GRR: Men Senior Rugby
Most of us now know Brian Vizard as the head of the US Rugby Football Foundation, and as a TV announcer and analyst, but before all of that, Viz was the captain of the USA team.
In a time when the best of thw West Coast often came from California exclusively, Jeff Lombard was an outlier.
A big, powerful flanker from Western Washington University, the lifetime Northwesterner cut his teeth in the always imposing British Columbia league, and forced his way onto the USA national team at a time when playing in Washington and BC was a quick road to obscurity.
Jay Hanson’s story is a classic one of the early days of the modern era of American rugby.
He found rugby where he could, and continued to perform at a high level whenever he did so. He played in high school in Maryland when that wasn’t really a thing. He attended TCU and found a club in Fort Worth to play for.
Tony Ridnell was the pride of Old Puget Sound Beach and was the towering force on their back row and 7s forward pack as Beach began a run of four national 7s club championships in five years.
Don Guest was an athletic wing for Cal in the 1960s and 1970s and continued to play at the highest level years after.
A relatively big wing for his time (5-11, 185), Guest was multi-skilled—he set a Cal football record for longest punt return ever with a thumping 108-yard effort—and was a key part of a very successful University of California tour of Australia in 1971.
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