“I ran through everything, and I ran through everybody. “They threw me the ball and told me to run,” she recalls. (Canadian and US gridiron football developed from rugby.) The person described the sport-which she’d never heard of-as a cross between soccer and football, the game she longed to play. She planned to try out for the Badgers’ basketball team, until someone at a party encouraged her to check out rugby. But by the time she entered the University of Wisconsin Law School, she missed team competition. Even in co-ed pursuits, though, she said, she found that “girls were not encouraged in the way boys were.”ĭuring her undergraduate years at Alabama State University, she set aside sports altogether and focused on her double major: political science and speech communications. Knight yearned to play the latter, but there were no girls teams, so she went out for basketball and tennis. Local kids favored basketball and football. Her mother taught school, her father farmed, and she and her sister picked vegetables to earn money for school clothes. Knight, who now lives in New York City, grew up about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta in Irwinton, Georgia, which she remembers as a place with one stoplight and a single gas station. It might seem odd that a black girl from a town in the South would cross paths with a sport born in the 1800s at England’s Rugby School. A top performer in three World Cup Championships for the USA Eagles, she’s a World Rugby Hall of Famer, and in 2010 she was named USA Rugby Player of the Decade. But what cements her place in history is her excellence in rugby. Olympic bobsled team taught rugby to incarcerated youth at New York’s infamous Rikers Island jail and shot a scene in a forthcoming Halle Berry film. “Off with one hat and on with a new one,” she says, adding, “Why not?”Įclectic goals keep her life percolating. That’s how she graduated law school but pursued a professional rugby career. And it’s how she got wooed out of retirement in her mid-40s to train in mixed martial arts (MMA). Occasionally, Phaidra Knight gets blown off course, abandons the plan and charts a new adventure.
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