Rugby Burn: Gravely injured in a fluke house fire, Iraq War vet Stephen Ellis is dead set on returning to the sport he loves

The young man in the photograph gazes proudly at the camera, his entire life in front of him. He wears a military uniform, like his father once did, and his grandfather and great-grandfather as well. Beneath the tugged-down brim of his patrol cap, a few pimples interrupt the smooth skin on his face, but his six-foot, six-inch frame is approaching its eventual 270-pound form. Those shoulders, which would soon batter down doors in Iraqi neighborhoods, have already delivered thousands of blows on rugby fields across Illinois and Missouri.

Ever since high school, Stephen Ellis had been a formidable player, introduced to the game by his father, Russ, a 30-year rugby veteran who some say still has the hardest skull in the St. Louis region. For a handful of seasons, father and son were known as T1 and T2, a matched set of country-bred forwards locking arms in the scrum, a 495-pound wall of muscle and bone.

At the age of two, Stephen would sit in his stroller at Scott Air Force Base and watch Russ — then the 25-year-old bruiser of the Scott Rowdies — bulldoze his way across the rugby pitch. Later young Stephen, who dreamed of being a pilot, watched the matches from a nearby tree. By age fifteen he was on the field, a boy among men, virtually joined at the hip with his father, who refused to let time rob him of a young man’s game.

Now 50, Russ Ellis is the oldest active player in the Missouri Rugby Football Union, a local legend of a sport invented 150 years ago by an Englishman of the same name: William Webb Ellis.

Play like an Ellis.

That was the team’s motto, still used today, as much a statement of character as of prowess.

The boy in the photo would survive unscathed a year of war and seven more playing the most brutal sport on land — right up until the day it all went up in flames.

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