho revival of Rugby in the United States. The revival is the subject of an article in tho "Literary Digest" of January 13, which says: —

"Four years ago the undergraduates up at Cambridge and New Haven were in an uproar about the efforts that were being made under cover of the Harkness House Plan to convert their Yale and Harvard into an 'Oxford-in-America.' Harold Cooper, studying at Yale on an English Fellowship, braved, the undergraduate/ distrust of things English, and reintroduced Rugby to Yale after a lon£ lapse that had been filled with football of sorts. With admirable obstinacy and the help of Cecil Bullock, another English Fellow, Cooper established the game at Y r ale in three months' time. The next year Cooper transferred to Princeton and established the game there —a regular missionary, this Cooper. P. de Q. Cabot, a former member of the famous New Zealand All Blacks, put the game on a firm basis at Harvard, and Big Three Eugby (i.e., contests between the three greatest American universities) was no longer fiction. Playing Field in Swamp. "Those persistent Britishers turned the trick air a lone. At Yale, at a time when millions were being set aside for the erection of a gymnasium, all that Cooper asked of the Athletic Association was a field to play on, a few cast-off football shoes, and the privilege of being let alone. He got a field—in the middle of a swamp that had once been a dump heap—and a few old football shoes; but the players had to help clear the burnt brush and the broken bottles off the: field, most of them had to buy their own shoes, and all of them liad to pay their J

own expenses on trips. From that humble beginning the Yale Rugby Club continued to grow, until last year they were able to send a fifteen that included two football (Le., American football) captains—Johnny Wilbur and Bob Lassiter—to Bermuda, where they beat the British Navy fifteen.

I Other tennis were organised in "the East: the U.S. Marine in Philadelphia; the Irish Shamrocks and the French Sporting Club in New York City; and the Xew York Rugby Club, made up of old Oxford and Cambridge "Rugger blues" living in America. Imagine a group of old Yale gridiron heroes leaving their banks and the Stock Exchange an hour early to play a football game with a 'similar team of old Harvard football players just for the fun of it! Match in Canada. "La-st winter Harry Maloney, director of minor sports at Stanford, revived the game out on the Pacific Coast. Teams organised by Stanford, California, the Olympic Club, the San Francisco Blues, the Barbarians, Pasadena., and Lane Hospital were among the first member fifteens of the California Rugby Union. "Last year Stanford came through the season with only three points against them to win the California championship. This year, in co-operation with California, they sent a combination fifteen for a Christmas tour up into j Canada, where they beat the University lof British Columbia, ten to eight. Now they have arranged to take a combination Yale-Harvard-Princeton fifteen out to California for a series of games during the Easter vacations, and the Stanford Rugby Club will foot the bill for Hie trip. "Belongs Not to the Gallery." "An East-West Rugby Classic! That sounds as if Rugby might offer a determined challenge to our defence-clogged American football. But there are 110 high-salaried coaches, 110 high-powered systems, 110 alumni pressure, no undcr,graduate apathy, no tremendous gate receipts, nor any frenzied cheering sections—nothing in a Rugby game for football to fear save an hour and twenty minutes of wide-open action, a lot of | middle-aged Englishmen in short pants, and a growing lot of youug Americans with good legs, good wind, and a love of a game that belongs not to the gallery, nor to the newspapers, nor to the alumni, nor to the coaches; but something new on the playing fields of America—a game played for fun."