Craigwell swaps NFL dream for sevens

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Sitting in a Boston diner early last year, Miles Craigwell picked up his phone and did what American rugby bosses hope is a sign of things to come.

The 24-year-old had been playing American football since he was five years old. He wasn't bad either, an Ivy League all-star at Brown University and good enough to go into the NFL draft.

An outside linebacker, his specialty was smashing wide receivers, quick enough to be a track runner, big enough to pass as a bodybuilder, but missing the X-factor needed to break into the big league.

The dream was still alive, paid a reasonable wage as a practice player after being drafted by the Miami Dolphins, but unfulfilled somehow as an athlete.

"So I came up from Miami where I'd been training and working out and I was eating in a diner when the national collegiate sevens was on TV," he said yesterday. "I was just struck by the athleticism, the pace of the game, the athletes out there and I thought `this is what I want to do'.

"I called up my agent right there and said: 'I'm watching rugby on TV, collegiate sevens, get in touch with whoever you need to so I can play this sport'."

A few months later Craigwell was trying out his new sport at the NYAC/Spearhead Academy in Minnesota and discovered that not only were there quality athletes involved, but there was a pathway to the Olympic Games.

"I'd only really seen it [rugby] during the weekends, just older guys out on the pitch on Saturday. I didn't know it was so competitive, that they had great athletes, that it was a big sport in the States.

"I didn't know it was an Olympic sport, but my agent had always talked about rugby because he was studying in London at one point and said if the NFL doesn't work out there is always rugby.

"I had always brushed it off till I saw it on TV and thought `this is actually something I could play, it seems like fun'."

THIS week at the NZI sevens in Wellington, Craigwell will play his third tournament on the IRB world series, proof of the power of rugby's new-found exposure on American television network NBC.

Still in his prime, he's also a hint of the athletic talent from American football that has previously wasted away on the fringes on the NFL.

He's not the first to discover sevens either after Leonard Peters, a former Chicago Bear, played for the American sevens side last season and has now graduated to the USA 15-a-side team.

Craigwell knows the money available in rugby is not on the same scale as the NFL, but says money has never been the primary motivation of his sporting ambition. A graduate in business economics from Brown, he is the co-president of film and production company, Beyond Measure Productions, which is run by his brother.

So, though he'd love to forge a career in XVs, he is realistic in his immediate goals, having had just one game in rugby's traditional format. "I enjoyed it. It reminded me of American football with the pace, the stop and start.

"I liked the wing because there wasn't as much fitness involved. It was just `get the ball and go to work', 100 per cent speed and energy, whereas in sevens, it's like a track meet and you get the ball when you are dead tired.

"Three or four good seconds of focus, that's what my football coach used to say, this is 14 minutes of focus. That's the biggest adjustment, aside from the physical difference of the shoulder pads and helmet."

- © Fairfax NZ News