Commentary Huge weekend for rugby in the Bay Area

One of the biggest sporting events in the world is coming to the Bay Area this weekend.

It started Friday and runs through Sunday. And no, it isn’t the San Francisco GiantsOakland A’s rematch at the Oakland Coliseum, though we’re all looking forward to seeing Lou Trivino and Alen Hanson face off in a pressure situation.

No, while the A’s are hosting the Bay Bridge Series, the Giants’ park will be reconfigured for a very different sport. A beefier sport. A rougher and more physical sport. And by the standards of the world stage, a more popular one.

Here come the Rugby World Cup Sevens.

“This is gonna be a huge weekend for rugby in America,” U.S. player Stephen Tomasin told me over the phone on Tuesday. “It’s gonna be on NBC Sports, so it’s gonna be nationally televised. And they’re expecting over 100,000 people through the gates over the three days.”

Rugby, like cricket and Formula 1 racing and even soccer to some extent, is one of those sports that exist on the other side of a cultural divide. While places like Fiji and New Zealand elevate rugby to a near-religious experience, Americans mostly arch an eyebrow and look on suspiciously.

I’m not here to talk you into following the Rugby World Cup. It’s probably too late for that and, anyway, I’m not so steeped in the game myself. But I think it’s cool when major sporting events come to Northern California, and this qualifies. Like the soccer World Cup, the rugby version occurs just once every four years, and this is the first time the United States has hosted. The top 24 men’s national teams and 16 women’s national teams will be here.

The selection of AT&T Park was not random. The Bay Area is a hotbed of rugby. Four of the 12 players on the Team USA roster are from within two or three hours of San Francisco. That includes Tomasin, who grew up in Santa Rosa and was a football star at Cardinal Newman High School.

Rugby is exotica, related just closely enough to American football to reveal its eccentricities — like the protracted pushing matches of the scrum and the airborne players of the line-outs. And even if you have watched some rugby, you may not have seen this version. The sport is generally divided into two forms, 15-a-side and sevena-side.

Rugby 15s is the older, more revered version. But the biggest rugby event in the world, the competition at the Summer Olympics, is a sevenman event. And so is the second-biggest gig in the world: The World Cup.

With fewer players on the field, rugby sevens is a faster, more free-flowing and higherscoring game. The games are crazy short, with seven-minute halves. “Which makes it very cutthroat. If you get down, it makes it hard to come back, and vice versa,” Tomasin said.

He noted that USA Rugby equipped its players with little square GPS units that they wear on their backs. Data generated by the technology shows that players run anywhere between 1,400 and 2,000 meters per game. That’s a lot in 14 minutes of action, especially when you consider that no one is moving much during the scrums. It’s a good fit for someone like Tomasin, whose 198 pounds of fast-twitch muscle do not make him one of the larger players in a sport dominated by the thick.