Ex-rugby player Christian Scotland-Williamson is chasing his NFL dream

The British rugby player, formerly of the Worcester Warriors, is a longshot to make the Steelers, but you’d be mad to write him off

There are no rational reasons to expect Christian Scotland-Williamson will make the Pittsburgh Steelers as a tight end. He is a rugby player, late of the Worcester Warriors, and though he stands 6ft 9in and 275lbs, he never played football before this year. He is here only because of an NFL program that sends international players to the US as practice players for a full year with a vague hope they can earn a real roster spot next season.

Given the stratospheric odds of a rugby player making the 53-man regular-season roster of a professional football team – Jarryd Hayne’s eight games with San Francisco in 2015 being a rare exception – Scotland-Williamson’s chances are poor. Most watching him at a recent Steelers offseason workout assume this is a lark, a bucket list checkmark, and that next year he will return to England and rugby.

But Scotland-Williamson doesn’t talk about unlikely odds. He doesn’t see the failure that others imagine for him. He believes he will make the NFL if he just works hard enough. He believes it with such clear-eyed, thoughtful, certainty that after sitting with him for half an hour on a bench beside the Steelers practice fields you want to believe it too.

He loves to hear people’s doubts, gulping them as inspiration. He says there are players on the Steelers who are “encouraging”, but who watch him fumbling around the field and crack jokes that say he’ll never be one of them. When they do he says he smiles to himself.

“In the back of my mind it’s quite funny because I’m thinking ‘OK, give me a year and I’ll show you,’” he says. “As soon as I know what I’m doing it’s going to be a problem. But for now its fine because I’m working things out and making a lot of mistakes. Then as soon as I know what I’m doing I will be fine.”

His mother, Hazel, long accustomed to such proclamations from her son, laughs through the phone from her home outside London.

“What a wonderful gift to believe in yourself like that,” she says.

And yet who can say that Christian Scotland-Williamson is wrong? At just 26 he’s already earned a college degree, a graduate degree, been offered a promising finance job in London, turned down a promising finance job in London, picked up rugby, become a professional rugby player and started law school. He has survived a car accident, fought through two years of agonizing back pain only to become a viral sensation for a rugby tackle so violent and precise it became its own Gif and eventually drew notice of the NFL.

If he can’t do the impossible, well, who can?

He has a story he wants to tell. It’s about how the day he became a Worcester Warrior. For you see, Scotland-Williamson never imagined himself becoming a professional rugby player. Then one afternoon, while at college, a friend called saying the Warriors reserves were short a player. Could he come down? After the match, the team’s coach and director of rugby asked Christian to play with them again. Two weeks later, they offered him to a contract.

“That’s what prepared me to come here,” Scotland-Williamson says. “This is on a much grander scale but my journey into rugby was unexpected. It was a picking up the phone on the off chance someone was calling. It’s a similar circumstance, all the way across the Atlantic.”

What no one understands is that Scotland-Williamson’s NFL pursuit is no fantasy. When he left rugby late last year for the ultimate of longshots, he was walking away for good. Doing so was hard because he felt he was playing well for the Warriors and believed he had a real chance to make the national team – a dream of his father’s. But he also knew he couldn’t make a serious run at the NFL if he was planning a return to rugby. And Scotland-Williamson doesn’t do anything halfway.

“Why would you try and dip your toe into something as big and hard as this if you’re going to go away?” he asks, incredulously. “It’s a waste of time and a waste of exercise.”

His old dream was rugby, now his new dream is the NFL, a league he has watched over the years and considers the ultimate athletic pinnacle. So much so that he has taken what he calls “a paycut” to come here.

He always liked the NFL, occasionally watching their games on television, though his favorite NFL programs were the America’s Game documentaries because he loved the stories of how players came to be successful. Never did he seriously consider playing American football until last September when propelled himself like a human missile at Wasps flanker Alex Rieder, wrapping his arms around Rieder, lifting the player up, then driving him to the ground. A clip of the tackle spread across the Internet, soon came suggestions Scotland-Williamson should play in the NFL. A family friend mentioned the NFL’s program and in January he was on his way to Bradenton, Florida to train at the IMG academy with other football prospects like himself.

For several weeks he trained at IMG, taking a crash course in football basics before being assigned to the Steelers. As part of the NFL program he is considered an extra player able to practice and take part in all meetings and workouts. He doesn’t count against the team’s roster but he can’t play in any games either. Basically it is a one-year apprenticeship, one with no guarantees beyond 2018. And yet a chance he couldn’t pass up.

“I feel you regret the things you don’t do,” he says.

It should be said that Scotland-Williamson isn’t any ordinary rugby player from any ordinary family. His father Guy Williamson was the ABA super heavyweight boxing champion in 1985, whose 1988 Olympic hopes were dashed by a broken foot. His older brother, Alexander, discovered basketball at 17 and within five years was playing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Christian always had a sense of wanting to try things. He grew up wanting to work in finance, even lining up a job at a top investment company in London upon his college graduation, only to have rugby get in the way. Giving up the London job turned out to be a relief. He realized he didn’t want to work in finance anymore. He wanted to be a barrister, like Guy. He wanted to work in sports law.

So while he played rugby the last two years he also completed his masters in international business at the University of Birmingham, then was accepted into BPP law school, where he planned to spend this year, balancing classes with the Worcester Warriors, until the NFL came along.

But nothing may have shaped Christian more than the day, early in 2013, when a truck rammed the car he and Hazel were in on a motorway outside London. Hazel heard Christian screams as his hip was pushed up against the side door, leaving him with lower back pain that lingered for months.

The crash happened a few months before the Worcester Warriors called, meaning he started professional rugby with constant aching in his back. What should have been the best time of his life became the most trying. Hazel says here son was in “agony and discomfort” that he tried to play through. But because Christian’s injury didn’t happen on the field, it was hard to explain to the team.

He missed a large part of two seasons, struggling to make the ache go away He worked with trainers and therapists. He worried he was losing his unexpected rugby career. He read books to forget the pain. He studied. He vowed to give rugby every chance he had. Finally, three years later, he had a day in which he wasn’t in perpetual agony. Then another. And another. He realized that if he could overcome three years of constant back pain while playing rugby, he could overcome anything.

“If the accident hadn’t have happened we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now,” Hazel says into the phone. “People in England had huge aspirations for him and (the injury) happened and, of course, that puts you back. He would have been flying in rugby. It makes you re-examine everything.”

An ocean away, beside the practice fields in Pittsburgh, Christian nods.

“If this opportunity had been presented to me as a 19-year-old or 20-year-old without that professional experience, without the ups and downs and without the turmoil that I had to go through to get to this point, then it would have been more of a challenge,” he says. “Because inevitably is that this is not going to be a smooth journey (and) I’ve already had some tough days where things weren’t quite fitting.”

He learned to relish small advances, treating them as big victories: the day a complicated play finally made sense, the morning he hit the blocking sled harder than before. He gasped when the Steelers handed him a book with some 600 plays to learn, but found he loved the challenge of deciphering them. He’d stay up late into the night studying Pittsburgh’s offense.

Football, he realized, gave him a mental challenge that rugby couldn’t match. Through watching the America’s Game episodes and conversations with his Steelers coaches, he gained an appreciation for the psychological battle football coaches play – seeing the playbook with its pages of squares and circles and squiggly lines as the template for a Sunday afternoon war to be waged in the minds of his coaches. He even picked tight end over a seemingly more natural position like defensive end because he likes the variety of pass catching, running and blocking that tight end offers.

“This is the perfect blend of being able to service my academic needs and my physical needs in terms of sports because it’s both packaged into one,” he says.

Still, nothing about football is natural for Scotland-Williamson as he crams into half a year a lifetime of his teammate’s knowledge. He hates having to picture his way through pass routes in practice, knowing it slows him in a place where everything is full-speed.

He gazes across the practice fields toward a hill rising beyond the fence. A freight train rumbles along the hillside, its horn booming through the silence. The practice just finished had been like the others since he came to Pittsburgh: filled with moments of hope and despair. Leaving the certainty of a rugby career for the Steelers is the hardest thing he’s ever done. And yet this is exactly where he wants to be.

“When you’ve got, potentially, two prosperous and budding careers before you and one is completely unknown and the other one isn’t guaranteed but because of your performance and reputation it’s likely you will succeed, I don’t think there are many people that would leave something that great behind for what is effectively the unknown,” he says.

Then Scotland-Williamson leans back against the bench and laughs at the absurdity of being that one.