‘One was my heart, one was my soul’: Bollywood star Rahul Bose on acting, rugby and plans for an IPL of sevens

Rahul Bose is a unique interviewee. A Bollywood movie titan, his first question when the Zoom link connects is how long this is going to take.

Nothing novel there. But, once assured it will not take up too much of his time, he replies with: “Are you sure? Can we not chat for 15 or 20 minutes longer? Please.”

What is immediately clear is that even the extension would not be long enough. The 57-year-old former scrum-half-turned-film star would happily talk about rugby all day and all night.

“When I broke my nose for the first time and the prettiest girls in school were in my hospital room, I said, ‘I can get used to this’,” he said of learning the rough-and-tumble sport at school. “I started playing rugby for all the wrong reasons.”

He says he went to one of only two schools in India which taught rugby. He fell for it, and maintained a love for the game while making his living as an actor.

The twin passions are not obvious bedfellows. Bose says he has broken his nose four times playing rugby, had six broken fingers, one torn rotator cuff, operations on his knees, a shattered ankle, and an impacted vertebra. Which are hardly the sort of activities suited for being presentable on screen.

“These two worlds don't have anything similar,” he said. “There's no collision. It's like antimatter, like two opposite poles of a magnet. You know that weird feeling when you put north and north and south and south.

“But I was not prepared to give either up. One was my heart, and one was my soul, and that was it. I was the only actor of this magnitude to have played for his country at rugby in the world.

“I would break my nose, and they would say, ‘We have to postpone shooting by two weeks because you still have scars under your eyes'.

“Every contract of mine banned me from playing rugby, every single contract. And I broke every single contract.

“They would say, ‘You're in contravention of the contract'. And I would say, ‘No, I fell down the stairs yesterday'. Then they lift up the newspaper and say, ‘This is not what the newspaper says. Are you so shameless?’”

Bose says he had the more customary ambitions of Indian children, that of opening the bowling for India with his left-arm seamers.

But he worked out the odds of making it in that sport, and became more taken by rugby anyway. That sport did give him the chance to fulfil his dream of representing his country on the international sports field.

“My priority was playing for my country,” he said. “Because when you play for your country, something profound happens: you lose your name.

“You’re called ‘India’. ‘India, No 9, come here, don't do that again’. ‘India: dinner table No 4 and No 5’. ‘India practice ground No 3'.

“For an actor, the only thing he has is his name and his face. So, for those two or three weeks at tournaments, I would just lose my name, and I cannot tell you how refreshing it is.

“And of course, rugby boys are going to take you down 17 pegs in eight seconds, so you don't have to worry about your head getting too swollen.”

Bose’s love for the sport has survived retirement from playing. He is the president of Rugby India, the sport’s governing body in the country, and is now using his celebrity to begin a revolutionary new sevens event.

Starting in Mumbai on June 1, Rugby Premier League is a six-team league which involves some of the leading players and coaches from the abridged format, as well as 30 leading players from India.

It will be aired live on Star Sports, and is co-owned by Rugby India and GMR Sports, the owners of the IPL franchise, the Delhi Capitals.

Bose noticeably avoids referencing the IPL. That league is the gold standard for start-up professional sports leagues.

But, while Bose’s sevens project has some similarities – Bollywood glamour, imported players and coaches – it has little of the bombast of the behemoth cricket league.

Bose terms the salaries being offered “respectful, not astronomical”, which stands to reason. The biggest wages in rugby are paid to stars of the XVs format, rather than its abridged version.

And while rugby clearly does not have the broad appeal of cricket in India, it does offer similarly fast scoring, like the fours and sixes which rain in the IPL.

“You don’t have a 90-minute goalless draw,” he said. “You have a dopamine hit of a try being scored every 120 seconds.

“And in between the tries, it is event filled. There’s a smash tackle, there's a break down the blind side, there's a high tackle. There’s TMO [television match official], there’s a slow-motion replay.

“There’s stuff happening all the time. You really don’t get time to breathe in sevens. There’s never a dull moment.”

The league has been six years in the planning, with the final version settled on five months ago.

The likes of Mike Friday, Tomasi Cama, Ben Gollings and DJ Forbes – who are all multiple winners at the Dubai Sevens – are among the coaches.

The season will comprise 34 matches in 15 days at the Mumbai Football Arena, with just one notable format tweak. Instead of seven-minute halves, as is the case in sevens, they will play four quarters of four minutes.

Bose says those involved are under no illusions that rugby is new to an Indian TV audience. But he is optimistic a sport that is a “cross between kabaddi and soccer” can find its place.

And, he says, the backers are in it for the long haul.

“We didn't exaggerate [to the team owners] how brilliantly this league was going to do,” he said. “We didn't talk about making a profit in year two and year three. They won't.

“Automatically you have team owners who say, ‘Hang on, these guys respect us. They're not disrespecting us'.

“You're talking to team owners who are at the very least millionaires, if not billionaires. What are you going to tell them about financial statements and profit and loss that they don't know? We told them the exact truth.

“There is no intense pressure to live up to lies that we sold to get somebody to buy a team. And I can tell you these team owners are not coming in for five or seven years. It's longer, a lot longer. We are not messing around here.”