Olympics: Perry Baker’s NFL career was ruined by injury but now he can end USA’s 100 years of rugby hurt at the Olympics… and explains why Louis Rees-Zammit faces a tougher swap with the Chiefs

In 2011, Perry Baker achieved a lifelong dream, making it to the NFL after being signed by the Philadelphia Eagles.

Two years later, the recipient, who was on the verge of fame and fortune, was sleeping in his truck and working as an employee at a pest control company.

But now, a decade later, the 38-year-old is gearing up for his third Olympics. No, not as an NFL player – flag football doesn’t return until 2028 – but as a two-time World Rugby Sevens Player of the Year.

Americans and rugby is an unfamiliar concept to most in the NFL-obsessed nation, but what they may not know is that the U.S. shares a history with the sport on the Olympic stage. Albeit a long, distant and extremely vague one.

The 2024 Games in Paris will mark the 100th anniversary of the last – and only – time the United States men won gold in Olympic rugby, a triumph that also took place against the backdrop of the French capital and against the hosts.

Baker laughs when he thinks about the alleged performance during the Team USA summit in New York.

“I’ve heard about this team,” he chuckles. “I think there were only two teams.”

He’s not wrong. The Americans only had to beat two teams that year, France and Romania, to top the podium, but despite the stiffer competition 100 years later, Baker favors the U.S. chances with the focus on medals.

“The first goal is to get in the top eight and then the focus definitely shifts to the podium,” Baker said. “Right now I’m saying, why are we putting pressure on ourselves? I’m just enjoying it, soaking it all in.”

The main reason to enjoy the moment? This will be Baker’s last. He confirmed that he plans to retire from professional rugby after the Olympics.

It’s the perfect send-off. To end a rollercoaster of a career on the Olympic podium – a career he could never have imagined at the lowest of his lows.

After being drafted by the Eagles, the financial comfort he needed to fulfill his dream of providing for his family and helping his parents retire seemed within reach. Until a knee injury changed the course of his life.

Baker was released from Philadelphia and played for two years in the indoor Arena Football League in a desperate attempt to maintain some hope of returning to the NFL.

Eventually he decided to switch to a completely new sport, and rugby came his way.

In 2014, Baker was invited to join the Residency Program at the Olympic Training Centre and made his debut in the World Rugby Sevens Series under head coach Mike Friday. His performances in the 2014–15 season earned him a spot on the shortlist for World Rugby Rookie of the Year.

In the 2015–16 season, he led the Eagles in tries scored with 48, which is second most in the Series.

Still, it wasn’t all glitz and glamour. He moved to Columbus, Ohio, where he lived between his truck and the rarely available couch in the apartment where “probably 12” of his teammates already lived.

He once borrowed $100 from his mother’s electricity fund during a tournament in Las Vegas so he would have enough money to eat.

After just scraping by, Baker finally got his big break. He checked all the boxes for Team USA as they began putting together a squad for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro—rugby’s first appearance at the Games since their “surprise” 1924 appearance.

Baker admitted he cried when he was offered a contract with the U.S. Olympic Training Center, with the opportunity to represent the United States in Rio while on-site at his job as a pest control technician.

From there the ‘Speestick’ took off.

Baker was voted World Rugby Sevens Player of the Year in 2017 and became the USA’s all-time leading try scorer in the 2017–18 season.

He later helped the Eagles secure their first-ever Cup on home soil at the 2018 USA Sevens Tournament.

Baker won the World Rugby Sevens Player of the Year Award for the second time in a row in 2018 and helped his team start the new season with a silver medal at the 2018 Dubai Sevens.

And he owes it all to the Olympics, something he hopes will inspire a new generation of rugby stars in the US.

“The Olympic Games play an important role,” he emphasizes when asked about the impact of the Games on the popularity of the sport.

“That’s what drove me to come and play rugby. When I was told it was going to be in the 2016 games, I thought, ‘Oh man, I want to be an Olympian.’

“Getting a medal will definitely help because everyone wants to be part of the winning culture. If we get a medal, the sky is the limit.”

“We’ve been falling short for so long, everyone says, ‘They’re a sleeping giant, but they’ve fallen short.’ But if we win a medal, they can’t say anything about it.”

Still, he acknowledges that even a gold medal alone won’t be enough to increase rugby’s popularity in the United States, especially when it has to compete with the existing popularity of soccer, basketball and baseball.

“Let them play it at a young age,” he says when asked how to grow the sport. “When I started playing soccer I was seven years old and I played until I was 23. Now my son plays baseball, he started when he was two or three. My other son was the same. We have balls and bats flying around our house all the time, but there’s no rugby ball. If I told you to go to Dick’s Sporting Goods and get me a rugby ball, you’d never find one.

“That’s the thing, we need to start at the grassroots age so we can start developing these kids who want to play and want to be an Olympic athlete. That’s the key to building that.”

It’s the main motivation behind his post-retirement plans. Baker plans to start his own league, called RugbyFlag X, and travel to different states and cities to introduce rugby to America.

But first the goal is a podium finish in Paris, where Baker and his teammates will take revenge on Team GB.

In Tokyo, the US took an early lead in the quarterfinals, but ultimately lost 26-21 to Great Britain.

“It’s so crazy not having any fans [Tokyo] because we blew [that] “lead,” he told Olympics.com

“I just feel like [if] “We had fans there to have them behind us, we would have finished them off. It means everything and I want to take it in… I just feel like it’s definitely a boost to have those fans there,” he said.

One British rugby union star, however, has made the opposite transformation to Baker. Welsh international Louis Rees-Zammit shocked the rugby world when he left the game to pursue a career in the NFL, embarking on the International Player Pathway in January.

The 23-year-old had contract talks with several teams before ultimately heading to Kansas City to sign a reported $884,000 contract with the Super Bowl winner.

However, Baker warned that Rees-Zammit faces a tougher road to the NFL than his own path to rugby.

“It’s easier to go from football to rugby than the other way around,” he claims. “The reason for that is the playbooks. It’s the encyclopedia of the NFL. Rugby is really small. I just think it’s a lot for him to understand — what audibles are being called, what to do, where to be, how to read defenses. Everybody in rugby is the quarterback, whereas in the NFL there’s only one.

“As a running back, he has a tough job. He’s got to know, when they call a pass, which way to run or he’s got to know when to block. It’s fast.

“He’s got the size and the skill, but it comes down to the knowledge. It’s so hard to learn in the NFL. It doesn’t wait for you, it’s constant and it’s hard to keep up at that level.”

While Rees-Zammit swapped Wales for St Joseph to prepare for life at Chiefs, Baker travels to Paris and the Olympic Games for the last time.