California was once a rugby powerhouse. After a troubling series of deaths in American football — 18 high school and college players in 1905 alone — Stanford, UC Berkeley, and several other California campuses renounced the sport in favor of the English import: rugby.

Berkeley’s president, Benjamin Wheeler, urged California’s high schools to join the transition, and many did. 

Football lovers were incensed. “Without opportunity for defense, the American game was sentenced, executed and thrust into its grave, almost before its friends knew that it was even in danger,” the Daily Palo Alto roared.

Few campuses outside California and Nevada, however, took the transition to rugby seriously. As a result, the U.S. national rugby squad during the 1920 and 1924 Olympics was populated almost entirely by Californians. They won back-to-back golds. 

The toppling of France, 17-3, in the 1924 final, held in Paris, was a sensation. Furious French fans rained rocks and bottles onto the field and booed loudly over the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the medal ceremony. 

One correspondent likened the upset to a French baseball team beating an American pennant winner. “Their victory and their conduct under fire,” he wrote, “is the brightest entry that has been scored on all the pages of America’s international sport records.”

Still, the heyday of California rugby was short-lived. USC abandoned it after after failing to entice any other Southern California colleges to the sport. After the American entry into World War I in 1917, Stanford became a Western headquarters for student military training — and the Army preferred football.

Rugby was pretty much over. For decades, the sport was discontinued at the Olympics. Upon its return in 2016, the American team was eliminated early, but competed with a proud distinction for a sport barely played in the U.S.: defending champion. 

Read more: Stanford Magazine | ESPN

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