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A Spectator to a Team Celebrating Pride
In 2019, a gay couple bought an English rugby team, and the community immediately embraced them. Rory Smith witnessed the unexpected camaraderie.
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My job title at The New York Times is, on reflection, probably a touch too grand. Officially, I’m a global sports correspondent, but that’s not the sort of title you can mention to people and expect them not to assume you’re boasting. “Correspondent” sounds serious. “Sports” sounds fun. “Global” probably involves hotels.
The job can be quite intimidating. There are a lot of sports and a reasonable amount of globe. Global sports correspondents should ultimately concern themselves with the seismic, the urgent and, crucially, the far-flung. They should not necessarily devote several months of reporting to a story that can conveniently be combined with a trip to the municipal dump.
But if that’s where the story is, there isn’t much choice. I had long wanted to write about the Keighley Cougars, a Rugby League team roughly 17 minutes from my home in Yorkshire, England. In 2019, the club was bought by Ryan O’Neill and Kaue Garcia, a married couple. That made them the only openly gay owners of an elite men’s sports team in Europe.
For that barrier to be broken in Keighley felt significant. In the north of England, there are lots of places like Keighley: towns and cities that were once extremely prosperous, their fortunes woven in wool or worsted, and eventually hollowed out by the loss first of industry, then opportunity and, in many cases, hope.
What initially piqued my interest, though, was hearing that the owners had found Keighley to be quite different from what they expected. The town welcomed them. The owners flew the rainbow Pride flag from nearly every available surface at the stadium. The fans and the surrounding community immediately embraced the new owners.
When I first met the team’s owners this spring, that was the picture they painted. Sitting in the single hospitality suite at Cougar Park, they described how the town had surprised them at every turn.
