CALLS continue to grow for the NRL to capitalise on the success of Jarryd Hayne, but rugby league already has quite a history in the USA.

With Hayne’s day of reckoning set to approach later this week, we’ve put together a brief history on rugby league in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

For more information on American rugby league, check out the USARL website.

The American All Stars

Rugby has been played in America since the late 19th century, but the first time league got a kick start was in 1953. Mike Dimitro, a wrestling promoter and NFL veteran with the Los Angeles Rams, scraped together a group of college footballers for a tour to Australia. Dubbed the American All Stars, the tour managed to generate incredible hype despite not one of the American’s ever having played rugby league before.

The All Stars won their first match, a 34-25 victory over a combined Monaro/Southern Districts side and a monster crowd of 65,453 came to watch them play a Sydney representative side at the SCG. They were beaten 52-25 and much of the novelty wore off, but 32,000 punters came back for more. The All Stars’ next match was a 62-41 defeat to New South Wales. All told, the All Stars played 26 matches across New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand, winning six, drawing two and losing 18.

A born hustler, Dimitro played off the gridiron skills and image of his charges. The team wowed crowds with spectacular, but ineffective, quarterback style passes that went from one sideline to the next. In their first two matches the Americans wore gridiron style tights before switching to regular footy shorts.

The tour was generally regarded as something of a circus by the end, but the Americans star player, Al Kirkland, returned to Australia for a season with Parramatta in 1956 before he spent a year with English club Leeds. Kirkland remains just one of three Americans to play first grade football in Australia.

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Manfred Moore

A former Super Bowl winner with the Oakland Raiders, Manfred Moore signed with the Newtown Jets in 1977. His curious story is covered in far more detail here.

Greg Smith

The tale of Greg Smith is one of the strangest sagas in rugby league history. Newcastle coach Warren Ryan, who had coached several of the Americans World Sevens teams in the late 1990s, happened upon Smith early in 1999.

The American was a former squad member of the Philadelphia Eagles, having trialled with the famous NFL franchise several years earlier. Enamoured by Smith’s athleticism, Ryan signed him and following an early season injury crisis Smith was given his first grade debut against Canterbury in Round 6.

Still woefully inexperienced in the nuances of rugby league, Smith made a host of errors and missed a score of tackles to shoot the Knights in the foot as Newcastle gave up a big lead to the Bulldogs and lost 28-26. Smith promptly vanished from rugby league circles after the match.

The Long Beach Origin

In a bold move to try and give rugby league a push into America, the powers that be decided to hold a one-off fourth Origin match in 1987 in the unlikely venue of Long Beach, California. A curious crowd of 12,349 came to Veterans Memorial Stadium to watch the Blues win 30-18 on the back of a man of the match display from Peter Sterling.

There are differing accounts regarding the validity of the match — the Queenslanders treated the trip like a holiday while the Blues were desperate to restore some pride after letting a 1-0 series lead slip through their fingers.

Officially, the match was counted as an exhibition and the ground breaking move could have been the start of a concerted push into America, but nothing really came of it.

The Tomahawks

The American national side played their first official match in 1954 in Paris against a powerful French outfit that contained all time greats Puig Aubert and Gilbert Benausse but lost 31-0. Mike Dimitro bobbed up again, captaining the side at lock, but after the match the national team went into long term hibernation, re-emerging after a few scratch games in the late 1980s in the wonderfully irreverent World Sevens.

Undisputed champions of the best team name in international rugby league, the Tomahawks were built by former St George halfback David Niu, a constant champion for the cause of American rugby league, and Mike Mayer, who had been trying to get a semi-professional American rugby league competition established since the mid 1970s.

The Americans made their sevens debut in 1992 as the USA Patriots and played in each tournament until the concept was abandoned in 1997. They never had a great deal of success, but they did contribute perhaps the most memorable moment in sevens history in this match against the Rabbitohs.

The Tomahawks began to play more regularly in the late 1990s welcoming touring English and Welsh sides, participating in the Emerging Nations Cup and World Cup qualifiers and beginning to establish themselves are a genuine international side.

They missed qualifying for the 2000 and 2008 World Cups but managed to qualify for the 2013 edition and went on a giant killing run, upsetting the Cook Islands and Wales and giving Scotland a hell of a scare to set up a quarterfinal clash with Australia. The ruthless Kangaroos won 62-0 but the Tomahawks exceeded all expectations and were one of the success stories of the tournament.

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Parramatta lock forward Joseph Paulo captained the Tomahawks at the World Cup and starred at five-eighth — so much so that the Wiggles campaigned for Barack Obama to carve Paulo’s face onto Mt Rushmore — while former Eels winger Matt Peterson, journeyman back Ryan McGoldrick, Eels winger Bureta Faraimo, Tigers hooker Joel Luani, Titans forward Eddy Pettybourne and South Carolina born Knights backrower Clint Newtown are some of the more notable names to get a run in the red, white and blue.

They’ve been coached in the past by Brian Smith, Terry Matterson and John Cartwright.

Unfortunately, the Tomahawks are no more. A casualty of the civil war between the United States of America Rugby League (USARL) and the American National Rugby League (AMNRL), the national side was rebranded as the Hawks in late 2014. The Hawks will make their debut later this year in the Colonial Cup, an annual series played against Canada.

American competitions and “the war”

David Niu was a driving force in starting the AMNRL in the late 1990s and the six team competition kicked off in 1998 but attempts had been made at getting an American domestic competition off the ground since the mid-1970s. Based around the east coast, the inaugural teams were the Aston Bulls, the New Jersey Sharks, the New York Broncos, the Philadelphia Bulldogs, the Boston Storm and the Pennsylvania Raiders.

Infighting and financial problems dogged the league for many years and clubs were constantly withdrawing and reforming, but the competition eventually expanded further down the east coast with the inclusion of the Jacksonville Axemen and the Fairfax (Virginia) Eagles.

In 2011, seven clubs formed the breakaway USARL citing a lack of input in the competition and a lack of confidence in the administration of the AMNRL.

While the AMNRL were still recognised by the Rugby League International Federation as the official governing body of rugby league in America and thus in control of the national side, the USARL had a more stable club environment and following the departure of Niu as AMNRL chief executive, the league folded and seceded control to the USARL in late 2014.

The USARL now runs a 14 team competition, split into the 10 team North Conference (which is confusingly split into Northeast and Mid Atlantic divisions) and a four team South Conference, with the winner of the conferences playing in the Championship Final at the end of the season. The current teams are:

North Conference, Northeast division: Boston Thirteens, Brooklyn Kings, Connecticut Wildcats, New York Knights, Rhode Island Rebellion.

North Conference, mid-Atlantic division: Bucks County Sharks, D.C. Slayers, Delaware Black Foxes, Northern Virginia Eagles, Philadelphia Fight.

South Conference: Atlanta Rhinos, Central Florida Warriors, Jacksonville Axemen, Tampa Mayhem.

The Boston Thirteens are the current champions after they downed Atlanta 44-12 over the weekend in the 2015 Championship final, with former Panther Liam Georgetown and French international Kane Bentley starring. A smattering of NRL players have spent some time playing in America, including former Sharks and Melbourne outside back Dustin Cooper, Eels and Queensland workhorse Daniel Wagon and former Origin and Test players Shannon Hegarty and Phil Bailey.

The Philadelphia Story

The finest hour of American rugby league came not in the 2013 World Cup, but nine years earlier the Australian side travelled to Philadelphia on their way home from a crushing Tri Nations final victory over Great Britain. Australia had played in American once before, when Mike Dimitrio talked the Kangaroos and New Zealand into playing a couple of exhibition games in California in 1954, but this time the Kangaroos were to take on the Tomahawks for the Liberty Bell Cup at Franklin Field, Philadelphia.

Matt Peterson started at five-eighth for the Tomahawks, who also had former Raider, Magpie and Rabbitoh Brandon Costin dubiously playing halfback as a “guest player” and the plucky Americans pulled off the biggest underdog story since Rocky.

This was no mug Australian side — there were only a handful of changes from the team that had thumped the British 44-4 in the Tri Nations final and was about as close to full strength as they could muster.

Playing on a field painted for a gridiron match with goalposts resting on the dead ball line, it made for a bizarre scene that was made all the more incredible when the Americans raced to a 24-6 lead and just for a second, the most incredible upset in rugby league history looked possible. Alas, the Kangaroos clicked into gear in the second half and won 36-24, but it was a banner day for the Tomahawks and to this day is the closest they’ve come to upsetting one of the Big Three.