In another life Christian Wade would have been playing for the Bills against the Ravens over the weekend, not scoring a hat-trick for Gloucester in their win at Bristol on Friday.
Wade, 33, is back in the Premiership after six years away, four of them in the NFL, and two more playing rugby for Racing 92 in France. He has already made headlines by saying he is determined to break Chris Ashton’s record and become the league’s all-time leading try scorer (he needs 17 more to do it) but underneath all that swagger, he has become a fascinating athlete to talk to; older, wiser, more reflective after his years away. He has done more living than a lot of people in his line of work.
Wade never actually made it on to the pitch for the Bills in a league game. He famously scored a 65-yard touchdown with his very first carry in a pre-season match against the Colts, but that was about as good as it got. He spent the next three years on and off the Bills’ practice squad, which is more of an achievement than it sounds.
There are more than 73,000 college footballers in the US, and around 16,000 of them are eligible for the 250 slots in the NFL draft. Among them, Wade was just another prospect, competing against men who knew a hell of a lot more about the sport. Most of what he knew he learned “playing Madden”.
Wade’s background in American football actually goes a little deeper than that NFL video game. He was first tapped up in 2015, by Jason Bell, Osi Umenyiora and a couple of other NFL players. Intrigued by their confidence in him, he spent his off-days that rugby season training in secret at Tottenham, “learning how to catch the ball correctly, how to hold the ball correctly” and all the other basics.
The Jacksonville Jaguars offered him a contract on the strength of his video footage, but he turned it down because he had only just made the British & Irish Lions tour in 2013, and wanted to try to play for England at the 2015 Rugby World Cup.
It’s the same sort of decision Louis Rees-Zammit faced when he made the move this year. Like Wade, Rees-Zammit went into the NFL’s international player pathway, which is designed to help elite athletes in other sports to make the hop across to American football. It’s a hard road. A few men on it have come close to breaking through, but only one has really made it big, the Australian rugby league player Jordan Mailata, who is now a standout offensive tackle for the Eagles. Wade says he and Rees‑Zammit are due a catchup, they’ve been swapping text messages, but Rees-Zammit hasn’t been able to find the time for a phone call yet.
Which Wade gets. Because the hardest part of making the move was how busy he was. He had to do a lot of work to catch up with the people he was competing against. It wasn’t physical, Wade was strong enough, and fast enough, to hold his own (if he hadn’t been, the Bills wouldn’t have wanted him), and he says a lot of NFL players would struggle to make it through 80 minutes of professional rugby. It was the mental side, especially the time he had to spend mastering the playbook. Working days in NFL pre-season ran from 8am to 8pm, with two hours of training and then eight or so of meetings and video analysis.
In the evenings Wade would go back home and have his wife “pretend to be the quarterback so I could practise all this stuff in the living room”.
All those hours of work were worth crucial split seconds. “It’s one thing you can run fast but the amount of information you have to take in before the snap is the bit that will slow you down, because you’ll be thinking rather than moving. So that’s the challenge, and I think I saw a little bit of that in Louis’s pre-season games.
“I recognised myself in him, and a lot of the other guys who came over from the UK. You’re fast, but you’re slowing down because you’re doing a lot of thinking.” Meanwhile, everyone else is playing on instincts honed by years of school and college football, the same way Wade is able to do in rugby. “It probably took me two or three years to really get to that stage where I felt really comfortable,” Wade says. And that was when the injury happened. He did his shoulder, and was out for the season. The Bills cut him, even though he had two years left on his contract, which was when he came back to rugby.
The Bills’ ruthlessness was another big difference between the sports. Wade says the NFL can be a lot more cut-throat. It means there’s a lot more emphasis on individual responsibility.
“The biggest difference was that the players are a lot more driven. They don’t need to be spoon-fed.” In the UK, he says, and especially in rugby, players can get too comfortable. “They can think: ‘I’m good at what I do, I’ve got three years on my contract, and I know I’m going to get paid even if they want to get rid of me.’” In the NFL, he says, no one is going to tell you to take extra care with your recovery, or your nutrition. You either do it, or you get cut.
If the responsibilities were greater, so were the rewards. The NFL is just about the richest and best-run sports league in the world, and Wade has come back to a sport that is in a state of flux. He was talking in the buildup to the NFL’s upcoming London Series of three fixtures at Tottenham and Wembley, part of a 17-year-long investment in overseas markets, and it is paying off.
Data gathered by the ticket sales platform Viagogo shows that this year, for the first time, a majority of the paying fans for the series are from the UK rather than the US. The UK is now the NFL’s second-biggest market. There is always talk about the possibility of a London franchise.
Wade will have one eye on it, watching with interest. But for now he’s got the other on the try‑line. “Rugby’s my sport,” he says, happy to be back.
