…Continued from the previous post.

Without question, the USA is the finest rugby sevens team on the planet. I mean, just look at what they did to poor Uraguay.

Wait, hold that thought…OK, it’s Japan that’s the premiere team. I mean, Guyana never had a chance to…

Hang on, hang on. Wow! Canada is really putting the hammer down on poor France. These guys are pretty much unbeatable…except by Scotland, who seemed not to have much trouble doing so. Or was that Wales? But didn’t they lose to Kenya? Who lost to New Zealand…and England?

Welcome to the IRB Rugby World Series, and its USA Sevens tournament, in sun-drenched Las Vegas. To become that confused about what countries rule the world of rugby sevens, you’d think I would had to have seen a lot of teams play. And I had.

I mean, I’d been there for over an hour.

It doesn’t take too much more than that to see over half the 16-team field in a rugby sevens tournament-slash-festival. Fourteen minutes of running time per match helps with that. Two teams take the field, and then alternate between running around wildly and tag team wrestling for about as long as it takes to figure out which color uniform belongs to which team. Then time runs out, the teams shake hands, and two more squads come in off the assembly line.

It’s enough to make somebody with Attention Deficit Disorder exclaim “That’s it? Is that all there is? I wasn’t done watching yet!”

Helpless to figure out which team was leading in the pursuit of what piece of kitchenware (Cup, Bowl, Plate, and something called a Shield), I had decided after a while to simply soak it all in. And as soon as I made that decision, I was rewarded with the best match of the day. Kenya and Australia had spent almost their entire allotted fourteen minutes of play time sprinting up and down the field and rolling up an impressive 40 points. The score was 21-19 in favor of the Aussies when time expired, and the “hooter” sounded.

Except that didn’t end the match.

See, a game isn’t over until a ball has “gone dead” via a change of possession or other stoppage in play. And those determined Kenyans, who held the ball at the time, were not about to let that happen. So on and on… and on…they went for several long minutes, probing with one offensive surge after another. They just…would…not…give…up. I fully expected the Stanford band to appear on the field at any moment, when finally and amazingly, Kenya managed to lunge just barely over the try line (goal line) – and in so doing, to win the match.

Everyone on both teams lie on the field totally spent for several minutes afterward as the wildly appreciative crowd noise washed over them in waves. I wondered if the Aussies would ever get up. I also wondered how the Kenyans would ever be able to regroup in time to play in the tournament’s Plate final – and sure enough, they went down readily to Samoa in that match, 26-17. I’m not even sure they got any silverware for their efforts.

But it truly was something to behold.

Samoa was a story in and of itself. This tiny island nation came into Las Vegas as the event’s defending champion, with a rabid fan base and something to prove to those who were thinking “fluke”. They made quick work of Argentina, 26-14, and you wondered who in the world – literally – they had lost to earlier in the tournament that had put them in this more or less “consolation” Plate bracket. (The answer:  Fiji had beaten them 17-12 the previous evening.)

It had taken me a while, but I was finally beginning to trace the lineage of each team’s two-day journey through the field. Left to my own devices however, I couldn’t figure out which piece of hardware made which team THE champions of the USA Sevens. Fresh off of Super Bowl XLV, I thought Bowl perhaps? Nope. OK, let’s think more globally.

Got it! Isn’t the planet’s most popular sporting event the World Cup? That had to be it. But when it came time to contest the tournament’s four finals, the Cup final was the first one on tap. Hmmmm…

But there it was, in all of its counter-intuitive-ness. With much fanfare, Fiji and South Africa were introduced as “the top two teams”, and commenced to play a ten minute first half. I had read that the only match in a tournament that consisted of more than seven-minute halves was the Big One. So this Cup final, with three other matches still to be played, was for all the marbles. Why?

If there’s just one thing I’ve learned in this little year-long expedition, it’s that when something doesn’t quite square in a sporting event, start looking for television trucks. And sure enough, there was my answer. It turned out that the ultimate match was being played in the fourth-from-ultimate time slot because…well, because NBC said so. So there.

The Cup final presented a study in opposites. Fiji was huge and immensely physical, and when they had the ball, they literally bulled their way down the field. South Africa was far quicker though, and took full advantage of their speed to score the first 12 points of the match.

Fiji asserted itself though, and carried the ball, the South Africans, and a half-dozen vendors who had wandered too close to the scrum in for a score and conversion that cut the score to 12-7. South Africa barely blinked, and tacked on 7 points at the end of the half to go up 19-7.

With six minutes left, Fiji managed to cut that to 19-14, but South Africa put the match away shortly thereafter. The final score was 24-14, and especially in contrast with some of the preceding matches, it was pretty devoid of Kenyan-esque drama.

By the end of the contest, I felt pretty confident in making the bold statement that the nature of the sevens game is that much more often than not, fast will beat big. In 15-a-side rugby, it’s probably a different story, but that’s an event for another day.

Despite the fact that three more finals matches were to follow, a decent portion of the crowd began to file out of the stadium bowl and into the adjacent festival fairground. I however, felt it was my patriotic duty to stay and watch the USA team play Japan in the Shield final. After all, this was the second most important match to be played all day. Or was it the third? Or maybe it was the fourth. No matter — “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”

The home team’s run to glory in the USA Sevens had ended about 14 minutes after it started on the previous afternoon, when in their first game of the tournament they had the unfortunate luck to be matched up against South Africa – and got blown out, 27-5. A few hours later, they lost to Samoa 28-12. USA, this is the consolation bracket; consolation bracket, this is the USA.

With one more shot at hardware, the Americans came out and scored right away on a neatly executed breakaway. They converted for a 7-0 lead, and then turned right around and did it again to go up 14-0. Japan regrouped and put a score on the board on the final play of the half to cut the margin in half. Shortly after the second half kickoff though, Team USA effectively ended Japan’s hopes for victory, on a play that curiously enough, looked exactly like this…

As the early Spring afternoon shadows stretched further and further across the field, I started packing up to join the rest of Los Angeles on I-15, as we began crawling out of Nevada and back to the coast. It had been my fifth trip to Las Vegas since October, and I had yet to lose a bet – or wake up with a tiger in my hotel room.

All in all, I think I beat the house.

Next Up:  Thursday! Thursday! Thursday! The National Hot Rod Association’s Winternationals