#15
RFE/RL Newsline
November 27, 2002
QUIET! THE GAME'S STARTING!
By Russell Working
Russell Working is a freelance journalist who specializes in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.

For Aleksandr Simanchev, the gear is what won him over: the gladiator-like helmets, the swollen shoulder pads, the perforated jerseys from teams with names like Patriots and Eagles. As a teen, Simanchev first glimpsed the hulking players clashing on a field in Moscow, and he knew he had to get out on the turf and butt heads. Never mind that he had no idea what rules governed the movement of that lemon-shaped ball up the field. He signed up for the city's American Football Youth League.

"I spent the first year not knowing what I was doing because everything's so different," he says. "After my first game, I went home and told my mom we lost. Only later did I find out that we had actually won."

Now 20 and a center on Russia's European championship football team, Simanchev is a part of a growing phenomenon in a land better known for ice hockey and walrus swims. Forget the sport that the rest of the world calls "futbol," in which a sphere is booted up and down a field and occasionally ricochets off somebody s head into a net, to the delirium of stadiums full of Bolivians. These Muscovites are crazy about North America's greatest contribution to the civilization of a mostly indifferent planet: the game of gridiron.

Simanchev plays for the Moscow Patriots, one of two adult amateur teams in town (the other is the Moscow Bears). Throw in the 600 junior- and senior-high-aged youngsters playing in full pads and helmets, and you've got the beginnings of a sports revolution. There are even more than 400 girls high-kicking on the sidelines as cheerleaders. And football is sprouting up elsewhere in the former Eastern bloc -- from Prague to the southern Russian Volga River city of Astrakhan.

Football evolved in American and Canada from common roots in the mid-1800s. The two countries now play on different-sized fields, with variations in the rules and numbers of players. Think of it as a form of rugby in which the players stop after every tackle and talk about what they'll do next (offense and defense huddle separately to strategize). The contact is bruising. Play after play, 22 men (24 in Canada) line up and smash into each other, and so an armature of helmets and pads have been added over the years.

Russians began playing American football in the late 1980s, soon after glasnost opened the Soviet Union to Western influences and ideas, says Moscow Patriots coach Vasilii Dobryakov. The sport has since been nurtured by the National Football League, which established a six-team professional league in Europe (although not yet in Moscow) and has held exhibition games in Japan and Mexico. With the fall of the iron curtain, it seemed urgent to evangelize the football-deprived territory known as Russia.

Perhaps Harry Gamble will one day be remembered as the man who did for football what medieval monks did for Orthodox Christianity in Russia. Gamble is a New Jersey resident who has coached the University of Pennsylvania, served as a Philadelphia Eagles coach and club president, and worked as an executive in the NFL's head office in New York. Now retired, Gamble started visiting Moscow in the mid-1990s to coach, donate used equipment, and provide encouragement.

"Going to Russia was something special, because we'd been adversaries for so many years, and it had been a closed society," Gamble says. "And it was only four or five years after the end of the Soviet Union that we started out there."He still returns regularly, bringing coaches he has worked with in the past (the Russians no longer need equipment donations after National Capital Bank and the pro-Kremlin Unified Russia party agreed to sponsor the team).

The youth football league and the Moscow Patriots share an office crammed with boxes of gear in the northern Moscow neighborhood of Petrovsko-Razumovskaya. When they are not working out game strategies or coaching the younger kids, burly fullbacks and tackles fiddle with football computer games or watch old NFL footage featuring beloved legends such as the Pittsburgh Steelers' Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris.

Surveying the scene, Patriots coach Dobryakov says, "You can call this the main center for the development of American football in Russia."

Russia's youth teams often have to start from scratch in teaching kids the basics. With only 600 youths on teams feeding into the city's two adult amateur teams, the Patriots and Bears have a comparatively small pool of players to draw on.

But Dobryakov has found ways of improving kids skills. He sends the youths to compete against teams from the United States, Canada, Japan, and Europe in an annual international football competition in America. And they have clashed with high-school and Pop Warner teams in Miami, Milwaukee, Chicago, and elsewhere.

The coach himself isn't above learning new tricks. He spent a season with the Allegheny College football team in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Along the way he attended practices, traveled to games with the team, and absorbed strategies. He even got to see a few NFL games, where he was a little overwhelmed by the spectacle.

"The first pro game I saw was Pittsburgh versus Jacksonville," he says. "I didn't see three touchdowns out of five. I was too busy looking around at the stands."

Russian players and coaches admit they are in a disadvantage in a country that is more devoted to soccer and hockey. But Gamble has rounded up coaches who worked with him during past jobs and dragged them over to Russia to advise the players. Although he has retired, the NFL still foots the bill for his travel and expenses.

The NFL has used other clever ways of spreading interest in football. For instance, it flies a Russian broadcaster to the Super Bowl game every year to broadcast the championship match back home.

All this effort has paid off. Last summer, the Russians won the European championship in a round-robin competition among teams from places like the Czech Republic and Germany. The team was especially proud of their 26-20 defeat of Germany in the final game; football has much deeper roots in that country, where American troops have been based for nearly six decades.

Upon the Russian team's return home, Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov held a reception for the football heroes. A pleased if bewildered government promptly honored them with Russia s most prestigious sports title. They are now Master Sportsmen of American Football.

Says Gamble: "When a team like Russia, which has only been doing this for seven years or so, is able to defeat Germany that has played American football for so many years, it's a real feather in their cap."

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