American Football's Forgotten Kings

Alex Cassidy

Description

In 1991, their first year of existence, the London Monarchs won the first World Bowl title at Wembley; though just seven years later the team had folded and swiftly disappeared from the sporting public's consciousness. American Football's Forgotten Kings recounts the true story of the only professional American football team to ever exist in England. The book details each of the Monarchs' seasons, both statistically regarding on-field performance and culturally with the American players' stories of their experience in London. It also delves into the history of the NFL's European experiments, the World League of American Football and NFL Europe. Chronicling the Monarchs' surprising rise and shocking decline, Alex Cassidy has interviewed players, coaches and fans to pinpoint the successes and failures of the flagship European franchise. Can the Monarchs experiment be used as a case study for the future of gridiron, now more popular than ever in the UK?

Sujets

• Gran Londres
• Fútbol americano
• American football
• Greater London
• Grand Londres
• London

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 16 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785311086
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2015
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Alex Cassidy, 2015
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-047-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78531-108-6
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Contents
1. Football s Foreign Policy
2. 1991: World Bowl I
3. 1992: Aint A Damn Thing Changed
4. 1995: The Battle For Britain
5. 1996: The Fridge And The Frenzy
6. 1997: Limping To The Finish Line
7. 1998: England s Team
8. London s Future
Appendices
FOOTBALL S FOREIGN POLICY
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defence by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy s defensive line.
George Carlin, Baseball v Football , 1986
W HAT is war good for? Well, anyone who has heard Edwin Starr s 1970 anthem War will immediately reply with a resounding absolutely nothing . But what about the few benefits that war does bring to the table? Technological advancements, medical improvements, toppling of tyrannical dictators and, of course, international expansion of American football.
Now that last one may seem out of place, but without war the London Monarchs, a World League of American Football (WLAF) franchise that played in England from 1991-1998, may never have existed. It doesn t justify the innumerable losses - the pockmarked no-man s-lands and endless, nameless graves - but, as Carlin showed us above, football s connection to war is certainly unavoidable.
There have been entire books written about the game s intrinsic link to the battlefield, but most of them overlook how war s geographical implications affected football s spread. Throughout the 20th century the United States Armed Forces stationed tens of millions of soldiers in Europe. They invariably brought at least one pigskin per platoon, and, as a result, inadvertently planted the seeds of football on the continent.
The first gridiron game held in the United Kingdom was in 1910, when 4,500 bemused Britons watched the squads of two navy warships, the USS Georgia and the USS Rhode Island , play a game of American football on a frozen soccer pitch in Northfleet, a town in Kent 25 miles southeast of London.
Several months later another set of Navy ships stopped at the Kentish docks and were again invited to play their foreign sport. This time the Daily Mirror newspaper sponsored the match between the USS Idaho and USS Vermont, and it was held at Crystal Palace in south London.
10,000 fans packed the stadium, and the fuss was so great a member of the royal family was even wheeled out for the occasion, with the Duke of Manchester, William Angus Drogo Montagu, presenting a trophy to the victors. Two more events were organised and drew similar numbers, but later that year the ships permanently left for France, taking with them any interest of the sport in England.
In fact the next time a touchdown was scored on English soil, Europe had seen two world wars. Over 3 million soldiers arrived in the United Kingdom throughout the Second World War, and they brought their sports along too. Before football took off the London International Baseball League was founded in 1943, and featured both Canadian and American military sides, but gridiron only came about because of a drinking session between some of the brass.
As Simon Day wrote in The History of the NFL in the UK , American football was played at Army bases throughout the country, but the biggest encounter of that era took place as a result of a chance meeting in a pub. Major Denis Whitaker, a former quarterback for the Hamilton Tigers and now a member of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, bumped into an American Lieutenant and, as is the way, talk quickly turned to football. Several drinks later they stumbled upon the idea of having an international match between the Canadian and US armed forces!
The media once again got involved, providing a 6in silver teapot as a trophy, as the game had been dubbed the Tea Bowl by the participating soldiers. On 13 February 1944 the two sides trotted out to play an American football game in front of 30,000 people in White City Stadium, west London, most of whom were, it has to be said, North Americans on active duty.
But the game was deemed a success for morale, especially by the winning Canadian captain Major Whitaker, who hauled in a 40-yard touchdown and kept the teapot until his death in 2001. Because of the positive reaction a follow-up Coffee Bowl was promptly organised. The Americans, determined to win, brought in some ringers, including former Philadelphia Eagles QB Tommy Thompson, who led the Stars and Stripes to a 20-0 victory. Later there were other games held, including a Navy vs Army game. Coverage from this event, which had an attendance of over 50,000, was provided in earnest by a decidedly confused Vivien Batchelor of the Evening Standard . 60,000 Americans and their girls swarmed into the White City Stadium, Shepherd s Bush, yesterday to see the US Army vs the US Navy in what General Doolittle described during the interval as a, real, old-fashioned American football game . A free fight seemed to be going on in the centre of the stadium. 22 enormous young men in crash helmets were locked in deadly struggle for an oval football. The only thing that moves play towards the goalposts seems to be the instinct of self-preservation of the man with the ball. He runs as far as he can before he is maimed or killed by the other players.
After the war ended, so too did the exhibitions of American sports. These wartime games were early sporting exchanges between the UK and US, in a time where American music, clothes, food and cinema had already coursed its way throughout England. But although the post-war period began the tentative trading of cultural currency between the United Kingdom and the United States, sport was still non-negotiable, and would be for another 30 years.
* * * * *
If the game catches on, we might some day have some regular NFL franchises in Europe. Who knows what could happen? The-then NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle said that way back in 1974, a sign that, although the League is now known for having its all-seeing eye on the parts of the globe that don t play its game, global ambition is not a fleeting fancy.
In fact the League dipped its toes into international waters for the first time in 1974, when it gave consideration to the Intercontinental Football League (IFL).
In a meeting with the NFL league owners on 5 June 1974 two men, Bob Kap and Adalbert Wetzel, proposed a spring football league to be played in Europe the following year. Kap had been a coach of Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt s soccer team the Dallas Tornado, while Wetzel was a West German entrepreneur who owned the soccer side M nchen 1860. The timing of their pitch seemed to make sense, as Mark L. Ford and Massimo Fogilio wrote in an edition of The Coffin Corner , a professional football history journal. By the early 1970s, the NFL was already looking to promote its product abroad. Tex Schramm, general manager of the Cowboys, had scouted Europe in search of new talent, the biggest catch being Austrian soccer star Toni Fritsch. On 27 May 1972, 42 NFLers had demonstrated le rugby Americain before 8,000 in Paris. NFL Bleu beat NFL Rouge that day 16-6. Two years later, interest in overseas play was renewed.
Indeed, Pete Rozelle and Tex Schramm s vision was so clear that they predicted events which would eventually transpire 20 years in the future. But this was a case of long-sightedness, because, just as the IFL seemed to be getting some traction, with schedules being drawn up and investors found, the problems of global expansion became clear.
Civil unrest may have been a catalyst of progression in the past, but it proved to be a hindrance to Rozelle s European effort. Six teams had been planned; Istanbul Conquerors, Rome Gladiators, Munich Lions, Berlin Bears, Vienna Lippizzaners and Barcelona Almovogeres. But it was problems in many of these countries, as well as the looming Cold War, that caused the US Government to directly intervene and shut the project down. During summer 1974, war broke out between Greece and Turkey over the island nation of Cyprus. The US ambassador in Cyprus had been assassinated, and the weapons sales to Turkey were blocked. Worse, terrorism was on the rise in many of the other nations where games would be staged. Rogue groups, like the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhoff gang in West Germany, had taken to kidnappings.
So, the owners reneged on their plans, and, in a March 1975 meeting, Rozelle surmised that the, state of the economy, in both the United States and Europe, made such a project impractical at the time.
What s interesting is that European football wasn t seen as an overreach by the NFL owners, but a necessary step. Fresh from the 1970 American Football League merger, rival organisations were a genuine worry, and getting an edge, whether it be through rule changes,