T
HE RAP on the door
startles us awake. “Guys,
come quick, there’s a bear,”
hollers Justin Green.
“Quick or you’ll miss the
bear.” Clad only in our pants, we trundle
down steps as quickly as we can to join
Justin, his heavily-pregnant wife Melissa
and a squadron of kids, trying to get as
close to the young black bear nosing
around their ‘garden’ as possible.
Oh yeah, and as if this isn’t startling
enough an image, Justin’s front yard
also happens to be a fully-functioning
rugby ground nestled into an Alaskan
mountainscape. Mondays, am I right?
This is the stunning Alaska Mountain
Rugby Ground, climbing high into the
vista over Anchorage, the largest city
in the vast US state at the north-west of
North America. A green haven amongst
the saw-tooth peaks of this rugged
landscape, this is also the site of a
yearly sevens tournament, the Midnight
Sun 7s, which we are here to take in.
Of course we knew all of this stuff
beforehand, the bare context. We knew
that we were headed for a ground
unlike any we had visited before, where
the wild intersects with the man-made.
We also knew that we would be
disorientated by a combination ofheading to the extreme west, jetting
backwards in time nine hours while also
arriving at a time of year when the sun
never really falls beyond the horizon.
On our very first night on the grounds
this is sharply illustrated when, after
10pm, we witness an adult and baby
moose refreshing themselves at the
pond on the skirt of the playing field,
bathed in honeyed sunshine.
But while we expected extraordinary
settings, that was the extent of our
knowledge before embarking on thejourney. Our photographer Sam visited
the state more than ten years ago,
during white-out winter, but rugby here
was something neither of us had a handle
on and we barely understood the ‘why’.
According to the legend, Green was at
the pub with his mates when talk turned
to the need for a beacon for Alaska rugby
and right then and there he sketched
out a design for his own field of dreams,
on a napkin. He had a grand vision.
“I had played here since I was 14 and
when I was younger they
barely had two men’s
teams, so I knew we had
to do something to grow
rugby in Alaska,” Green
says, sitting pitchside. “I
went to boarding school in
England and I understood
the clubhouse and the
camaraderie of rugby. I
knew how the field and the
clubhouse preserved the
culture of the clubs and
their history. We had to start
that history in Alaska and grow things.”
Green was, in his words, a “naughty
boy” who grew up on ten acres of wild
land in the state. When his mother
insisted that her three unruly Alaskan
sons get a European education, they
were sent to St Lawrence College in Kent,
England. Undisciplined at first, the kids
were taken under the wing of Welshman
Ian Gollop, who taught them the game
of rugby. Green was bitten by the bug.
The ground founder admits that such
a project here would have been,eh-hem, pie in the sky, were it not for his
successful company Alaska Demolition
“paying the bills”, but the role of the
rugby community around him was also a
vital one, particularly when certain other
people could not see what he saw.
He reflects: “There were times when
neighbours were trying to shut us down.
There were a lot of people who said,
‘This ain’t gonna happen!’ There were
a lot of doubters. Then it happened.
“Now we’re enjoying all the work we
have done. We have had some teams
from around the world come here, big
names, and when they showed up
everyone was like, ‘Hey, he did it’.”
According to the collective, rugby
began here between 1972 and 1973,
and there is undoubtedly a trace of
legacy that deserves to be coloured in.
During the sevens event, fold-out chairs
are dotted around the field, with local
veterans of the game taking in the view,
some leaning against the stonework
with a small cooler of ‘soda’ at their feet.Bring the beer Kegs from Matanuska BrewingRugby cub
A bear sniffs
around the cabinsBird’s-eye view
An eagle sculpture“I had played here since I was 14
so I knew we had to do something
to grow rugby in Alaska”
Alaska