Baker broke out for one of the best tries of the year against Fiji, and is ready to help sevens grow in the U.S.
Perry Baker plays on the United States rugby sevens team. He is known primarily for being fast, unusually fast even for a game where players run three miles at full speed in practice regularly. Baker is fast enough to look remarkably fast even against some of the best competition in the world, as he did in a spectacular try against Fiji in March. He is also elusive enough in the open field to break ankles—sometimes six at a time, if necessary.
Baker is currently in training with Team USA in their buildup to the 2018 Rugby Sevens World Cup. He talked with us about transitioning from football to rugby sevens, how the sport could take off in the United States, and about being famous. (Famous in Fiji, at least.)
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
First of all, how’s training going?
Perry Baker: Pretty good. We finished base camp on Tuesday, and started advanced camp today.
What do you think people don’t get about the intensity of rugby sevens training?
PB: Spot-on, man. They don’t understand the endless aerobic fitness stuff we have to do in conditioning, and then the mental part of it trying to push yourself through certain limits. I tell my fiancée all the time. She says “you have training” like it’s nothing, she doesn’t really understand what I mean. Like we’ll have a day off, and I’ll get a massage and she says “oh you’re getting pampered.” And I’m like, you don’t really understand what camp was like a day ago!
You played college football [at Fairmont State University] and you played in the NFL [with the Eagles] and the AFL [with the Pittsburgh Power]. Do people think you’re just out there doing football style wind sprints and that’s it?
PB: Honestly I don’t know what they believe other than that it’s just not that hard, you know? You gotta think about it. In football, the average play lasts four seconds, just four seconds all out. In rugby, it’s seven minutes non-stop. Yeah, you might have a lineout or something that stops play for a second. But you gotta run to get in position for it, and it’s a fast lineout. You’re up in the air, moving, full-speed, full-tilt, gone. You gotta be well-conditioned, and how you get in that kind of shape is pretty unbelievable.
In 2006, you really start looking at rugby, right?
PB: Yeah.
What was your experience transitioning to the sport, both psychologically and physically?
PB: It is definitely a big transition, because no matter what your sport is you’re training differently for this. From a football standpoint, it’s totally different from how you train for rugby because you have to be just a non-stop kind of fit. We get guys who come in from Fifteens rugby and it’s a totally different game for them. We’re trying to get them caught up. We’re running five or six kilometers in a session at full speed. It’s crazy.
You play multiple games in a day. That’s different than football, where you have five or six days between games to get all your working parts in order again. What are you doing to recover in between matches? How does that work?
PB: Our coaches are big on being off your feet when we get off the field, hydration, and stretching. They’re really big on recovery. The moment we get off the field we have a shake made for us and some Gatorade, and we have to finish both of those before we step out of the locker room to eat. We’re also on the bikes even though we just finished running, it’s like a cool-down. Then we get a band and stretch.
We’re really big on nutrition, too. I’m not telling you that I’m the best at trying to eat on days I’m playing? They’re always trying to get me to eat because once I get full I feel like I get sluggish, but my body needs it since I’m going so much.
Rugby is just taking off in the States, but it’s huge internationally. Did you know what you were stepping into, internationally?
PB: I had no idea what I was getting into, honestly. I didn’t know they traveled out of the country as much as they did. I remember when I was at Tiger, they said the boys were out on tour, and I was like, “What do you mean, on tour?” When I got selected for my first trip, I’d never been out of the country like this.
It was exciting to me, though. You get there and you get so many people who love the game of rugby across the world. You see that and think “Man, I wish it’d get like that back in the States. If we can get this game to be this big back in the States, it’d really be something.”
It’s amazing how you can go across the world and find that this is their game. This is their baseball, their football, their basketball or whatever the case may be. This is what they love, and how can you not love it?
You and teammate Carlin Isles are known for being really, really fast. Is there something to the games Americans play—whether it’s football or basketball or whatever—that gives us an advantage in terms of the athletes we bring over to play rugby sevens?
PB: Yes and no? I say we have an advantage because a lot of the stuff we do as rugby athletes do is a crossover from other stuff. In football you need to be able to have vision and agility, and in basketball you’re working in closed small spaces, figuring out how to defend, how to get out of them, stuff like that.
You have to remember, though, that rugby players who grow up playing it have been doing it their whole life. It’s hard to transition over later. It’s hard to jump right in the deep end because the guys who’ve been doing it are working at such a high level. They’re so far ahead of them, and it’s going to be hard to pull them up to their level.
That’s the thing about other countries. They start at such a young age. There are six year olds out there playing, and they are so tough. I mean running through tackles, and stiffarming people, and running people over. These kids are doing that at four and five. You think about football, we start at like six or seven years old. At rugby [in the U.S.], we start people as teenagers.
We’re already playing catchup, no matter who we’ve got on the coaching staff or on the team.
What was the thing that really threw you in learning the game?
PB: I’d say—and I feel like I still kind of struggle with it—but it’d be the aspect of tackling. Rugby is so much about form. If you touch a person’s collar on a tackle you could be sent to the sin bin, so it’s all about tackling. In football, I don’t wait to tackle, I aim at a point and hit it. In rugby, you aim at a point and the next minute your head could be at the wrong spot. You have to be patient in rugby and wait for the right time to make your contact, meaning the right point of contact.
Take this. On Tuesday, we were doing a tackling drill. I had Carlin, and he was right in front of me, and I was in the right spot to make a tackle. The next minute my face is right at his knee, because he just shifted in front of me and moved so quick. I was annoyed because I felt myself wrapping my arms around him, but my face was in the wrong spot. That’s the hard part about tackling in the right spot.
And in rugby you have to do that, because if you don’t you’ll be knocked out all the time, or have a broken neck. For me, that’s always something I worry about: Having my shoulder in the right spot. It’s so tough for me because I’m ready to go in and fire at the legs.
Because that’s what you do in American football all the time.
PB: That’s the thing. How many times in football do you actually see someone wrap up? They try to teach you to bring your hips and wrap up, but watch the game. Most of the time it’s someone diving through the legs, or shoulder-charging someone, or using your helmet. You’re not using your head like that in this game!
The first time I played in a tournament I did that. Everyone erupted like “Sorry, sorry, he didn’t know, it’s his first time!” I went right into a guy’s legs, wiped him out, came right from the side and went BOOM right through him. Now, as I understand the game, when you form tackle it’s so much easier and safer. There’s no high tackling where you’re grabbing someone around the neck.
I struggle with patience, because in football it’s a game of inches and you’re not giving up any ground. In rugby, you can afford to be patient.
Wait, tell me more about this laying out a football hit in a rugby game.
PB: It was in Atlanta, playing South Sevens, playing a team called Old White. This guy is running and he doesn’t see me coming and I just wipe him out, BAM! Right through his legs. As I get up I hear everyone screaming, and see people running towards me, and the ref is like COME HERE and my coach is apologizing like “I didn’t teach him that, it’s his first tournament, I’m sorry” and stuff like that.
A couple of plays later someone went for my manhood. He grabbed me and just yoked it. I mean, so hard my coach yelled at me to check and see if it was still there. I was so scared to look, because I didn’t felt like it was there anymore. It was a payback for what I did kind of deal.
That’s a thing a lot of rugby people will say about football. The hits we think of as normal on a football field would get you kicked out of any rugby match.
PB: I guarantee you this would change the whole mindset in football: If they got rid of helmet and the pads. In rugby, we have no pads. You look at football and parents see pads, and they think it’s safer. People feel like they can run through anything with pads on. Take that stuff off, though, and no one’s doing headfirst tackling and that stuff.
They say we’re crazy for tackling without pads on, but we’re not doing that kind of tackling. I ran into Terrell Owens once and I told him to come play rugby, and he said “Nah, y’all crazy, y’all don’t have no pads on.” It’s a lot safer! We actually have form tackling. Even in Fifteens, in league, and you run up on someone you use your shoulder. You might have a few crazies who use their head and stuff—every sport does—but in rugby they don’t last long
We’re the safer sport.
Who have you played internationally where you thought: “That was definitely an experience?”
PB: I can say a lot of the top teams are definitely like that. New Zealand, they all grow up playing the game, they’re all freaks. You can have young kids come on in the first tournament they’re playing, and you don’t realize that they’re eighteen but they’re so smart you wouldn’t know it. Playing in South Africa, too, that’s just a different experience. But it’s always a different experience, because every country has their own style they play.
What’s a good example of that, if you had to explain it to the layperson? Like, how would you explain playing against Fiji?
PB: The offload is unreal. With them it’s always like, “how did you get the ball off like that, or to that person?” Whenever you watch them, if they have the ball, then you will get a show put on by those guys. Their ball control is just crazy, it’s unreal. People coming out of nowhere. I just watched Jerry Tuwai (Fiji’s Sevens captain) do some crazy stuff in Vancouver. Like, how did the winger even know he was going to get the ball from you? He stepped in, crowded by like three people, and the next minute the ball is just flicked out and everyone turned to go “where did you come from?”
They don’t even look for you. They just put a ball and it’s there. That’s their game. When they have the ball, they’re just flooding from all over with these trick offloads. It’s pretty amazing to watch, man.
I’m glad you mentioned Fiji. I want to talk about the highlight of your try against Fiji. At one point there are three guys crashing down in position to tackle you, and then you juke them, and then they’re gone. Did you know this was going around? Have people asked you about it?
PB: People ask me more about the chasedown in that game. That set the tone for the whole game.
With that going around a bit, and in the run-up to the World Cup, though: Do more people know who you are now, though? And know that we have a Rugby Sevens team that’s doing really well?
PB: I don’t know, honestly. People still don’t really understand that we have rugby. I got a text message from the guy that introduced me to the game. It was a shot from Highly Questionable on ESPN, and it was of them with my name at the bottom and he’s like “Hey, you’re on Highly Questionable.” I was like what, I love that show! I tweet Papi every once in a while because I love that guy.
And when I got home and watched it, they were talking like they didn’t know we have a team. It’s still like people don’t know. It’s hard because we’re not televised like that. We’re on about once a year here. Thank god for the World Cup, because we get a lot of press off that. But people still don’t know.
Do you have an overseas following? Are you big somewhere we don’t know about?
PB: So, if you have the verification on Instagram, you can see where the majority of your followers come from, stuff like that. The majority of my followers are from London.
Really?
PB: Yeah. My percentage is so small in the States.
You’re big in England.
PB: Somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of my followers, yeah.
So you’re huge in the UK.
PB: I was talking to someone about how I want to go to Fiji so bad. I was talking to a few people from there, and they said “if you come to Fiji everyone would instantly know who you are, the whole island would know Perry Baker.” So I get on my social media sites, I get on Facebook, and the majority of the fans on my Facebook are from Fiji.
We need to revise, then. Your tagline for 2018 is “Perry Baker: Big in Fiji.”
PB: [laughs] Tell you something crazy, too. There was another guy named Baker in the 19th century that was a missionary who touched a chief’s head or something when he was a missionary, so they killed him and ate him. A few Fijian people were sending me an image they found on Facebook after our match against them that said “We killed and ate the wrong Baker.” I thought it was one of the best things ever.
How are you feeling leading up to the World Cup in San Francisco?
PB: We’re definitely taking it one game at a time, trying to break into the top four, and building our confidence as a launch pad going into the World Cup.
On the flip side of it, we’re feeling pretty confident about our ability to win it on our home soil. I know how tough that can be when you’re on someone else’s turf. We go to Cape Town, and the whole stadium is in a roar the whole time. South Africa’s already tough to beat, but then you add that in and it gets even tougher. We go to Sydney, it’s the same thing with Australia. We’ll be on our home soil, and everyone will be chanting U-S-A!, but even then? Even then Fiji has a big traveling fan group. Fiji! You’ll see their blue flags everywhere.
In San Francisco, with the whole crowd behind us? We could win it all. But we’re going to take it one tournament at a time to see where we are, and use it as confidence going into it. It would be huge for us to win it.