7 Rugby World Cup roars in AT & T Park

One of the world's biggest sporting events arrives in the Bay Area this weekend. It starts Friday and continues on Sunday. And no, this is not the revenge of the Giants-A at the Oakland Coliseum, but we are all looking forward to seeing Lou Trivino and Alen Hanson face each other in a pressure situation.

No, while the A's welcome the Bridge Series Bay, the Giants Park will be reconfigured for a very different sport. A more muscular sport. A tougher and more physical sport. And by the standards of the world stage, a more popular version.

Here is the Rugby World Cup.

"It will be a huge weekend for rugby in America," said American player Stephen Tomasin. phone on Tuesday. "It's going to be on NBC Sports, so it's going to be televised nationally, and they're expecting more than 100,000 people through the gates over the three days."

Rugby, like cricket and Formula 1 racing and even football to a certain extent, is a sport that exists on the other side. While places like Fiji and New Zealand are raising rugby to a quasi-religious experience, Americans are generally eyebrows and watch suspiciously.

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

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

Rugby is exotica, tied just tightly enough to American football to reveal its eccentricities – like the protracted throws of the scrum and the airborne players of the line-outs. And even if you watched rugby, you may not have seen this version. The sport is usually divided into two forms, 15-a-side and seven-a-side.

Rugby 15s is the oldest and most revered version. But the biggest rugby event in the world, the competition at the Summer Olympics, is a seven men event. It is also the second largest concert in the world: the World Cup.

With fewer players on the field, rugby sevens is a faster, smoother and sharper game. The games are crazy short, with halves of seven minutes. "What makes him very much made-up If you go down, it's hard to come back, and vice versa," said Tomasin.

He noted that USA Rugby has equipped its players with small square GPS units that they carry on their backs. The data generated by the technology shows that players run between 1,400 and 2,000 meters per game. It's a lot in 14 minutes of action, especially when you know that nobody moves much during the scrums. This is a good choice for someone like Tomasin, whose 198 pounds of fast-twitch muscle do not make him one of the greatest players in a sport dominated by the thickness .