Rugby grew up at an English school, split in two over players' wages in 1895, and spread from Kyoto to California. These stories cover both codes: the William Webb Ellis legend and what is actually known, a New Zealand nickname that was never a misprint, a stray dog that was ruled no spectator, and an American team that is still the reigning Olympic champion in fifteen-a-side rugby.
Every tile in a Rugby game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Legends
nine stories
1The inventor who probably invented nothing
On the tile: Webb Ellis1823Legend
The story goes that in 1823 a Rugby School pupil, William Webb Ellis, caught the ball and ran with it, inventing a new game. The tale first appeared in accounts by Matthew Bloxam in the school's alumni magazine in 1876 and 1880, after Ellis had died in France. The World Rugby Museum notes that carrying the ball stayed illegal at the school until 1841, and credits generations of schoolboys instead. Ellis became a clergyman and is not recorded as ever commenting on rugby, yet the men's World Cup trophy bears his name.
In 1887, at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, where her father was assistant headmaster, Emily Valentine, aged about 10, got her chance when her brothers' team was a player short. "I could run in spite of petticoats and thick undergarments," she wrote in her memoirs, and she ran, dodging and darting, until one last spurt let her touch down right on the line. Irish Rugby calls her the earliest documented female rugby player. The World Rugby Museum adds a caveat: an 1881 newspaper report on a women's match mentions touchdowns, suggesting it was played under rugby rules.
Constantin Henriquez came from Haiti to study in France, played club rugby in Paris, and in 1900 took the field for the French team at the Paris Olympics. France won the rugby tournament, and the World Rugby Museum describes him as the first known Black athlete to compete at the Games and the first to win a gold medal. Olympedia, which notes some confusion in the old records, says he is often considered the first Black Olympian. He later became a doctor in Haiti and is credited with introducing soccer there.
Prince Alexander Obolensky's family fled Russia at the time of the 1917 revolution and settled in north London. He was 19 when he made his England debut against New Zealand at Twickenham in January 1936, and he scored two tries in a 13-0 win, England's first victory over the All Blacks. Both are still counted among the finest tries ever scored by an English player. He joined the Royal Air Force and was killed in 1940, aged 24, when his Hawker Hurricane crashed during a training exercise at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk.
Growing up in Cardiff, Clive Sullivan needed operations on his knees, feet and shoulders, and doctors doubted he would ever walk normally. As a teenager he impressed Hull at a trial and signed the next day. In 1972 he became captain of Great Britain's rugby league team, the first Black captain of any Great Britain team. That November in Lyon he scored a length-of-the-field try in the World Cup final, a 10-10 draw with Australia, and Great Britain took the title on table position. Part of Hull's main approach road is Clive Sullivan Way.
At 19 years and 45 days, Jonah Lomu became the youngest All Black to play a Test when he faced France in 1994. A year later, at the World Cup in South Africa, the 6-foot-5 wing scored four tries against England in the semifinal in Cape Town, running straight over fullback Mike Catt on the way to a 45-29 win. He was named player of the tournament and became one of the first superstars of rugby's professional era. When he died in 2015, his 15 World Cup tries still shared the tournament record.
In 2018 South Africa named flanker Siya Kolisi as its first Black Test captain. Chiliboy Ralepelle had led the national side against a World XV in 2006, but that match did not have Test status. The next year, in his 50th Test, Kolisi led the Springboks to a 32-12 win over England in the World Cup final, joining Francois Pienaar in 1995 and John Smit in 2007 as South African captains to lift the trophy. In 2023 he led them to the title again, making it back-to-back World Cups.
Steve Merrick, a scrum half from Singleton, New South Wales, made his state debut in July 1995, and within a month had played two Tests for Australia against the All Blacks. That August rugby union went professional, and the Australian Rugby Union offered him a contract that was generous compared with his coal mining pay. But he would have to move to Sydney, play for the Waratahs and give up country rugby. He stayed, and played more than 300 matches for the Singleton Bulls. The World Rugby Museum calls him the last amateur to play international rugby union.
Dan Carroll was the youngest member of Australia's 1908-09 touring team, and on that tour he won Olympic rugby gold in London, in a final played in fog and mud with a ball made heavy by trips into the swimming pool beside the pitch. After a 1912 tour he stayed in America and played and coached at Stanford. In 1920, as player-coach of the United States, he helped beat France 8-0 in Antwerp for a second gold. The World Rugby Museum says no other rugby player has won Olympic gold for two different nations.
A favorite rugby tale says New Zealand's nickname began as a typo: an English paper described the 1905 tourists as "all backs," and a printer slipped in an L. Billy Wallace, who played on that tour, told it that way in 1955. The New Zealand Rugby Museum disagrees. An Exeter newspaper was calling them the All Blacks the morning after their first match, "by reason of their sable and unrelieved costume," and an Auckland journalist wrote of the "all blacks" in 1893. The accepted view is that the name came from the uniform.
2The first overseas rugby tour of the British Isles
On the tile: Natives Tour1888-89
The first rugby tour of the British Isles by an overseas team was made by the New Zealand Natives in 1888-89. The side was originally to be called the Maoris, but not every player was Māori, so it became the Natives instead. Captain Joe Warbrick had traveled New Zealand himself in search of players. His 26 men then played 74 matches in the British Isles between October 1888 and March 1889. One of them, forward Thomas Ellison, went on to captain the first official New Zealand team in 1893.
3The Lions began as a cricketers' business venture
On the tile: Lions 18881888
The tour now accepted as the first by the British and Irish Lions was a business venture by the cricketers Alfred Shaw and Arthur Shrewsbury. The Rugby Football Union refused to back it and reminded players that they must not be paid. Forward Jack Clowes was disqualified after admitting he took 15 pounds for his kit, yet stayed on tour without playing. The team played 35 rugby matches in Australia and New Zealand, losing two, plus 19 games of Australian rules football. Their captain, Bob Seddon, drowned in a sculling accident on tour.
The Barbarians were born in the early hours of April 9, 1890. William Percy Carpmael and a touring team, back at their Bradford hotel after a hearty dinner, enthusiastically elected themselves the first members of a new club. It would be invitation-only, and players had to be good at rugby and well behaved on and off the field. The black-and-white hooped jersey was chosen that October, and the emblem in the first season was a skull and crossbones. Early Barbarians wore the jersey with black shorts and the socks of their own clubs.
New Zealand's 1924-25 touring team played 32 matches and won all 32, earning the name the Invincibles. Fullback George Nepia, just 19, was the only man in the side to play every match. One opponent was missing: the Scottish Rugby Union refused to host them. The reasons were murky, from rumors about payments to players to Scottish objections that England had organized the tour, and perhaps lingering irritation that New Zealand had taken home the gate money from a sellout in Scotland in 1905. Scotland went on to win its first Grand Slam in 1925.
When South Africa toured Britain in 1912, the team brought along a stuffed springbok's head, to be presented to the first side that beat them. It did not travel far. On October 24, at Newport in Wales, the taller, heavier and faster Springboks met a club side with a plan: find touch and keep the ball away from the visitors. Several times only great tackling kept the South Africans out. Newport won 9-3, and the head went no farther. The Newport writer W.J. Townsend Collins put the result down to superior tactics and superlative captaincy.
Fiji had been going to the Olympics since 1956 without winning a medal of any color. Then rugby sevens made its Olympic debut in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and Fiji beat Great Britain 43-7 in the final. The country declared a public holiday, and in 2017 it issued what the World Rugby Museum calls the world's first circulating seven-dollar banknote: two million of them, with serial numbers beginning AU, the chemical symbol for gold. Fiji defended its title at the Tokyo Games.
In 1910, rugby players from Keio University came to Kyoto to teach the game to students at what is now Kyoto University. With no suitable field, they played at the ancient Shimogamo Shrine, in what the World Rugby Museum calls the first rugby game played by Japanese people in the Kansai region. Former players later placed an engraved stone there. Today the shrine, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, includes a small Shinto shrine dedicated to rugby, with a bell shaped like a rugby ball and wooden wish plaques in the same shape.
9The folk song that became Scotland's rugby anthem
On the tile: Scots Anthem1967
In a 1954 photo of the Gordonstoun School rugby team sits a boy named Roy Williamson, who became famous as one of the Scottish folk group the Corries. By 1967 he had written Flower of Scotland, a song about Robert the Bruce's victory over Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1974 Scottish wing Billy Steele encouraged his British Lions teammates to sing it on their victorious tour of South Africa. Ever since, it has been sung at Scotland's rugby internationals.
Rugby's first official laws, in 1871, said a match was decided by a majority of goals only. Tries did not count by themselves; what mattered was kicking the goal afterward. So in 1872, when Royal High School Former Pupils scored eight tries to Edinburgh University's two but each side converted just one, the result was a draw. Tries became a tiebreaker in 1875. When points arrived for the 1889-90 season, most unions made a try worth one point. It rose to three in 1893-94, four in 1971 and five in 1992.
Early rugby balls, made by bootmakers in the town of Rugby such as William Gilbert, were hand-stitched leather cases around a pig's bladder, blown up by lung power through the stem of a clay pipe. Richard Lindon, another local bootmaker, lost his wife, Rebecca, to lung disease in 1843, possibly from years of that work in his shop, and he sought something safer. He pioneered a rubber bladder, too tough to inflate by mouth, and invented a brass pump for it. He never patented either, and it is Gilbert's name that is better known today.
Numbers or letters on the backs of rugby jerseys first appeared in 1897, when New Zealand played Queensland. Not everyone approved. In 1926, when King George V asked why the Scots were not using numbers, Scottish Rugby Union vice president James Aikman Smith reportedly replied, "This sir is a rugby match, not a cattle sale." Even teams that did number their players disagreed on how: some gave the fullback 15, others gave him 1. In 1967 the International Rugby Board ruled that jerseys be numbered from front to back.
For most of rugby's history, an injured player could not be replaced. At a conference in 1924, New Zealand proposed allowing substitutes for injuries before halftime; a delegate from New South Wales warned of trickery and a whiff of professionalism, and there was no general agreement. The laws finally changed in 1968. That June, in Pretoria, the Lions' Mike Gibson came on for the injured Barry John and became the first officially recognized replacement in a Test. Tactical substitutes came later still, starting with Australia's Brett Robinson against Scotland in 1996.
The night before Wales played New Zealand in Cardiff in December 1905, Scottish referee John Dallas was handed a silver whistle by the Welsh union's secretary. He tried it at bedtime, found it too slow, and kept his own brass whistle. The next day he used it to disallow a try by Bob Deans, ruling that Deans was grounded short of the line, and Wales won 3-0, the only defeat in the tourists' 35 matches. New Zealand's manager complained that Dallas, in walking boots and a high collar, could not keep up with play.
When the Calcutta Football Club folded in 1877, its captain wrote to the Rugby Football Union that polo, which needed no training, had proved a fatal blow to football in that climate. The club melted down its remaining 270 silver rupees into a cup with cobras for handles and an elephant on the lid, and presented it to the union. Ireland had lost all five of its internationals without scoring a point, so the cup became the prize for England against Scotland. The first match for it, in 1879, was a draw.
In November 1886, Victoria of Portsmouth were playing Trojans of Southampton when the ball hit a stray dog. A Victoria player seized the deflected ball and scored a try. Trojans objected that the ball had struck a spectator, so it was dead and the try should not count. The dispute went to the Rugby Football Union, which overruled them and let the try stand. The dog had reportedly been straying about and seemed to take no active interest in the game, so, the World Rugby Museum reasons, it presumably could not be considered a spectator.
From 1871 to 1977, a player who caught an opponent's kick before it touched the ground, standing still and planting a heel, could claim a mark, and his side could then take a free kick at goal. Only 27 goals from a mark were ever kicked in international rugby. The first came in 1886, when England's Charles Elliot made the catch against Wales and handed the ball to Andrew Stoddart to kick. In 1903 New Zealand's Billy Wallace kicked two in one Test, the only time that has happened.
The Siam Cup, a silver bowl decorated with elephant heads, is believed to be made of Siamese coins melted down with King Rama VI's permission, a friend of the British officers who brought it to the Channel Islands in 1920. It became the prize in rugby between Jersey and Guernsey, and the World Rugby Museum calls it the second-oldest contested rugby trophy. When German forces occupied the islands from 1940 to 1945 and tried to seize silver, the cup vanished. It reappeared after liberation, and no record shows where it had been.
In 1870 the captains of five Scottish clubs challenged England to a football match under the rules of Rugby School. The Rugby Football Union was formed at the Pall Mall restaurant in January 1871, and one of its first jobs was picking a team. On March 27, 1871, the English Twenty met the Scots at Raeburn Place in Edinburgh. Half of the English side had attended Rugby School itself, and few expected much from the Scots. But Scotland's fitness told late in the game, Angus Buchanan scored the first international try, and Scotland won.
Rugby's great split was over broken time: compensating players for the working time they lost to play, which the Rugby Football Union would not allow. In late August 1895, representatives of about 20 northern clubs met at the George Hotel in Huddersfield and formed the Northern Rugby Football Union. It launched its own Challenge Cup a year later and was renamed the Rugby Football League in 1922. Rugby union did not repeal its own amateur rules until 1995, a century later.
At the 1924 Paris Olympics, France were such favorites in the rugby final that the betting at one stage was 20-1 in their favor. Their opponents were a United States team drawn mainly from California universities, many of them more familiar with American football. The Americans won 17-3 at Colombes in front of a hostile home crowd; several spectators were attacked, and the team needed a police escort off the field. Fifteen-a-side rugby never returned to the Olympics, so the United States remain the reigning champions.
In the 1973 Five Nations, every team won both of its home matches, and with no tiebreaker until 1994, all five shared the title, the only time that has happened. England's hopes had seemed lost after two opening defeats. One was in Dublin: after Scotland and Wales had declined to travel to Ireland in 1972 because of the Troubles, England were the first side to agree to play there, and they lost 18-9. Their captain, John Pullin, said afterward, "We might not be any good, but at least we turned up."
South Africa's 1981 visit to the United States met such strong opposition to apartheid that matches had to be moved and guarded. The Test against the USA Eagles was secretly brought forward a day and played on September 25 on a polo field in Glenville, New York. The American union's president was not told, and a local referee got a call at four in the morning. About 150 people watched the Springboks win 38-7. Back-row forward Thys Burger helped put up the posts, ran the touchline, came on as a substitute and scored a try.
The first women's Rugby World Cup, held in Wales in April 1991, was organized by a small group of volunteers, and many of the players paid their own way. The Russian team arrived with no money for lodging, transport or food, and brought vodka, caviar and Soviet souvenirs to barter, which upset customs officers. The United States beat England 19-6 in the final, and captain Mary Sullivan, 39, lifted a silver cup bought in London for 1,007 pounds. Its lacy openwork let champagne escape whenever the winners tried to drink from it.
Apartheid had kept the Springboks in years of sporting isolation, and they were welcomed back to international rugby only in 1992. Three years later, a newly democratic South Africa hosted the World Cup. President Nelson Mandela saw a chance to turn a team long seen as a symbol of the apartheid era into one that could unite the country, under the slogan "One team, One Country." South Africa beat New Zealand 15-12 in the final at Ellis Park, and Mandela, wearing a green Springbok No. 6 jersey, presented the trophy to captain Francois Pienaar.
Japan came to the 2015 World Cup having won just one of 24 World Cup matches, back in 1991, and their first opponents, in Brighton, were two-time champions South Africa. Coached by Eddie Jones, Japan trailed 32-29 late in the game, but they passed up a penalty kick that would have earned a draw and went for the win. In the 84th minute, replacement Karne Hesketh raced over in the corner. Japan won 34-32, a result Rugby World magazine called the biggest upset in World Cup history.
9The try scored while a teammate changed his shorts
On the tile: Lost Shorts1889
In February 1889, England played the touring New Zealand Natives at Blackheath. Early in the second half, England center Andrew Stoddart had his shorts torn off, and players formed a circle around him to protect his modesty. England forward Frank Evershed took advantage of the distraction and scored a try. Most of the 12,000 spectators expected it to be ruled out. Instead the referee, Rugby Football Union secretary George Rowland Hill, awarded it. Some of the Natives walked off in protest, and England won 7-0.