Aaron Woods unwinds his giant frame across a velvet couch, looking every inch an Antipodean gladiator in the anteroom of a Las Vegas television studio. His is the hirsute, affable face of rugby league in America, and as he waits to be interviewed about the NRL’s matches this weekend, he rattles off some of the other places he’s promoted the game; a NASCAR race in Florida, an LA Lakers basketball match, the filming of a Netflix professional wrestling show in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here he is at KLAS TV, stepping under the bright lights. He delivers his rapid sell in an NFL lingo Americans can understand; Nathan Cleary is our Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City Chiefs), six tackles are kinda like four downs, but the difference is “there’s going to be a lot of collisions” in the league, he tells presenter Chris Maathuis. “We don’t wear pads or helmets, brother.” He doesn’t voice the implied conclusion to that statement, but a Fox presenter did, a few weeks earlier: “It’s something like football for guys that aren’t sissies?” Off-air, as he walks back to his hotel, Woods confides that Americans froth at the idea of collisions without pads. He leans closer; he’s not sure if he should say this. Last year, when he played in Las Vegas for Manly, a teammate “got split open” in the first 15 minutes. “For American fans to see a massive cut, trainer comes on the field, puts a bit of vaso[line] on it, just tapes him up, and he’s straight back out there … it’s just the theatre.” It’s year two of the Las Vegas venture, but league’s battle to attract US eyeballs remains in its infancy. With the gala day at Allegiant Stadium less than a week away, every Las Vegas bookie approached by this masthead had not heard of it. “Is it soccer?” puzzled one, when asked if he was offering odds on this weekend’s league matches. “Is it cricket? Is it AFL?” The American manager at the Aussie-themed Outback Steakhouse on The Strip was similarly unaware, although he did say a “rugby team” had been there for dinner the night before. The challenge of selling a sport that is massive in Australia but relatively unknown in much of the US is colossal; to find the sympathetically minded within a huge population and convince them to give the game a crack, without spending vast sums of money. To do this, the NRL has identified promising targets, ranging from the Polynesian community in Utah to fans of other sports known to have an appetite for biff. The NRL’s arguably most powerful partnership is with the UFC, a Las Vegas-based mixed martial arts competition that, some argue, has eclipsed ice hockey as the US’s fourth sport. It’s popular in Australia, too; in the NRL heartland of western Sydney, pubs burst during pay-per-view battles between so-called cage (technically octagon) fighters, who can use any martial art form – from kickboxing to jujutsu – to overwhelm their opponent.