Why it took so long has a lot to do with the history of the game. Legend has it that rugby sprang into being one day in 1823 at the Rugby School in Rugby, England, when 16-year-old William Webb Ellis, “with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it.” Until the beginning of the professional era in 1995, the main branch of the game, known as Rugby Union, held fast to its amateur status, and to a manly, aristocratic ethos that idealized the carnage of concussions and separated shoulders as unselfish character-building sacrifice for Team, God and Country. Vestiges of those values are still celebrated by club players and boosters who credit rugby with fostering a rare fellowship and mutual respect, rugby brawls notwithstanding. Players often call the ref “sir.” Stars have been known to help clean up the locker room. When the mayhem on the pitch is over, it’s customary for adversaries to share a pint at a pub. Of what is sometimes called “the game they play in Heaven,” the English rugby champion Jason Leonard once wrote: “There is a way of life that comes with it; and a way of thinking that believes in honor, sacrifice, pain and love of teammates and country. We can never compare sport with war, but we can perhaps discover here the wellspring of those beliefs.”

The first bona fide rugby in the United States was played in 1874, between Harvard and McGill University. Six years later, at Yale, the future T. rex of American sports was hatched when Walter Camp, the innovative coach and writer known as the father of American football, separated the rugby scrum into football’s “line of scrimmage.” Both rugby and football were popular in American colleges and universities in the early 20th century, and at one point, alarmed by the prevalence of injuries, Stanford and Berkeley gave up football for rugby — a programming decision that was reversed after New Zealand’s mighty All Blacks, on a tour in 1913, humiliated a squad of all-stars in California, 51-3.

New Zealand and other top teams were not represented when the United States won Olympic rugby gold medals in Antwerp in 1920 and Paris in 1924. The 17-3 victory in Paris over a heavily favored French team by a United States squad made up mostly of California collegians was one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history. But the outraged reaction of some 40,000 French fans at the Stade Colombes jeopardized the very principle of the better and more peaceful world through sports on which the modern Olympics were based. David Wallechinsky recounts the scene in “The Complete Book of the Olympics”: “After two French players were injured, the U.S. team was booed and hissed the remainder of the game. Fighting broke out in the stands, and Gideon Nelson, an art teacher from Illinois” — and a United States reserve player — “was knocked unconscious after being hit in the face with a walking stick.” The Americans left the field under a police escort and a barrage of rocks and bottles.

Rugby was dropped from subsequent Olympics. In America the game went into a long dormancy from which it did not emerge until the 1960s, when it began to catch on again with colleges and clubs. Ed Hagerty, whose life before rugby included a turn as an altar boy in Grace Kelly’s wedding in 1956, discovered his passion for the game at Holy Cross in 1963. “It was kind of countercultural,” he recalls. “We wore discarded football jerseys.” After graduation, Hagerty played for local clubs in New York and was working as the publisher of Popular Science when he quit to eke out a living as editor of Scrumdown, a rugby newspaper started in 1975 by Jon Prusmack. One of the first Scrumdown editorials summed up the state of the American game, suggesting that ruggers from New Zealand, Australia and Britain were to their American counterparts what Rudolf Nureyev was to Zorba the Greek.

To close the talent gap, promote and govern the sport at all levels and establish a United States national team, the 115,000-member organization known today as USA Rugby was formed in 1976. This August, rugby is returning to the Olympics after a 92-year hiatus. The United States will defend its gold medal in Rio de Janeiro, playing a shorter, less complex form of the game that features seven players on a side instead of the traditional 15.

A professional rugby league is about the last thing Doug Schoninger imagined he would be pouring time and money into. Hockey, basketball and tennis were his games growing up in Great Neck, Long Island. His father, a voracious reader who left high school early to help put a brother through college, worked six days a week running an extermination company. “Somewhat like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ but with no angels,” Schoninger recalls. He was 25 when his father died at 66.

Reflecting his faith and his cool appraisal of numbers, Schoninger spent a year at Emory University studying theology, then transferred to Tulane, from which he graduated in 1982 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He landed a $13,000-a-year job as a runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and later worked as a construction manager for Morse Diesel, the general contractor for the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. He returned to Wall Street in 2000 to trade stocks and bonds at Morgan Stanley and Oppenheimer. Bearish by temperament, with a keen feel for risk, he eventually started his own shop, DJS Capital Management, managing a bond portfolio of several hundred million dollars for more than a dozen clients.