Good Read.
BY GREG COTE
DOLPHINS IN LONDON
What's English for football?
To most of London, the Dolphins-Giants game on Sunday, while a sellout at Wembley Stadium, is an obscure oddity.
LONDON -- Everybody, everybody is talking football over here. Just not the kind the NFL had in mind.
''The one with the funny-shaped ball? It's not proper football is it,'' says the
gentleman guiding our small taxi Friday from the Dolphins' team hotel on glamorous Park Lane, past the Aston Martin dealership. ``It's all double-dutch to us. We don't understand the rules at all.''
The driver had only a vague awareness there was an American football game happening here Sunday. Couldn't be sure it was the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants. Didn't know it was at Wembley Stadium.
In this city of some 11 million people, he wasn't alone. You mention Sunday's big football game around here and Londoners assume you mean Arsenal vs. Liverpool in a highly anticipated Premier League soccer match.
There is arrogance at once bravely admirable and faintly galling in the NFL's notion it can package itself for export to a waiting, hungry world -- that it can parachute one of its midseason games into a diverse, cosmopolitan capital like this one and expect the populace to curtsy and swoon.
There is some of that going on here, yes. Wembley's nearly 90,000 seats sold out quickly for this first-ever NFL regular season game staged overseas. The circus has come to town, and curiosity over the unique, highly marketed visit of this major American sports brand is augmented by a hard-core minority of Brits who do follow the stateside version of football.
But to say this game has gripped Great Britain on account of Dolphins-Giants would be roughly akin to saying soccer captivated America once David Beckham touched down.
''I reckon only one in 10 people at this game will know what's really going on,'' guessed Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes, Scotland-born. ``It's an event and good for a few beers, but it's never going to sway football [soccer] fans. Once a year maybe there's a curiosity. But outside of that?''
It is humbling, and does the perspective good, to meander about London and feel such massive indifference for the sport that rules the U.S.
Consider that a blessing to the Dolphins, perhaps. The more who followed our football in England, the more who might know Miami slunk here with tails low, 0-7 and in the midst of a tumultuous, injury-wracked season among the worst in franchise history -- things all better unknown.
The movie shown on the Dolphins' long overnight charter flight here was, appropriately, Pursuit of Happyness.
Ain't it the truth!
Dolphins defensive star Jason Taylor was asked here Friday about the 26-foot animatronic likeness of himself that has made the rounds around London to help promote the game, and whether or not he was embarrassed by it.
''No,'' he said, ''there are other things that can be more embarrassing.'' Like 0-7, he didn't have to add.
''It's depressing,'' owner Wayne Huizenga admitted of carrying a winless mark onto a stage as bathed in light as this one. ``You can't hide it. It hurts. I'd do anything for a win.''
Dolphins fans over here feel that feeling well, including the 120 or so loyalists of the Dolfans U.K. fan club, but don't mistake that for broad or general interest among average Brits.
I attended a Crystal Palace-Stoke City soccer match in town the other night to speak with fans there about the Dolphins and Sunday's game. None of a dozen I asked could name Miami's starting quarterback, although two volunteered they knew it wasn't still Dan Marino.
''One problem with your football is all of that padding,'' volunteered Brian Bennett, 26, a Stoke fan who works on bicycle as a courier. ``In rugby they let you know they're men. But your footballers hide in there, isn't it?''
A friend of his noted how silly it is that ''50 play on a side in American football.'' I mentioned yes, but only 11 play at a time. He said, ``Then why you need 50 then!''
Over at the Selhurst Park concession stand, I found Emily Waller unwrapping a steak- and potato-filled crescent pie.
''Football here has a fluency, an elegance to it even as the elbows fly,'' she observed. ``Whereas from what little I know of American football, it's full of starts and stops. Doesn't the game hiccup along?''
London's soccer-saturated English-language papers have given only token mention if any to the Dolphins-Giants game this week.
Like a guy on a bar stool in Pittsburgh harrumphing with disdain over soccer, this from writer Robert Philip in Friday's Daily Telegraph: ``Call me a Philistine, but I have always been immune to the attractions of American football. Any spectacle in which a 6-foot 2-inch, 326-pound block of lard can become a superstar is, to these eyes, a freak show rather than a sporting contest.''
Writer Ivan Speck in the Daily Mail: ``Gridiron, end zone, linebackers, quarterback. The terms are familiar, but how they are joined together is often lost in translation.''
Our version of [American] football is played in the United Kingdom, but on the far periphery of anything you'd credit with popularity. The British Collegiate American Football League features 42 teams nationwide, with slightly more than that number of amateur teams. One, the Sussex Thunder, plays in front of crowds that team chairman Tony Miller guessed at ``30 or 40 people.''
No doubt the glamour and glitz of a filled Wembley Stadium on Sunday will help sell the foreign sport here. Well, at least for a night. Until the bags are packed, the NFL circus heads home and the Arsenal-Liverpool replay fills the local pubs.
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