At the United States Military Academy at West Point, rugby has the best winning record of any men’s sports program. Brothers on Three, a new documentary about the team out this week, begins with scenes of wild joy from Houston, Texas in 2022, when the Black Knights beat St Mary’s, from California, to win their first US college title.
And yet director Sean Mullin’s film is shot through with loss.
There are losses, of course, on the field.
Mullin and writer-producer Brian Anthony are West Point grads, rugby players too. They set out to follow their successors through the 2022-23 season, as they defended their title under captain and prop Larry Williams, 2022 US player of the year. Things started well, with seven wins in a row. But then Navy, time-honored foes, beat Army 27-14. After that, Mullin’s cameras followed Coach Matt Sherman and his team as the wheels came off.
“I’ve been told that West Point rugby players get promoted to general at a much higher rate than their classmates,” Williams says, in the final film. “After winning that national championship. I thought I knew why, but I didn’t.
“I realized that being a good leader isn’t about how much you win, it’s how you handle loss.”
In one raw scene, in a film made behind doors normally closed, Williams is shown failing in that challenge. After a heavy defeat at Lindenwood in Missouri, in a locker room littered with mud and torn tape, Sherman asks his captain to speak. Williams searches for words that just won’t come.
“I got nothing,” he mumbles.
By the end of the movie, the team has lost its national crown — to Navy — and its captain, Williams suffering a bad ankle injury.
After Lindenwood, Mullin also captures striking film of Conor Fay, blindside flanker and team poet (charged with composing odes for the bus and the bar), ear ripped and bloodied, gore leaching onto his shirt. Later, in the second of three punishing defeats by Navy, Fay makes a tackle and falls in evident pain.
“Another fuckin’ knee,” Sherman exclaims, off camera. “Jesus.”
Nobody said rugby, or West Point, was easy. But as the academy is an academic and physical pressure cooker, channeling brutal training and strenuous classroom standards, so Mullin and Anthony capture how West Point rugby takes tropes familiar from the world game — close bonds of brotherhood (or sisterhood), sometimes regrettable behavior, usually regrettable singing on the bus, pain shared and dealt in turn — and presents each in fierce relief.
There are considerable ups, including an unlikely play-off win over Davenport and the exuberance of branch night, when fourth years, “firsties”, learn in what form of arms they will serve. There are considerable downs. The final defeat in the playoffs — by fuckin’ Navy, again — is dealt with quickly, as if just to get it done.
Rugby is only a game. But what a game. Mullin shows why so many love it. There is pure adrenalin, raucous laughter and even ragged beauty in close-ups of tackles and kicks, rucks and mauls, straining scrums and leaping lineouts, pre-match huddles ending in shouts of “Brothers on Three!”
But Mullin’s film also looks beyond the field — where loss returns to the frame.
Like Mullin, Ian Weikel graduated West Point in 1997. After 9/11, Mullin served at Ground Zero. Weikel went to Iraq. Mullin’s film includes footage from Weikel’s time in-country, explaining how to survive a convoy in the war of the IED. On 18 April 2006, in Balad, Weikel’s vehicle struck such a roadside bomb. He was killed. He was 31.
In other old footage, under the hum and crackle of old VHS, Weikel holds his infant son, Jonathan, or reads books for his boy to listen to when his father goes away to fight. There is footage of Weikel’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, horses pulling the coffin on its artillery caisson. Over more VHS, of Weikel making a tackle at West Point, his widow speaks to camera.
“Rugby meant so much to Ian,” Wendy Green says. “When I first met him, he said, ‘You gotta come to my rugby game. And I was like, ‘What is rugby?’ I went and I remember him coming to the sideline to me, sticking his tongue out and he just looked like this adorable puppy covered head to toe with mud and dirt. I was just smitten. I was like, ‘Okay, I love rugby.’ We fell in love.”
Love runs through Mullin’s film too. Twenty-one Army rugby players have died in service of their country. In the very first scenes of Brothers on Three, of the great night in Houston in ‘22, a big, bearded old player in Army cap and t-shirt congratulates hooker Matthew Meehan, shouting the name of the hooker in his own West Point team.
“I’m class of ‘02,” the veteran says, beaming, showing a tattooed arm. “Jimmy Gurbisz was killed in Iraq in ‘05. You left that jersey better than when you found it, brother.”
Which is where I come in. In 2002, Gurbisz was part of a West Point team that toured to London, where they played against my club. Years later, from New York, I wrote a piece and then a book about that team, about what happened to them in the wars after 9/11. Writing the book, I got to know the big, bearded veteran in Mullin’s movie: it’s Bryan Phillips, my opposite number in the second row 23 years ago. I met Mullin and Anthony too. On sidelines and in banqueting halls, at memorials, in screening rooms, we talked. And now, in the early scenes of their finished film, I’m there, onscreen, helping with the set-up: telling American audiences what this strange game is and why so many cadets love it and each other so much.
So I can’t claim to be an impartial reviewer. Not even close. I was present for a ceremony that now forms one of the most poignant scenes in the film: the scattering of the ashes of Clint Olearnick, another ‘02 player, gone too young, on the West Point field on a blazing fall day. Mullin and his crew capture the silent contemplation of team-mates saying farewell to their brother. Clint’s widow, Diane, and daughter, Zosha, share in the bonds of his team.
And yet, one great loss looms over all of Brothers on Three. Michael Mahan graduated West Point in 1970, commanded troops, made lieutenant colonel, came back up the Hudson to teach. He never played rugby but ended up coaching it, for 16 seasons all told, seeing the martial sport — “war minus the shooting”, said George Orwell — as the perfect vehicle to teach future leaders in combat.
Last summer, at 76, Mahan died. His funeral was in Massachusetts. Old players came from all corners of America. Shots were fired over the grave.
Mullin and Anthony dedicate their film to Mahan, giving him first and last words. Over the end credits, he explains his role in helping set up Women’s Army Rugby (WAR), a thriving varsity program. Next Friday, 14 November, his old players will gather again at West Point, for a screening of Brothers on Three and, next day, during the big game against Navy, the unveiling of a memorial statue.
For everyone else, Brothers on Three premieres in Los Angeles on Thursday, then plays at selected cinemas across the US.
Martin Pengelly writes about rugby in the US at The National Maul
