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.
In 2019, they held their first Pride-themed game at the stadium. They had redesigned the team’s jerseys to incorporate the rainbow, and they invited a drag queen, Miss Ivy Rose, as pregame entertainment. In the end, the owners sold more jerseys, not fewer, and the event was so successful that they now hold a Pride-themed game every year.
This year, they dedicated their season to trans rights and invited a trans woman, India Willoughby, to become the club’s patron, someone who supports and promotes the team. She received a standing ovation at the stadium.
I wondered, still, what the Cougars’ stadium was like in reality; over the course of the following months, I attended half a dozen games to get a sense of how accurate Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Garcia’s assessment was. My 6-year-old son, never one to miss a day out, decided he was coming with me. He wanted to know what a journalist did. I told him that the idea, more or less, was to notice things. He appointed himself my official “noticer.” He was paid in candy.
The things one or the other of us noticed included: the dents in the roof at the stadium, Cougar Park, that had been left by stray rugby balls; the players greeting Mr. Garcia with a hug and a kiss on the cheek; and dozens of fans, drinking plastic pints of lager while clad in bright rainbow jerseys. In my six months of reporting, I did not hear or see a single note of objection to the Cougars’ new identity and message of inclusivity.
In a way, that presented a problem for my article. It was not, really, a case of a gay couple overcoming adversity to succeed. They had not needed to win over the town.
The tension was not between the protagonists and various antagonists but between the protagonists and the prejudice of the reader: the disconnect between how we might assume a place like Keighley would react and what actually happened. (Also challenging: explaining the intricate but fascinating differences between Rugby League and Rugby Union, its inferior but more popular cousin.)
It took the expert touch of three editors — Claire Gutierrez, Mike Wilson and Andrew Das — to pick that delicate path, trimming away the excess, accentuating the meaning, allowing the drama to build.
My last visit to the Cougars was a few days after the article was published. The season did not end as Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Garcia had hoped: They lost their last game, to an excellent team from Hunslet. They are now condemned to at least one more year in the third tier of England’s Rugby League system.
Still, the owners seemed relatively happy. They recently told me they had received a surprising number of orders for jerseys from the United States. Two members of staff from the club shop had to spend four hours in the post office, packing them up.
Perhaps the idea that places are not always what we think was more global than I had assumed.
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