USA 1991

At a Rugby World Cup where the Russians tried to fund themselves by selling contraband, the French barely made it at all, and England and New Zealand were favourites, a USA team featuring the ‘locks from hell’, the ‘mother of rugby’, a stunt woman hand-picked by Burt Reynolds, and coached by a Welsh PE teacher, pulled off one of the sport’s greatest shocks.

In 2016, a reunion party was held in Atlanta to mark 25 years since the USA won the first Women’s Rugby World Cup. The occasion provided the moment for coach Kevin O’Brien to give a speech that revealed one remarkable incident from that tournament he had never previously told in public or shared with his players.

It occurred in the toilets at a reception held after USA and England had won their respective semi-finals and were due to meet in the final at Cardiff Arms Park. “I don’t make a point of talking to strange men in toilets,” jokes Kevin, speaking from his home in Vermont, “but one of the English coaches had just walked in, so I congratulated him on beating France. But the thing is, I’m from Cardiff, I’ve got a Welsh accent and he didn’t know who I was or that I was representing the USA.

“He said to me, ‘yeah, it was a good game and, you know, it’ll be tough on Sunday but we’ll have it’.”

Kevin decided to play it straight. “I said ‘Oh, yeah? That’s good’. But he went on to say, ‘well, yes, the US team is pretty good, but the thing is they haven’t got it upstairs.’ 

“So, I replied ‘ah, okay’. And left without saying another word. 

“Back then, USA Rugby really wanted nothing to do with us or the tournament, but they did send me four or five ties to give to the opposition after the game. We beat England 19-6. There was an event following the final, we made a little speech and then I came face to face with that coach. As I handed him his tie, he gave me this look, like, ‘just don’t do it, don’t say an effing word!’”

Some coaches may have thought about that moment in the gents and decided that if England thought the USA were physically tough but lacked the necessary nous, then that would be the team talk for the final all sorted.

So, why did Kevin choose to keep his counsel? “We always knew if we beat New Zealand in the semi we would be good enough to win the final,” he explains. “Once we’d done that, I didn’t see anything to be gained from telling that story. The players didn’t need any extra motivation.”

The USA lock that day, Tara Flanagan, picks up the story, “I thought it was hilarious. If there was one thing you could say about us it’s that we were mentally tough. Yeah, he didn’t tell us at the time and it was the right thing to do. We didn’t want anything that could distract us from our mission. 

“But I just love that story,” she continues, “because a little bit of what I think we suffered was disrespect. To some extent that still exists even now. There’s a story on the World Rugby website that was put out two years ago where they interviewed a bunch of England players about the final in 1991 and the headline said, ‘We were better than them but they were relentless’.” 

Even after that semi-final victory over New Zealand, Tara was left in no doubt about who were favourites. Or, to take a line from late, great darts commentator Sid Waddell, USA weren’t so much underdogs, they were underpuppies.

This was America, after all: a country that didn’t do rugby, playing the mighty England in the UK. 

Tara and team-mate Tam Breckenridge had gone for a stroll through Cardiff the day before the final. “We walked into a Ladbrokes and we asked about the odds for America to beat England,” explains Tara. “We were quoted 13-1. So, me and Tam looked at each other and we went, ‘huh?’ And then we stepped outside and Tam said, ‘how much have you got in your pocket?’ We probably had about £100. 

“But you can’t bet on a game you’re playing in. It’s unethical. So, we thought, ‘well, we’ll keep it to ourselves’.”

To give that some context, Italy were 14-1 to beat Wales in Cardiff back in March and we all know what happened next.

However, had the players mentioned this to Kevin he wouldn’t have thought twice about getting a bet on, and there wasn’t a rule as such to say he couldn’t. “I found out about it just before the game kicked off through a mate of mine, Sean Ellery, who was a bookie,” says Kevin. “I worked with him on the docks and played rugby with him.

“And he said ‘do you know what the betting is in London?’ When he told me the odds. I said, ‘You’re joking, right?’ Well, Jesus Christ, I’d have raised £1,000 because I was convinced we were gonna win. 

“I said to him, I wish I’d known. That would have covered at least half of the cost of the trip for the whole squad!” 

The final was held on April 14, 1991. England went into a 6-0 lead. They were tight, disciplined and were the better team for much of the first half. But the moment that the Eagles put points on the board through a penalty, all the momentum swung America’s way, and they scored three tries – two from Claire Goodwin and one from Patty Connell.

When the team returned home as champions, their success initially failed to generate so much as a flicker of interest outside of the sport. 

Kevin did just one interview with the local paper, which he has kept to this day. 

Then, in 1992, the team was invited to the White House, along with the USA soccer team that won the first FIFA Women’s World Cup in November 1991, for an event to celebrate Women in Sport.

For Kevin, it was a slightly surreal but unforgettable experience. “I always remember meeting (First Lady) Mrs Bush, and she was terrific. She said congratulations on winning the World Cup and then she asked me, ‘where do you train in winter?’, I said, ‘pardon?’.

“She said, ‘Do you go to Bermuda?’.

“She didn’t know we were an amateur sport. But to get that recognition, not just for the women who played in 1991, but for the sport of women’s rugby, helped enormously with getting more interest from USA Rugby.” 

The significance of those USA successes went far beyond winning trophies.

The White House event took place twenty years after the introduction of a civil rights law known as Title IX, perhaps the single most significant moment for women’s sport in America. Title IX will be fifty years old on June 23.

It was an addition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Title IX says that any institution that receives federal monies, those monies must be equally distributed by gender,” explains Tara. “So, you can’t have nine boys’ sports teams at a school but only one netball team for girls. It has to be equitable. There has to be an equal division of the assets and funds because universities, for example, would have these big men’s sports programmes, and women would get nothing.” 

Suddenly, girls could play more sports at school, and women could get sports scholarships to universities.

Football, or soccer, would be the prime beneficiary. 

In 1972, only 700 girls were playing football in American high schools (aged fourteen to seventeen or eighteen). By 1997, that figure stood at 210,000. No, that’s not a typo. The team that won the 1991 FIFA Women’s World Cup, said Title IX was the foundation for that success.

While rugby wasn’t anywhere near as popular as soccer, basketball, volleyball or lacrosse, it still led to thousands of women taking up the game. “For someone like me, born in 1963, I grew up going to my brother’s baseball games,” says Tara. “Even though I was the better athlete, I wasn’t allowed to play sport. Title IX was a real game-changer.” 

According to Kevin, women playing rugby was as much about freedom of expression as it was about playing the game. “Across so many other sports, the rules were different for women. Anything that included physical involvement was frowned upon. But rugby was a chance for everybody, no matter who they were, to play the way the men did.

“One of the things I’m most proud of was being involved in the early stages of the women’s game in America.”

And, Tara says, the players wanted to make the most of this new-found freedom. “We were women who essentially brought the game of rugby up through our country, at our universities, creating our own teams, reading Jim Greenwood books, or getting up at four in the morning to go to a pub to watch the Five Nations, to learn about the game. 

“Women historically in America, were not given opportunities until Title IX said you must give women opportunities. So, we came from the background of we’re going to line the field, we’ll find referees that know the game, or we’ll teach the referees, and we’re going to find coaches. We will make it happen.”

Or, as Kevin puts it, “they would have you figured out in no time at all if you weren’t a good coach.”

“I went to university on an athletic scholarship in California to play basketball,” says Tara. “I had a girlfriend in my junior senior year who was Irish. She was a few years older than me, and she played rugby. So, when I started hanging out with her, I would go to her rugby games in Santa Monica and I thought, ‘Dear God, these women are crazy!’ 

“And they would sort of suss me up on the sidelines because I’d be wearing my athletic garb and they would always be asking would I want to play? I’m a big six feet tall, glass of milk. And I was like, ‘No, I can’t’. I was on an athletic scholarship and your scholarship is a contract, which forbids you from playing other things. 

“By the time I graduated and finished my scholarship, I didn’t have that as an excuse any longer. And one day they were short a player. Oh my gosh, first of all, I realised it’s pretty hard to foul out of this game and I was constantly getting into trouble for fouls in basketball. I just really like the physicality of it.”

Players were also forging successful post-graduate careers in fields such as law or medicine or sports science. And then there was Candi Orsini.

Candi went to Florida State University (FSU) and had planned to take up volleyball before discovering the delights of the rugby club. After that, she knew whatever career path she took, her earnings would be used to fund her rugby.

In 1981, a mutual friend introduced her to Burt Reynolds in Atlanta, where he was shooting the crime thriller, Sharky’s Machine. Reynolds had once been a running back for FSU’s American Football team and he invited Candi on set, where she got talking to the stunt guys. 

She would go on to become a Hollywood stunt woman and work on dozens of action movies, including Die Hard with a Vengeance, Eraser, Body Snatchers, Super Mario Bros, and, erm, Porky’s Revenge, a sex comedy sequel that was, shall we say, very much of its time.

When asked whether her profession made her a better player, Candi said, “Learning how to relax your body when you get hit [in rugby] comes in handy when you flop over the hood of a car”.

Their coach, by contrast, was born into a family of rugby players. In his 20s, Kevin went into teaching, specialising in PE and History at St Mary’s, Twickenham, one of the best colleges in the country for sports. The rugby team was good enough to include internationals like Irish fly-half John Moroney.

“I remember watching him play for Ireland on a black and white TV, at the Waldegrave Arms. He played against England, kicked a couple of goals, and then he flew back and played for the college the next day.”

Kevin then spent a year with relatives in South Africa, followed by hitchhiking around New Zealand to see the Lions tour of 1977.

Meanwhile, his brother had just been on tour in Boston with his club, Glamorgan Wanderers, and he wanted to prolong his stay. Kevin joined him and they spent a year with Beacon Hill and then Mystic River rugby clubs – the latter was the first team invited to play rugby in the old Soviet Union.

Then he was approached by KO, aka Karen Onufry, to coach Beantown in Boston, one of the best women’s teams in the US. 

Karen was known as the woman who played rugby with the men. ‘The Mother of Rugby’, as Kevin calls her, and what becomes evident from the interview is the reverence he has for Karen.

Even so, his immediate response was ‘women don’t play rugby’.

It took him just one session with Beantown to retract that statement. Then he was approached to become the national team coach but still had to juggle coaching with teaching commitments in Boston. And shortly before the World Cup started, Kevin became a father.

The tournament in Wales was wonderfully chaotic. The fact it went ahead was a minor miracle and a triumph of persistence for four ladies from Richmond Women who not only created but organised the tournament.

The IRB chose not to recognise the World Cup as an official event, the French team only confirmed their participation at the eleventh hour, and the Russians turned up penniless. The plan was to pay its way by selling vodka, caviar and Russian dolls in Cardiff and they arrived with 5ft-high crates of contraband.

When customs officers turned up at the South Glamorgan Institute to seize the goods, they couldn’t break the language barrier and gave up their line of enquiry.

The USA’s preparation wasn’t exactly conventional. With work and personal commitments, Kevin didn’t travel with the team to Cardiff and asked a couple of his cousins to take the first training sessions along with his co-coach Chris Leach.

“Chris and I were a team,” says Kevin. “I was only ‘head coach’ because one of us had to take that title. When I spoke to one of my cousins, Carl French, I asked how it went and said ‘Kev, you’ve got nothing to teach them’.”

There wasn’t a pre-World Cup training camp for the players. They were selected in January and convened for the first time as a team three months later in Cardiff. Tara and Tam created a ‘Know Your Team-mates’ handbook because most of the squad members hardly knew each other.

The two locks also created a nickname, which afforded them instant notoriety, especially among the media. “Tam also played basketball at UCLA,” explains Tara. “We would travel around the country and go to tournaments and people would just look at us and go ‘where are you from?’

“And one time one of us said, ‘we’re from hell’. It was a joke. We’re very nice people, but we want to be your worst nightmare on the rugby field. So, the ‘Locks from Hell’ just kinda stuck.”

For the USA’s first game against the Netherlands at Pontypool, the teams had to contend with a biblical storm.

Flanker Cathy Seabaugh apparently became so disorientated that she tried to join a scrum facing the wrong direction.

Californians like Tara and Tam would hardly see any rain, let alone play in conditions so unrelentingly cold and wet. Kevin feared that some may suffer from hypothermia. “I didn’t play,” says Tara. “I was a reserve, but I was set to go on about four times for one player. This was the old days of rugby, where the coach didn’t come down onto the field. But the gal who I was supposed to go on for was either concussed or hypothermic and she wasn’t getting the message. 

“They were playing in standing water by the end. I mean, if you were buried in the bottom of a ruck, you could probably have drowned. 

“You can’t exactly play a dynamic passing game and that would be to our disadvantage during the game. 

“We won 7-0,” she sums up. “However, I think it caused people to underestimate us even more because they thought, ‘Oh, they’re not that good.’” 

Tara finally got her first cap against Russia as Kevin picked a different XV to ensure he would see every player in action. As a woman with Ukrainian grandparents, playing against the USSR took on a greater, personal significance. USA won 42-0.

The final was to be Kevin’s last match in charge, but not out of choice. He was left to wonder what exactly he’d done wrong. “I was fired,” he admits. “How come? Well, I was caught unawares. You know, I had a daughter, I was teaching, so I took some time out. Then I got a call from the administrator of women’s rugby to say they were going to advertise the role and I needed to apply for it. 

“I wrote down some stuff,” he says. “But it was all a bit rushed. When we got to the national championships in Washington the following year I was told I wasn’t to be USA coach anymore and the reason given was that they wanted new blood.”

USA lost the 1994 World Cup final to England (see Gill Burns’ interview in Rugby Journal Issue 17) and Kevin is adamant they would have won back-to-back titles had he stayed in the job. He continued teaching as well as coaching at club level, winning a national title in 2009. Now aged 75, he works with World Rugby as an educator, encouraging more young people to take part and enjoy the game.

“I couldn’t imagine my life without it,” he says. “We tell the kids that rugby is a vehicle. You play rugby for the memories and the mates. The team that played for USA had better lives through college and after college because of rugby.”

As for Tara, she would play in the 1994 tournament before going on to study for a law degree and is now a California Superior Court Judge specialising in family law. After being voted into the role following the Californian Judicial Elections 2012, she said her approach to the election was to treat it like rugby.

 “There were three candidates and you cannot win a primary without having more than fifty per cent of the vote,” she explains. “What usually happens is that the top two from the first round of votes then go to the final. But I got 50.1 per cent in the first vote, something that hadn’t happened in our county in 130 years. 

“I incorporated the lessons I learned from rugby. Respect the process. Respect the hierarchy. Know your weaknesses, not your strengths, that’s the given. Know your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. And work harder at it than anybody else. And I think that’s why I was elected.

“It’s not just me. When you look at my team-mates and that level of personal success and accomplishment that almost all of us have attained, it comes from that relentlessness that one must have to excel at rugby.”

Then Tara asks if I’ve ever read the book A Prayer for Owen Meany.
If you haven’t, then what follows comes with a bit of a spoiler alert. “I recommend it. It’s a fictional book and the premise of the story is there are these two boys, John and Owen, childhood friends. They always do this thing when they play basketball called ‘The Shot’ when John lifts Owen to catch the ball and dunk it. But it’s not allowed in basketball and everyone wonders why they keep on doing it.

“Then they get sent to war and return as Vietnam veterans. One day, the brother of a dead soldier throws a hand grenade into a room of Vietnamese children – refugees that have come to America. Then they do the trick with ‘The Shot’ and they save the lives of all the kids in that room.

“And the point is that in life sometimes you’re preparing for something, and you don’t necessarily know what you’re working towards. But if you just keep preparing, the moment will present itself. 

“And I think for myself and my team-mates, we had that work ethic and we became the world champions. It may have surprised the rest of the world, but it didn’t surprise us.”

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by Garvin Davies, Getty Images and USA Rugby

This extract was taken from issue 18 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.