A rugby team from Philly bribed a South African bar to show the Super Bowl in the middle of the night

The trip to South Africa was planned last spring and Rachel Lambert was fully aware that it would fall on Super Bowl weekend. But the brutal finish to the previous Eagles season was still fresh. There was no way, she thought, that the Birds would be in the Big Game just a year after nose diving.

And that’s why the Philadelphia Rugby Football Club — a team of 23 women — was scrambling earlier this month in Cape Town, South Africa, to find a spot to watch Super Bowl LIX.

It was the Super Bowl, so they just assumed that bars would be airing it. Nope. Lambert checked Reddit and didn’t find any places. Google searches were fruitless.

There are spots to watch the Eagles in nearly every U.S. city and even Philly-themed bars in Europe and Asia. But Cape Town seemed to be an Eagles desert.

The Eagles were hosting an official watch party in Africa but that was nearly 5,000 miles away in Ghana. Kickoff was a day away and the women from Philly were running out of time.

“We were very nervous,” Hannah Oney said. “There was one place I found that aired the game previously and when I looked them up, they were completely closed. We were running out of options.”

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Oney kept digging as the women from Philly were not going to miss the game. She found another bar that had shown the Super Bowl in previous years and called them. These Eagles fans hoped they could bribe someone to stay open for the game.

“I said, ‘Are you hosting the Super Bowl this year?’” Oney said. “He said, ‘When is it?’”

Oney told him that the game started on Sunday night at 1:30 a.m.

“And he was like, ‘So Monday morning?” Oney said.

The owner of Casa Woodstock said he could do it. The Tiki-themed bar closed Sunday at 10 p.m., which was nearly four hours before the Eagles-Chiefs would start in South Africa Standard Time. It would reopen for the Birds, but it would cost everyone 250 rand.

“Which is about 14 dollars,” Lambert’s stepfather Ira Feinberg said. “I want to go live there.”

Last year’s Super Bowl was watched by more than 62 million viewers outside the U.S. and it’s safe to assume that the Eagles’ win over the Chiefs was viewed just as highly. Eagles fans are everywhere from England, Ireland, and Germany to Japan and Australia. This year, they even had a bar of rowdies in South Africa.

The ruggers from Philly flew to South Africa on Friday, played two rugby matches on Saturday, and then saved up whatever energy they had on Sunday to watch the Super Bowl in the middle of the night. They were ready.

“A lot of us tried to nap, but I don’t think I napped at all because I was too excited,” Lambert said. “I swear to God that my body switched back to East Coast time once the game started. I did not feel tired.”

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The Philadelphia Rugby Football Club was founded in 1976 as Philadelphia Women’s Rugby and claims to be the nation’s third-oldest historically women’s rugby club. The players are nurses, biologists, engineers, and project managers who mostly learned the sport in high school or college and want to keep playing. Lambert, who went to Strath Haven High School, found the team after graduating from Lehigh University in 2019. It quickly became more than just a rugby team.

“It’s definitely a community that I feel supported in,” Lambert said. “I like being able to do something that’s bigger than myself. Me going to the gym is one thing, but now I’m going to the gym to be a better player for my team so that we can hopefully make the playoffs and all that.”

The team is involved in youth programs, volunteers in the community, and holds social events. It’s more than just practice and games, Lambert said. The players are friends, the kind of crew that watches the Super Bowl together in the middle of the night in South Africa.

The Casa Woodstock owner smoked meat for the team, put the Birds on three TVs, and opened a tab for drinks. The women were in South Africa but it felt like they were in South Philly. For a few hours, Casa Woodstock was an Eagles nest.

“We brought the Philly energy to this bar in South Africa,” Oney said. “It was an awesome time.”

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Some locals wandered in, confused at why the women were screaming at the TV in the early hours of a Monday morning.

“Some people on the team aren’t diehard fans so I wasn’t expecting everyone to make it,” Lambert said. “But everyone was there. Everyone was into the game. We were jumping and screaming. It was a great place to watch. When we walked in, the bar owner was like, ‘Go Birds!’ and I said, ‘This is right.’”

Feinberg was at Franklin Field in 1960 when the Eagles won the NFL championship. And now he can say he was in South Africa with a rugby team when the Eagles won their second Super Bowl.

“There were 23 of them and me,” Feinberg said. “And we were raising hell at this bar.”

The rugby crew sang the fight song, blasted music, toasted the Super Bowl victory for an hour, and then grabbed Ubers back to the hotel.

“I don’t know exactly what time the game ended,” Lambert said. “But all I know is that we were Ubering home and we were in rush-hour traffic. I know that.”

The sun in Cape Town was starting to rise and they were staying near the ocean. So the crew ran toward the beach. They were exhausted but too excited to sleep. The Eagles won the Super Bowl and the celebration in South Africa wasn’t over yet.

“We watched the sun rise,” Lambert said. “That was our version of going to Broad Street.”