Ruggers Recall Historic Win

The 1984 Harvard Rugby Football Club was so busy raising the money to compete that its players did not see their own victory coming.

They scrambled, they begged, and they even called on rugby alumnus Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56 to raise the $10,000 for plane ticket to California. They pleaded with the Undergraduate Council for additional funds, but to no avail. The Harvard Athletic Department even refused to subsidize the ruggers—after all, they played a mere club sport.

But under the tutelage of graduate student Martyn E. Kingston, the “fun-loving” bunch of ex-varsity athletes, many hailing from high school football and soccer careers, not only dominated their Northeastern, Eastern, and Ivy competition, but also clobbered their national competition in the National Rugby Championship game against the University of Colorado in the spring of 1984—an accomplishment that has never been repeated.

“The whole run to the national championships not only caught the university by surprise, it caught us by surprise...All of a sudden, we didn’t have a budget,” said George L. Askew ’85, who was a junior on the winning team. “We weren’t the most popular—that’s an understatement.”

Having never won more than a Northeastern Championship title, Harvard Rugby Football Club members never dreamed that they would have such good luck during that historic spring season.

Looking back, the victory makes more sense. They had Coach Kingston, a man “who appeared to have started to play in rugby when he was in the womb,” according to rugger Giles A. Birch ’85.

According to Kingston, coaching a rugby team was a natural extension of his love for the game.

“In summer of 1981, I was wandering down their athletic facility and bumped into a group of guys who were rugby players,” Kingston recalls. “That was the beginning of it.”

Under Kingston’s leadership, their technical skill level peaked, according to Birch. In his decade of coaching at Harvard, Kingston said that this team was composed of the fittest set of athletes he had ever seen.

During virtually every season between 1982 and 1984, the team welcomed two or three “very good” athletes from other sports, which according to Kingston allowed the team to build momentum.

Being a club sport worked in the team’s favor in other ways. They subscribed to a “work hard, play hard” philosophy, and were known for having a keg on the sidelines during games, which would not have been allowed under varsity regulations.

Because they lacked the administrative funds that only varsity sports teams enjoyed, the HRFC depended on creative housing solutions for away games.

“We couldn’t afford hotels,” said Keith W. Cooper ’83, president of the team in 1983 and the current president of the Harvard rugby alumni association. “We’d generally try to find a girl sorority and try to make friends.”

When asked to recount tales from their college years, alumni were close-mouthed about their youthful antics, replying their stories were too boozy for publication.

“Most of our stories aren’t fit for print,” Askew said.

But they knew when to give up sorority sisters for the practice field.

“We trained hard,” Birch said. “We may not have been the fastest team or the strongest team, but we were smart. And we knew how to play and put the ball where we wanted it to go.”

But they did have a few technical hurdles to overcome. “I didn’t even know the rules for the first year that I played,” Cooper admitted.

Out of all the players on the winning team, Kingston estimates that two or three had played the game before arriving at Harvard. He contrasts this with the current powerhouse rugby teams, who field teams comprised mainly seasoned rugby champs that practiced in multimillion-dollar facilities.

The game itself has also evolved since 1984.

“It was more of a gutsy and a hard hitting game versus the flowing and more technical game today,” Cooper said. “The bigger, tougher teams tended to win back then. That’s the type of team that Harvard had in ’83 and ’84.”

The team has come a long way since their championship scramble for travel funds, which was eventually pieced together by loans from unnamed Harvard officials, according to a 1984 Crimson article. Now, alumni have raised “hundreds of thousands,” according to Cooper, which means that the ruggers no longer have to depend on wooing sorority girls for housing.

They also came close to replicating their 1984 win in 2007, when the team made it as far as the National Championships.

Twenty-five years later, Askew still marvels at what unlikely champions they were.

“We were the upstarts from Harvard who really didn’t belong there,” Askew said. “It’s almost as if we stumbled into this thing. We didn’t quite realize how good we were until the final whistle blew and we were national champions.”

—Staff writer Lingbo Li can be reached at lingboli@fas.harvard.edu

—Staff writer Marianna N. Tishchenko can be reached at mtishch@fas.harvard.edu.