Behind the scenes in the locker room, at the hotel and (of course) on the trainer’s table with Canada’s rugby sevens team as it fights for a spot at the 2016 Olympics

By Arden Zwelling in Las Vegas
Photography by Walker Pickering

The smell of rugby is unmistakable. That dank combination of sweat, dirt and a little blood. It clings to your clothes and lives in the soles of your cleats. It smells unlike any other sport in the world. It smells like something earned, something primal. Rugby smells like hard work.

The smell is everywhere Tuesday evening at the Charlie Kellogg and Joe Zaher Sports Complex in suburban Las Vegas, a neat row of five soccer fields sitting off some unremarkable Nevada street lined with gravel and fanning palm trees and mid-sized commercial plazas. Canada’s men’s rugby sevens team is on the field for its second practice of the day after a gruelling two-hour session in the morning that left lungs weary and legs heavy. It was scheduled for just one hour but, in the words of head coach Liam Middleton, “We had our heads up our asses for most of it.” Mountains shade the distance as the tall lights surrounding the field buzz and the players beneath them huff and puff their way through a light-contact scrimmage. They’ve already worked on the basics: ball handling, tackling, competing for the ball in the air. And they’ve already worked on executing specific game plans for the three opponents they know are looming. Now they’re just playing rugby to get ready to play more rugby. It’s a brutal session, made tougher by the fact that the players are taking as few water breaks as possible in order to acclimate their mouths, throats and lungs to the dryness of the desert, which presents a much different atmospheric challenge from Wellington, New Zealand, where they practised and played last week. Players come out of the session gasping for air, their training tops heavy with sweat, weighing as much as six pounds less than they did at the start of it. It’s physically exhausting, mentally taxing work. And it’s nothing compared to what awaits them in a few days.

Sevens rugby is played under the same rules as the traditional 15-a-side game, with two very crucial differences: Each team only fields seven players at a time, and there are only 14 minutes in a game. Tries are still worth five points, the ensuing kick is still worth two. The field remains the same size, which opens up a tremendous amount of space and emphasises speed and skill. Players have to be quick, they have to possess elusive footwork and they have to be great tacklers. There’s nowhere to hide. It’s like playing three-on-three hockey on an NHL-sized rink. It’s non-stop, end-to-end action. It’s big hits. It’s incredible athleticism. It’s tons of scoring. It’s perfectly in tune with our era’s urge for a faster, flashier, more intense experience that fits neatly into a 20-minute YouTube video. Its popularity has been steadily growing for years, and the IOC has recognized its appeal by adding it as an official sport for the 2016 and 2020 Summer Olympics.

And Canada is one of the best nations in the world at it. While not truly elite like New Zealand, England and Fiji—countries where rugby comes before all else and players sign six-figure contracts—with a roster entirely made up of amateurs, our home and native land is among the second tier of nations. Canada finished sixth in last season’s World Rugby Sevens World Series, which is contested for eight months, making nine tournament stops around the world. (In March 2016, it will expand to 10, and Canada will get its own stop on the circuit, at Vancouver’s BC Place.) Fifteen core national teams—and one invited non-core team—accumulate points based on their placing at each tournament in pursuit of the overall title. The top four teams from this year’s World Series will automatically qualify for the Olympics—but that result is out of reach for the Canadians. Instead, they will have to go through the United States, both literally and figuratively. This June, in North Carolina, an Olympic qualifying tournament will be held featuring Canada, the U.S. and a handful of Caribbean nations that don’t play in the World Series. Canada and the U.S. will be by far the best teams in that tournament, and it’s expected they’ll meet in the final with a spot in the Olympics on the line.

There’s more at stake than ever. And more uncertainty, too. During the 2013–14 World Series, Canada started slowly but found its legs in the middle tournaments as they dashed to sixth place (the Americans finished 13th). The turning point came last February in Las Vegas, where Canada finished third, the start of a string of solid tournament results that culminated in a second-place finish in Glasgow in May, the closest Canada’s ever come to winning a World Series tournament. Now, a year later, the Canadians have returned to Sin City under very similar circumstances. Through the first four stops, the team has been unable to replicate its stunning success of the previous season, finishing near the bottom of the table at each of the tournaments save for Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where Canada finished ninth. (The Americans have surged, finishing ahead of Canada at every tournament so far.) This mirrors what happened in 2013–14 until the Canadians stepped onto the field in Vegas and turned their season around. But the stakes are higher this year. If Canada is going to make anything of its sub-par campaign and start gaining momentum ahead of Rio qualification, it has to start in Vegas. There are only five tournaments before that crucial clash in North Carolina. Time’s running out.

Injuries are one of the most brutal parts of the sevens game, which tests the limits to which the human body can be stretched. You hear stories of players who walked off the field complaining about a sore shoulder and later discovered their labrum was completely torn. Or the ones who have been in too much pain to walk after the second day of a three-day tournament. In a game earlier in the season, Canadian Justin Douglas chased down a Fijian attacker from the rear and tackled him. The Fijian was knocked unconscious from the force of his head hitting his own shoulder. He missed the rest of the tournament, and soon Douglas suffered a shoulder injury that held him out of subsequent tournaments. In all, Canada was missing five of seven regular starters due to injury at this year’s Las Vegas tournament (a sixth was forced to skip it because of medical-school interviews), a situation that isn’t unusual.

Mike Scholz, a plucky McMaster graduate with a missing upper tooth in the middle of his wide grin, knows this side of the game all too well. In his four-year sevens career, he’s dealt with osteitis pubis, a torn adductor in his groin and wrist surgery. Vegas is his first tournament since he injured the wrist at the Commonwealth Games last July, and in each of his first two practices back, he picks up new injuries, the first a hip pointer from being dumped during an in-air battling drill and the second a dislocated finger during a scrimmage. “It’s something you learn to deal with,” Scholz says. “When I was younger, I used to make fun of the older guys who were stretching all the time. They’d be like, ‘Just wait—you’ll get here soon enough.’ Now I’m the guy stretching for like an hour every day just so my groin is alright. Now I’m that old guy.”

Scholz, that old guy, is 26.

The week leading up to a sevens tournament can sometimes be more gruelling than the games themselves. A mere 36 hours after the Canadians landed in Los Angeles, having endured a 15-hour flight from Wellington, the team has already been through two extended training sessions, two early mornings of hydro and mobility work in the pool, and now, at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, following a 30-minute ball-handling session, they’re huddling up before a three-period scrimmage with Fiji, the best sevens nation on the planet.

The Fijians are loud, yelling and screaming at each other in their native tongue no matter what’s happening, and at times it’s all you can hear. But through the commotion you can’t miss one Canadian voice reverberating across the pitch, growling orders at his teammates to hit this or carry that or just to get their legs moving. It belongs to John Moonlight, Canada’s brawny captain and their best, most reliable athlete. He plays every minute of every game, and in the course of half a dozen years on the sevens circuit, he’s gained notoriety for his penchant to run through tacklers instead of around them. Moonlight stands a shredded six-foot, 230 lb., but he looks small next to some of his teammates, especially Adam Zaruba (six-foot-four, 265 lb.) and Admir Cejvanovic (six-foot-three, 240 lb.), who are known as “the freaks.” But no one has the presence Moonlight does when he’s storming around the pitch. He’s fiercely proud and emotional on the field, and he’s been known to stick up for his teammates even in non-tackle contests like these. After the scrimmage against Fiji, Scholz jokes that it was the first he’s seen in which the captain hasn’t started a fight. “Well, yeah, sometimes they can get a little heated,” says Moonlight, who was a World Series all-star last season. “It starts as just a touch game, then next thing you know someone throws a shoulder, then there’s a stiff arm, then someone’s getting tackled, then everyone’s pissed off and it just keeps building until it’s basically a full game. We’re not going to let anyone push us around.”

Later on, players in sweatpants and T-shirts hobble around the 18th floor of the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino, Canada’s home base for the tournament. All of the team’s rooms are on this floor, mixed in with those of tourists, which can be an issue late at night when partiers return to the floor and cause all sorts of disturbances while the players are sleeping off their long days of work. Hotel security is less responsive than one would like under the circumstances. It’s Vegas, after all.

Maybe no one has it worse than the team’s affable physiotherapist, Danielle Mah, who woke up one night to the stench of cannabis fumes creeping in from under an adjoining door, hot-boxing her spacious room. Mah has the largest room of anyone with the team, primarily because it belongs more to the team than it does to her. It’s part trainer’s room, part film-study room, part players’ lounge and part storage facility for Gatorade, balls, water bottles, supplements, food, ultrasound equipment and a host of other miscellany that the team travels with. Mah just happens to sleep there.

Tonight she’s got her trainer’s table set up and is working on Mike Fuailefau, a third-year veteran who plays with more force than grace, a style that lends itself to spending an awful lot of time on Mah’s table. Of all the injuries he carries—no rugby player is ever fully healthy—it’s his back that bothers him the most. He walks gingerly into the room, his body curved like an S, takes off his shirt and lies down for 10 to 15 minutes of pure torture. She digs her fists into his muscles and yanks appendages to get Fuailefau to a place where he can take the field in as little pain as possible. Fuailefau’s father played rugby for his home country of Samoa decades ago. He met a girl while working as a missionary in San Francisco and moved with her to B.C., where Mike was born. He’s currently back in Samoa having back surgery himself. “Yeah, I guess [bad backs] run in the family,” Fuailefau says before retiring to his room to sleep on the floor because it hurts too much to lie in bed. “Or rugby players, at least.”

While his players are getting treatment upstairs, Liam Middleton is sitting against a wall on the second floor of the Monte Carlo—one of the rare spots in Las Vegas where a rugby coach can find the elusive combination of reliable Wi-Fi and quiet—talking on FaceTime with his wife, Sarah, and his two young sons, Struan, two, and Ethan, one. Middleton, a Zimbabwean, officially took Canada’s head coaching job last September, but streams of immigration red tape meant he missed the first tournament of the season and didn’t even meet his team until a week before the second leg of the World Series in Dubai. While he was trying to get a handle on his new squad, Middleton was also moving his young family to Victoria from his native country. “It’s tough for them already, being in a new place,” Middleton says. “Then I go on the road for a couple weeks. It’s not easy. Especially with my sons. You go home and they’ve changed massively in just two weeks.”

The 37-year-old coached his home country’s sevens team and worked as director of the Zimbabwe Rugby Union before accepting the Canadian job. His task is to raise the program to a world-class standard, a goal he knows won’t be achieved overnight. The players on his team are looking to the 2016 Rio Olympics, but Middleton is already looking past that, to Tokyo 2020. “We’ve got to be mindful of the fact that we’ve only really been competitive for the second half of last season. If you look at the four years previous, we were probably where we are now,” Middleton says of the squad that currently sits 13th in World Series standings. “One half-season doesn’t set you up for an expectation. Four years sets you up for an expectation.”

In other words, there is much work to be done in terms of physicality, mentality and identifying the players who can take Canada to the next level. But Middleton is confident he can get the program there. “The one thing about this group is they certainly represent fantastic team culture. Their work ethic is unquestionable. Their courage and determination is outstanding. That’s more valuable than a lot of other things,” Middleton says. “That’s why I’m so positive about the future. Because this group of players, this team, can get significantly better. They’ve got the foundation, which is team spirit, culture and work ethic. And they’ve got that in abundance.”

One of Middleton’s most promising pieces also happens to be his team’s most inexperienced player, Liam Underwood, a 23-year-old who had only played 15-a-side rugby until a week prior to the Vegas tournament, when he stepped onto a sevens field for the first time in Wellington, coming off the bench against New Zealand of all teams. “It was like, ‘I’ve watched these guys play on TV,’” says Underwood, who is completing a CFA program online when he isn’t playing rugby. “Now I’m trying to tackle them. It’s a little crazy.” Underwood is like many on the Canadian roster in that he plays both the 15-a-side and sevens versions of the game. He’s played in six games for Canada’s 15-a-side team so far, including a pair of starts at the crucial ball-distributing fly-half position against Japan and Georgia last year. He’s sublimely talented and does things on the rugby field that can’t be taught. He scored three tries in Wellington and was a fixture in Middleton’s starting lineup by the end of the tournament. “He’s never played on this stage before in his life, and he’s immediately one of our most influential players,” Middleton says. “That’s phenomenally impressive.”

Underwood is a core piece of Rugby Canada’s future, and plays arguably the most important position on the field in the 15-a-side game. But you have to wonder if he’s being spread too thin. He’s already missed significant time in his career due to concussions, and this year, he’ll likely be asked to play with the sevens team throughout the rest of the World Series and at the Olympic qualifier in June, along with 15-a-side duties at this summer’s Pacific Nations Cup and this fall’s Rugby World Cup in England. That’s a lot of high-grade rugby, and the Canadian program has to weigh the short-term benefits of giving Underwood sevens experience now and helping the team in the World Series, while keeping in mind the long-term goal of keeping him fresh for 15-a-side duty. The world’s top rugby countries mostly feature specialists who stick to one version of the sport. But Canada doesn’t have the luxury of that kind of depth. Not that Underwood minds. “I want to play as much rugby as possible. I’d like to be involved with the World Cup, I’d like to be involved with the Olympics. Who wouldn’t?”

It’s Friday, the first day of the tournament, and Canada has three important games ahead, escalating in difficulty. Three wins will get them out of their pool and into the Cup quarterfinals for the first time this season. Two might. One won’t. Kenya and England today, then Argentina on Saturday morning. With about four hours ’til kickoff against Kenya, much of the team is sprawled out in the lobby, stretching on the ground and against the walls as country music plays from an iPod dock. Around the corner in the team room, Tupac blasts as Mah tapes ankles and gives players their final treatments. Fuailefau gets the worst of it, gripping the side of the table as Mah leans into his back, swearing under his breath as she gets up on her toes and really digs in. “I know, I know—it has to be done,” she says. “Just breathe. Focus. Breathe. Just think, nothing’s going to hurt more today than this.”

Right before they leave the Monte Carlo, the team crams into Mah’s room, some sitting on the bed, some on the floor. The mood is more serious than it’s been all week. Calum Ramsay, the team’s bearded performance analyst, plays a highlight tape of Canada’s best moments from the Wellington tournament a week earlier. A big Moonlight tackle; a slick offload by Fuailefau; Underwood’s first try on the circuit. It runs for five minutes before Middleton gives his final speech. “There’s no doubting from those five minutes what a good side we are, and what we’re damn good at,” he says. “If we represent on the field all of our values and bind them together with work ethic, then I don’t think there’s anyone who can take us on.”

At the stadium, the locker rooms are cramped. They’ve stuffed the tournament into Sam Boyd Stadium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which is designed to house two football teams, not 16 rugby teams. This means sacrifices must be made. Canada’s dressing room is really half a room—a black cloth partition runs down the middle, separating them from the Brazilian team on the other side. The teams share a doorway, and every time a player enters or exits, the partition gets edged a little further back. Canada’s team manager, Brian Hunter, does what he can to make the space neat and workable, even hanging a Canadian flag over the black partition. The players can only focus on one thing—Kenya.

Off the opening kickoff, Canada moves the ball out wide to Underwood, who takes on two Kenyan defenders before feeding Moonlight, who runs the ball 70 metres up the wing and in for a try. Two minutes later, Underwood finds himself with the ball again on the same wing and calmly sidesteps two Kenyan defenders to break the line before cruising past a third for his first Vegas try. It’s a fantastic start, and although the Kenyans try to claw back, the Canadians are well in control of the game with two minutes remaining, up 21–12. And then, suddenly, they aren’t. Rugby sevens is a crazy sport, one that can turn on its head in an instant. Momentum swings wildly and leads vanish as quickly as they’re earned. Fighting through some desperate Canadian tackling, the Kenyans punch a try in with a minute and a half left to play, then, with 40 seconds left on the clock, they earn a turnover through some dubious—perhaps even illegal—work at a breakdown out of sight of the referee, and power over the line as time expires to win the game by a single point.

Moonlight punches a try-zone marker as he walks off the field, leading his team into a huddle halfway between the sidelines and the dressing room, their cleats clacking on the hard concrete. You can practically see the flames in his eyes. “You better dig deep for the next one,” he barks at his teammates. “Find it inside you to give everything you have in that game.”

The players grumble off to a cool-down room, some of them riding bikes, others sitting quietly and stretching. It’s deathly silent, but in about 15 minutes, when the players file into the meal room for Subway sandwiches, they’re talking again, watching video of the game on laptops and analyzing what went wrong. The Kenyans eat not far away, still bubbling from their comeback. “There are so many highs and lows in a weekend. When you play this sport, you really learn how to work through the lows and ride the highs,” Moonlight says. “You just don’t have time to sulk or feel sorry for yourself.”

The start of the England game two hours later is disheartening, as the English score off the opening kickoff and make it 12–0 before the game is three minutes old. But Canada gets a try right before the end of the half and another early in the second to draw to within two. The game goes back and forth from there until, with less than two minutes remaining, Canada spins the ball out to the wing, where the massive converted football player Zaruba takes it on with a full head of steam, sizing up England forward James Rodwell, the biggest player on his team at six-foot-five, 225 lb., and brushing him aside like a shower curtain as he heads toward the goal line. Another England defender clings to Zaruba’s hips, desperately trying to bring the big man down, but the Canadian simply drags the tackler along as he dives toward the line and scores the try that will give Canada the lead and, eventually, the win. All four teams in Canada’s pool are 1-1—a relative rarity on the circuit—setting up a pair of do-or-die games on Saturday, with two Cup quarterfinal berths on the line.

You can feel the floor rumbling underneath a magnificent chandelier in Ballroom 5 of the Monte Carlo as Team Canada sprints back and forth, striding across the long, carpeted room, throwing hard, crisp passes as they go. It’s 9 a.m. on Saturday and, like all elite athletes, Canada’s sevens players’ warm-ups are more intense than your hardest workouts. It’s called activation: waking the body up physically by pushing it through strenuous exercise, stretching and hand-eye coordination drills. It’s supposed to set the stage for their entire day.

Two hours later, in their cramped dressing room at Sam Boyd, the team sits around in full kit, listening to music, trying to stay loose. Team Canada has a particular affinity for ubiquitous pop songs, which explains why Tal Bachman’s “She’s So High”—high above me, she’s so lovely—is blaring out of the iPod dock. Television and movies might have you believe that these pre-game moments are scored by intense, aggressive music, meant to amp players up as much as possible. But at this level, in a sport as emotionally trying as this, the goal is to keep things loose, not tight. So the players take their caffeine and gnaw on their energy chews as John Legend and Phantom Planet echo off the walls, only breaking for a quick video session and chalk talk from Middleton, who has been watching film all morning and points out some areas in the Argentinian defence he thinks his players can exploit. “It’s all on us now, boys. We go out there, we attack and we score. That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. Let’s f—–g do this,” Moonlight says before breaking the huddle and leading his team into the tunnel.

The Argentinians are a strong side, small but tough with plenty of speed and a nose for contact. But right from the whistle it becomes clear this isn’t going to be their day. They turn the ball over off the opening kickoff, and soon after, when they have Canada pinned deep in their own end, Fuailefau draws in a pair of defenders and absorbs a hard hit as he feeds Scholz up the left wing, who, as an Argentinian drags him down, flips a pass behind his back to a streaking Moonlight, who takes the ball 60 metres for the opening try. The second half starts with Moonlight taking the ball flat-footed and simply muscling his way out of a bad situation, stiff-arming three Argentinians to the ground before a shoelace tackle stops him just short of the tryline. Moonlight’s warpath creates all kinds of space, which leads to Underwood’s second try of the game, and that’s all the Canadians need in a 24–7 romp to their first Cup quarterfinal of the season. After the game, Moonlight is as fired up as ever. “We won that game up here and in here,” he sternly tells his teammates in a huddle, pointing to his head and his heart. “We deserve this. This is our tournament. Let’s keep it going.”

Just like last year, the Canadians have rallied in Las Vegas and fought their way into the top eight, their best result of the season. For that reason alone, the tournament is already a success. But they don’t want to stop there. They want to get back into the top four, the stage they reached twice last season. Their opponent in the Cup quarterfinal is a familiar one—a team they love to beat and hate to lose to; a team incredibly similar to their own. “It’s funny, as we’ve gotten better over the last few years, so have the States. The games with them used to just be slugfests and raw emotion. It’s still a bit of that, but there’s also a fair amount of skill,” says Conor Trainor, who’s in his sixth year on the sevens circuit and has played the Americans enough times to know what to expect later that night. “Playing them is always fun. Especially when we win.”

The game will be the last on Saturday, played at 6:30 p.m. under a setting sun and the bright lights of a stadium that’s as full as its been all weekend. It’s cold in Canada’s dressing room now, the desert cool creeping in as the sun fades away. By fortune of playing in the last game of the day, Canada at least has use of the full room now, the black cloth partition pushed back to the wall with the Canadian flag still draped over it. Middleton sits in a corner, making notes. Moonlight sits with his back to his locker stall, his eyes closed as he leans his head on the wall. Underwood watches film with his teammate Patrick Kay, his left knee bouncing up and down. As hard as the Canadians have worked all week, there are two things in rugby you can’t truly prepare for—atmosphere and luck. From early in the game, it’s clear that neither of those will be working in Canada’s favour. The stadium is electric. The American faithful have turned out in droves, though there’s a sizable Canadian contingent as well. Everything is buzzing as the teams line up in the tunnel, and loud fireworks shoot out of the scoreboard. That’s the cue to take the pitch. Although rugby is not a North American sport, the games between Canada and the U.S. never disappoint. What makes this game even more crucial is the fact that every player on the field knows that, come June, they’ll be playing each other for a spot in the Olympics. For the right to live out their dreams. Whichever side is playing better going into that game will carry confidence with them. And in sevens, that can be the difference.

But then there’s the luck. After the game’s opening try by U.S. forward Danny Barrett—a diving effort that perhaps shouldn’t have counted, as the video replay showed Moonlight made a great covering tackle to knock him out of bounds milliseconds before he touched the ball down—the next two kickoffs both take unexpected, fortuitous bounces for the United States, gifting them open running lanes to the try zone and an early 15–0 lead. All three tries went to the same left corner of the try zone, and with a couple of minutes left in the first half, it feels like the stadium is collapsing in on the Canadians. Then, off the next kickoff, they finally manage to secure the ball, and Fuailefau sends a routine outlet pass to a completely uncovered Underwood, who lets it bounce right off his hands for a knock-on. The crowd is all over him for the glaring mental error. In the second half, Underwood throws a blind, one-handed, behind-the-back pass to no one in order to avoid a crushing hit. His pass is intercepted by an American and turned into a try less than a minute later. The Americans are up 20–0 with four minutes to play, and for the rest of the game, the Canadians barely touch the ball as the U.S. runs them out of the park. As the final whistle blows, Fuailefau looks to his teammates on the sideline and puts his index finger in his mouth like it’s a gun.

The dressing room after the loss is rough, but not as bad as it was after the Kenya game. Players are more flabbergasted than anything. Most of them can’t believe that things went so wrong; they feel like they haven’t even played a game. As if it was all a dream, like everything around them was conspiring to make them fail.

One player who isn’t talking at all is Underwood, who sits at his stall, dejected. Bright-red cleat marks run up his legs and across his back, physical reminders of how punishing this sport can be. He fiddles with his red socks and stares blankly into the distance until Middleton, who had been debriefing with Moonlight, makes his way over and sits next to his young star. “How did that feel?” Middleton asks, gently. “Not good. I did some stupid stuff,” Underwood responds. Middleton asks Underwood to go over the stupid stuff, and he obliges, reliving the dropped ball in the first half and the misguided blind pass in the second. Middleton talks him through his chagrin. “I wanted to impart the confidence that I have in him. You look at what he does, the tackles he makes, the breaks he makes, the tries he scores. If you add all that up, he’s probably in our top two or three most influential players. That’s a phenomenal achievement, and I wanted him to know that,” Middleton says. “Sure, he made some blinding errors in the U.S.A. game. But he’s an intelligent enough guy to know that you make those once and you learn from them. You get better.”

Sunday is a weird day. Eliminated from the Cup competition, the Canadians compete for the Plate with the other three teams ranked five through eight. It’s not the trophy they wanted, but the players will still earn a cash bonus for winning it, and the team will gain a few extra points in the standings as they battle to get out of the basement. They have to find a way to get past the disappointment of the loss to the Americans.

It doesn’t go well. The opposing Australians are well-drilled and play terrific defence, holding the Canadians scoreless as they cruise to victory and end Canada’s tournament. The Canadians earn 10 points in the standings for their efforts, pulling within two of Kenya for 12th place. (The Americans finish fourth in Vegas to move into seventh place on the circuit.) But they live with the knowledge that they could’ve done so much more. It’s deflating. Both physically and emotionally, the Canadians are spent. “It’s up here boys,” Moonlight says in the team’s final huddle of the tournament, tapping his head. “We didn’t want it enough. We know we’re better than that team. We know we are. It’s the little things that are losing us these tournaments. Boys, we know how good we are. Hold your heads high. If we clean up the little stuff, we can be playing in Cup finals. We know we can do it. Let’s go thank the fans.”

Thanking the supporters is a tradition at the end of every weekend in Vegas, the only tournament on the circuit where the fans sit so close to the field that it feels like they’re coming down on you. There are only about five feet between the sidelines and the first row of fans, and it’s in that space, while Fiji and South Africa play their Cup semifinal, that the Canadian team slowly does a lap around the stadium, reaching up to the fans who hang over the railings with cellphone cameras ready and paraphernalia to sign. Moonlight hops up onto the edge of the barrier to wrap his arms around two fans and flash a toothy grin. Zaruba, so big he’s almost on the same level as the spectators sitting six feet above him, signs a flag draped over the barrier. Fuailefau and Sean White mean-mug for a selfie.

The smell of rugby is still there; just as it was at the beginning of the week, which seems like ages ago. The players can relax now, for a bit. Return to home base at Rugby Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Langford, B.C., to rehab injuries, decompress, see the people they love. But they won’t get far from the game. The film from Vegas will be loaded onto their iPads before they even leave the Monte Carlo. Soon, the Series will call again, as it always does. Time for another leg; time for another continent; time to push their minds and bodies to further limits. As they circle
the pitch, they all know: six weeks ’til Hong Kong.