Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament
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The Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament or the Bingham Cup is a biannual international, non-professional, gay rugby union tournament, first held in 2002. The most recent tournament was held in New York City on May 25-28, 2006.
[edit] Founding and naming
In 2002, gay and bisexual rugby union teams worldwide founded the International Gay Rugby Association and Board (IGRAB) as a body to promote rugby union as an all-inclusive non-discriminatory sport which everyone can play, regardless of sexuality.
An informal invitational tournament, held in May 2001, was formally inaugurated by IGRAB as a new international rugby union competition — a gay rugby union world cup — which in a unanimous decision by all the members of IGRAB became known as the Bingham Cup.
The tournament was named after Mark Bingham, a former University of California, Berkeley rugby star who had played in the May 2001 tournament for San Francisco Fog RFC. Bingham died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on board United Airlines Flight 93. He is generally accepted to be one of a group of passengers who fought with the hijackers aboard the flight, which eventually led to the hijackers crashing the plane into a vacant field in Pennsylvania instead of targets in Washington, D.C.. At the time of his death, there were approx 8 gay-inclusive rugby clubs worldwide, and he was helping to create others.
[edit] Tournament history
The first Bingham Cup was held in July 2002 and hosted by the San Francisco Fog, Mark Bingham’s home team. That year, eight teams traveled to San Francisco to compete over two days with the Fog coming out on top as the Cup’s first winners. In May 2004, the Bingham Cup competition jumped the pond and was hosted by London’s Kings Cross Steelers. From eight teams just two years prior, twenty teams from four countries were fielded for the 2004 cup, which was won for the second time by the San Francisco Fog RFC.
The third Bingham cup was held in New York, hosted by Gotham Knights RFC on Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, 2006. 29 teams from 22 clubs in 6 countries participated in various divisions, including the Bingham Cup's first ever Women's division. The listing of past and future Bingham Cups and its precursor are as follows:
- IGRAB International Invitational Washington, DC, USA, May 2001
- 2002 Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament San Francisco, CA, USA, July 2002
- 2004 Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament London, England, UK, May 2004
- 2006 Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament New York, NY, USA, May 2006
- 2008 Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament Dublin, Ireland, June 2008 (announced by IGRAB on 1 Dec 2006)
