Mark Bingham

Mark Bingham rang his mum from United Airlines Flight 93. She was a flight attendant and insisted he sit down and not get noticed but, together with other passengers, that wasn’t going to happen. “He was six foot five, he played rugby. He was never going to sit down.”

Together with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and when man walked on the moon, it is often said that everyone can remember where they were when they heard that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center  on September 11, 2001.

Inevitably, however, some recollections are more vivid, more detailed and more intimate, because they involve the loss of a relative, a colleague, a confidant, a significant other, or a ‘partner in crime’.

Amanda Mark and Mark Bingham had been the best of friends for thirteen years. They shared in each other’s triumphs, tragedies and random nights out where the following day would be spent piecing together what happened like a pair of bumbling detectives. 

Mark became the rugby-playing hero of 9/11, one of the passengers who fought back against the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, preventing the plane from reaching its intended destination of the White House, and sacrificing their own lives as the plane crashed 20 miles from Washington D.C.

A year later, the Bingham Cup – the World Cup of gay and inclusive rugby – was established to honour his memory and it has become the world’s biggest amateur rugby tournament. 

An increasingly integral part of the Bingham Cup is Amanda, to the point where, in 2018, the event featured a tournament for lesbian and inclusive teams with the prize named the Amanda Mark Cup. Certainly, the view among the tournament organisers and the International Gay Board is that she is the future of the event going forward. 

Amanda had planned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with Mark’s friends and relatives at Shanksville, Pennsylvania close to the site where Flight 93 crashed, just as she had done on two previous occasions.

But due to the pandemic, she is in her native Sydney, unable to travel outside of Australia. Instead, she hopes to remember Bingham on 9/11 with the rugby community. “We’ve been talking with the Sydney Convicts and some of other teams here and we’ll probably do a few events to honour Mark,” she tells Rugby Journal. “I think it’s safe to say there will be a few cosmos and Jagermeisters consumed.

“We will celebrate Mark’s life, and reflect on what life could be but also what life is, and how everything can change on a dime.” 

Mark wasn’t supposed to be on Flight 93 and Amanda’s personal account of that day is uniquely poignant. “I went to work at 7.30am,” she begins. “There was a beautiful clear blue sky above Manhattan. It was everything you’d imagine New York to be as I walked past the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. It was only twenty minutes from my apartment to my office at Morgan Stanley.

“I moved to New York from Sydney in January 2001,” she continues. “I was looking for an apartment and after three or four weeks of Mark calling me every day, he said, ‘right, I’m moving to New York. We’re getting an apartment together and I’m going to open an office there’. 

“He got a registered address on Madison Avenue, which provided secretarial services and meeting rooms, and is what so many businesses do now. He was always ahead of the game.

“He kept his place in San Francisco, but he had these companion passes from his mum, Alice, who was a flight attendant with United Airlines. And so he would fly back and forth from New York to San Francisco all the time. 

“I worked a twelve-hour day for Morgan Stanley but still managed to go out until about four o’clock in the morning, when the bars closed. When they say New York’s the city that never sleeps, it does between 4am and 7am. 

“We had such a great time. Every night we would experience everything that New York had to offer. 

“My birthday is on September 9. It fell on a Sunday, so we planned a big birthday weekend. We’d been out to the US Open on Saturday night to see Venus and Serena Williams play in the women’s final. 

“But we couldn’t get tickets to the men’s final on Sunday. So, we went to Mark’s favourite bar, the Riviera Cafe in the West Village, to watch Lleyton Hewitt beat Pete Sampras.

“Mark had this disposable camera,” recalls Amanda. “He wouldn’t let me take a photo until he used up all of the film, which was at about 2am. So, I’ve got just three photos from that night because he took that camera with him on the plane. 

“We got home about 4am as usual, and I got up the next morning, went to work at 7.30am on September 10, feeling hungover. Like, really hungover.

“You play hard and you still go to work come what may,” she says. “But I went home just a bit after lunch at about one o’clock, which I’d never done before, or since, because I was so ill. I got back and sitting in my lounge on a conference call via a webcam, wearing only a business shirt, a tie and his underwear, Mark was having a meeting with his team.

 “I was like, ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on a flight to San Francisco’. He said he was also too hungover and would get the first flight back on Tuesday.  

“So, we played SSX, a snowboarding game on PlayStation. It took me like three years to beat Mark’s record score even after he passed away. 

“He stayed over at a friend’s house ten minutes from Newark Airport. So, I knew he would get on that flight the next morning.”

Amanda was at work when the attack began.  “The news ticker tape on my computer showed that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center,” she says. “We went into the conference room, turned on the television and we watched the second plane fly into the South Tower. At this point, you knew the first plane wasn’t an accident. Manhattan was under attack.

“One of the guys in the team walked in and said he’d just spoken to his cousin at the FBI, and there was a third plane out of Newark, that had been hijacked. I felt sick. 

“I threw up,” she says. “Of course, I didn’t know for sure, but I immediately thought ‘Mark is on that flight’. 

“So, I was trying to contact his mum, Alice. Earlier that year, she had given birth to triplets as a surrogate for her brother, Vaughan. And I knew she had been at his place helping Vaughan, and his wife Kathy, look after the triplets. They also had two older girls. One of them Alice had also given birth to as a surrogate. 

“I had Vaughan’s work number but not his home number.

“I got back home, and got through to the Morgan Stanley switchboard, who put a trunk call through to their San Francisco office, who then transferred me to Vaughan’s office and I was trying to convince his receptionist to give me his home number but she wasn’t going to do that. Then I said, ‘have you been watching the television? I know that Mark is on one of those flights’.

“I explained that I needed to speak to Alice, I knew she was at Vaughan’s place looking after the triplets. Eventually, she gave me the number.” 

She finally got through to Alice. “I said ‘I think Mark’s on one of these hijacked planes’. And she said to me, ‘yes, he is’. She told me that he’d called her from the flight. There was a group of them that were in first class and were going to do something about it. 

“Alice was a flight attendant and she told him he should sit down and not draw attention to himself. 

“But, I mean, he was six foot five, he played rugby. He was never going to sit down. 

“When the flight went down, we knew there would be no survivors. The plane had flipped over and crashed. 

“We later found out that they breached the cockpit and there was a fight and American voices could be heard trying to retake control of the plane. But I believe it was too late at that point. 

“That’s how we found out Mark was on Flight 93.”

It was rugby that first brought Amanda and Mark together back in 1988. Amanda’s school was hosting a rugby tournament to celebrate Australia’s bi-centenary and teams from around the world were invited to play, including one from America, that featured Mark. He would go on to be part of the University of California team that won two national championships in the early 90s.

For the trip to Oz, he stayed with one of Amanda’s good friends, Kathy Farnham. 

“It was basically four girls studying for our trial HSCs ,” explains Amanda. “But we ended up going out with the American team. We’d be on the train with 22 of them going into The Cross. Many of them were eighteen at the time, and we were seventeen, but back in the day, there wasn’t really a lot of checking of ID at bars when you went out.

“Nobody had high expectations of the US team but they played well. I became friends with Mark and the following year he came back to Australia.”

As Bingham began to open up about his sexuality, he also retreated from playing rugby, concerned that he might be targeted by opposition players. Then, by chance, he stumbled across San Francisco Fog, a gay rugby team, and two worlds collided.

He wanted to establish a similar club in New York but sadly never got to see or play for the Gothams Knights. “He really was on a path with that,” says Amanda. “You know, he’d be so pissed off that the Bingham Cup goes on without him!”

But Bingham’s story and the tournament that bears his name, has encouraged hundreds, if not thousands of people from the LGBT+ community to play rugby. A common thread in gay and lesbian inclusive teams is that they feature players who only took up the game as adults, joining clubs where it didn’t matter that you had only watched rugby on TV.

“The fact that he has been able to change so many opinions and, you know, be that hero to that little kid who isn’t going to play sport because they don’t want to be teased or bullied, or to the one person that comes out to their family and doesn’t live in fear of who they are or didn’t commit suicide: you know those things are just extraordinary,” she says. 

“I’ve seen the impact, and I’ve heard the stories. They are inspiring and life-changing, and that’s his legacy.”

This year - and next year in Ottawa - the Sydney Convicts and the LGBT+ community will also celebrate the life of Mark’s mum, Alice Hoagland, who became a mother figure to so many gay rugby players and was a tireless campaigner for improving passenger safety on aeroplanes. 

Alice passed away on December 22, 2020. If Amanda was the sister Mark never had, one could also say she was like a daughter to Alice. “Alice was his whole life,” says Amanda. “She had raised him to be fearless because she was fearless.

“We were riding down the freeway, on our way from Los Gatos to LA one time and the car in front of us burst into flames. Within moments, she pulled over, leapt out of the car, pulled out the fire extinguisher, and put out the fire, before you even had time to think about it. That’s just what she was like. 

“She became this LGBT+ heroine,” continues Amanda. “For a lot of young people who didn’t have a good experience with their own families, they adopted her as their mum. 

“The stories they would tell her about coming out, and sometimes the heartbreak that came with it, were always met with a kind word.

“We would go to the Bingham Cup with Alice and look after her, particularly when she wasn’t well,” continues Amanda. “For the last few years, she had Addison’s disease and she needed a hip replacement. And so when the Bingham Cup was in Sydney in 2014, she couldn’t walk very far. 

“We were managing her so that she could magically appear at every event, and then be whisked away, so she could eat, sleep and recover.” 

Even though her health was failing, Amanda says that Alice still met around 1,500 of the 1,800 rugby players representing inclusive teams around the world who turned up for the Bingham Cup in Amsterdam three years ago.

And Alice would have been at the scheduled 2020 tournament in Ottawa, had it not been for Covid-19. 

The Bingham Cup gets bigger with each tournament. Just six teams took part at the inaugural cup when it was held in San Francisco. Fast forward to 2018, and 85 teams were involved, which was also the first time a separate tournament was held for lesbian and inclusive rugby teams. “Alice was thrilled, it wasn’t just a gay rugby event, it had become more inclusive,” says Amanda. 

But the organisers still had to come up with a name for the trophy. “Yeah, that was quite extraordinary. They surprised me on the night and asked if I would award the trophy for the women’s tournament. And, of course, I was happy to do that. 

“And then they said ‘you know, it’s actually called the Amanda Mark Cup’. I was totally surprised, shocked,” she admits. “I think I said something like ‘what the fuck?’ and it was caught on video!

“But it’s the World Cup of lesbian rugby union. And I’m just so humbled
and honoured by it.”

The Bingham Cup has also become an important event for each host city. It attracted 3,500 players and officials in 2018 who simply want to play rugby in the day and party at night. Amanda wants to see the tournament reach out to teams that would otherwise be put off from bidding to be a host city because of the upfront costs required to secure pitches, hotels and bars. Those years of her working in finance are being put to use in another way.

“It’s a big task to fund a tournament,” she says. “And a lot of what prohibits a team from bidding is the cost. So, what we are looking to do is set  up this fund, and that would be the seed money. 

“It could be used by the successful team to secure the venues and the hotels and so on. And then once all the revenue comes in from the tournament, they would pay back the seed money. 

“It leads into this perpetual existence to make it more inclusive so that teams don’t have to be well-funded to be able to put in a bid to host the Bingham Cup because it moves around every two years. 

“Alice really kept Mark’s spirit alive,” says Amanda. “She was so proud of him, and not that she wanted to be a spokesperson, but that’s where she ended up and she did it ever so gracefully. And she was all about that inclusion. 

“So, I just think if we could create a legacy for Alice with this fundraising programme, it would just mean that the Bingham Cup would reach more places and be more inclusive. That’s my dream for Mark and Alice.”

But while she contemplates the future of the Bingham Cup, right now the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is bound to be uppermost in her thoughts.

“A couple of things have stayed with me since September 11, particularly because Mark lived these values. 

“If the phone rings, I always pick it up if I can because you never know, it could be the last time you speak to somebody. I mean, some people were called by their loved ones from the plane or from the World Trade Center, and they didn’t pick up. They were left a voice message, and they’re devastated. 

“A lot of my colleagues in New York also lost family or friends that day. I’ve watched the people that had harsh words with another person, and never saw them again, and they just can’t get over it. I try never to leave a situation angry, because it could be the last time. And I’ve been doing that for the last nearly twenty years.” 

In the same year as 9/11, Mark wrote a letter to a group of friends and rugby players to set out his vision for starting a new team that would eventually become the Gotham Knights.

He believed they should stand for something more than just a bunch of gay guys playing rugby and downing a few Jagers after the match. They should set an example and become a team that others would want to emulate.

“We need to work harder,” he wrote. “We need to get better. We have the chance to be role models for other gay folks who wanted to play sports, but never felt good enough or strong enough. More importantly, we have the chance to show the other teams in the league that we are as good as they are. Good rugby players. Good partiers. Good sports. Good men. 

“Gay men weren’t always wallflowers waiting on the sideline. We have the opportunity to let these other athletes know that gay men were around all along - on their little league teams, in their classes, being their friends.

“This is a great opportunity to change a lot of people’s minds, and to reach a group that might never have had to know or hear about gay people. Let’s go make some new friends ... and win a few games. Congratulations, my brothers in rugby.”    

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by Amanda Mark & Kevin Scott, Shutterstock, Alamy and David Cameron-Donnachie

This extract was taken from issue 15 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

The Bingham Cup has created a fund in Alice Hoagland’s memory - dedicated to ensuring the continued growth and success of the Bingham Cup. To find out more visit binghamcup.com