The second “Super Bowl” of professional American rugby drew a crowd of more than 4,500 and CBS cameras to the University of San Diego football stadium.
Most of the fans wore red and black in of the San Diego Legion, who had won Major League Rugby’s regular-season title this year and twice had beaten their opponent Sunday, the defending champion Seattle Seawolves.
The Legion pulled off several impressive plays, while a club-record crowd, announced as 4,694, stood and cheered and blew on noise-making “vuvuzela” horns.
In the end, however, came one of those San Diego sports letdowns that makes you wonder if local sports teams are jinxed as payment for the amazing local weather.
Seattle mustered a final drive that ended in a winning try on the match’s final play. A two-point kick followed.
The final score glowed on the scoreboard, as dejected Legion players, some of them bloodied, lay on the grass, spent.
Seattle 26, San Diego 23.
“We just pulled it out of our butt,” said Seattle forward Brad Tucker, who scored the winner.
Tucker, who said he “was lucky enough to end up with the ball” on the final collective surge, was effusive in his praise of the Legion squad.
Players for both teams rated the match’s overall quality of play as good, and praised the crowd enthusiasm and grass field as excellent.
“It was a great spectacle,” said the Legion’s Nate Augspurger, whose position is scrum half.
The Legion’s Aaron Mitchell, a reserve, lauded his teammates — “The boys played their hearts out” — and said the game and its telecast will spur rugby’s growth in San Diego and the country.
Yet for the Legion, the ending was likely more jarring than any of the countless blows its players dished out or absorbed across the 82-plus minutes of rugby.
San Diego had gone ahead midway through the second half, on a try by Jordan Manihera. The ensuing kick by Joe Pietersen raised the Legion’s lead to 20-14.
Seattle answered with a score, with seven minutes left in regulation, but missed the kick, leaving San Diego ahead 20-19.
When Pietersen made a deft drop kick from about 40 yards, the Legion were up 23-19 with only two minutes to go.
“It definitely felt like we were in control,” Augspurger said.
But Seattle got the ball back. And held it into injury time. And popped a runner loose up the middle, getting his team within 15 yards of the go-ahead score.
From there, Seattle played “big boy” ball.
Six-foot-5 Riekert Hattingh, of South Africa, jumped to secure a and held the ball through . His teammates coalesced around him. The ball went to the brawny Tucker, who’s 6-5 and 253 pounds. Heading west, his mates and he mooshed the ball across the line.
Tucker said his team raised its level of play from the regular season. “We had to,” said the New Zealand import. “The Legion was the tougher team. Hats off to them.”
If American football comparisons can be applied, Seattle won because, unlike the Seattle Seahawks when they had a chance to close out the New England Patriots in a Super Bowl, they leaned on a sturdy power game rather than trying to trick their opponent. (Like the Seahawks, the Seawolves wear green and blue.)
The Legion’s Peitersen, making kicks from angles and dead on, off tees and a bounce, was as clutch as Tom Brady, the Patriots quarterback who with Bill Belichick’s team trained at USD in the days before facing the Chargers in December 2014.
For the Legion, the late swoon may have just been a case of the rugby shoe being on the other foot.
A week earlier it was San Diego that rallied, knocking off New York.
Next year the Legion will have more company, as three expansions clubs in the Eastern time zone will bring the league to 12 teams.
Until then, American fans can savor a championship match that was painted in vivid colors, notably red.
When Hattingh scored in the second half, he eked the ball past the chalked line only after he and Manihera collided. Both men lay on the grass afterward.
Trainers stanched nasal bleeding of each man, while play continued. Both remained in the game.
“It’s just rugby,” Hattingh said. “You keep sticking your head in there.”
San Diego sports fans, bloodied and battered, can relate.
