1991 team played hard, partied hard
Coach, player recall bond that made rugby squad tough to beat at World Cup
One big piss-up was the key to success for Canada’s entry to the 1991 Rugby World Cup, a tournament they would go on to impress observers far and wide at.
Or, at least, that’s what assistant coach Rod Holloway believes — a former player of his does, too.
Yes, the old days of rugby very much fit the stereotype: hard playing on the pitch, hard partying off.
The 1991 team, coached by Ian Birtwell and Holloway and featuring a cavalcade of Canadian stars, is to be inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in May.
The night in question happened in England, a week or so before the Canadians moved to France for the second edition of the global tournament. They would go on to beat Fiji and Romania before close losses to France and New Zealand.
“The mayor of Windsor came down to see us, we were training there, and invited us to the guild hall, which is the city hall, for a dinner,” Holloway recalled Tuesday after the announcement about the team being honoured was made.
“At each table there were two players, coaches or managers and two people from the city. There was ample beer and wine brought out. At the centre of each table was a humidor full of cigars, two bottles of scotch and two bottles of port.”
“I thought, gee, drinking all this wouldn’t be good for our fitness, but good thing these guys are smart and won’t.”
Of course, they ended up having such a good time, everything was consumed, including all the cigars.
“At training the next day, there was a lot of carnage,” Holloway said with laugh. “It was a very bonding experience for the team.”
Of course, the team’s training sessions were always hard.
“Fully amateur and fully committed,” Holloway said of the squad.
To fine-tune the team’s powerful scrummaging,
Holloway would sometimes have the scrum sled backed up against a tree, explaining “if they can move a tree, they can move anything.”
Glen Ennis was a key forward on that team. He agreed with his old coach’s assessment on how the team’s spirit was built by nights out like the one in Windsor and by diligent work in training sessions and the weight room.
“Our team was more than the sum of its parts,” he said. “We played against each other, we partied with each other, we’d play together with B.C. “We were together so much.” Ennis pointed to the Canadian team’s origin story: Gary Johnston, who preceded Birtwell as head coach, battled with the Canadian Rugby Union — now Rugby Canada — for years over how Pan-Canadian his team should be.
Johnston kept picking a team stacked with British Columbia-based players, arguing the more time they had together, the better the international results would be.
“He fought like crazy to keep us together,” Ennis said. “He burned every bridge. And then he was sent away. But his sacrifice made us what we were.”
It all led to Canada’s best Rugby World Cup performance: a close loss in 1991 to the mighty New Zealand All Blacks in the quarter-finals.
Holloway said New Zealand coach Alex Wylie was nervous enough about the Canadians, he was spotted spying at Canada’s practice through some hedges.
“I told him to come stand with us, nothing we were doing was going to surprise him,” Holloway said. Enis recalled the attention they received. “‘Holy crap, you guys are big and strong and you’re pushing around the All Blacks,’ people said,” Ennis recalled.
“I’ve never had that much fun in any other group. It was just an amazing thing.”