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RSSI am a sports fan. I’ve been so since high school. Even though I’ve never been good at basketball, I made it a point to know every little fact and figure I could about the National Basketball Association (NBA), the local Philippine Basketball Associaiton (PBA), and of course, our beloved University Athletics Association of the Philippines (UAAP). Even before I could appreciate basketball though, I was fascinated with American football. With relatives in Chicago, Illinois, a love for the Chicago Bears of the National Football League (NFL) was ingrained in me at the age of 10. It didn’t hurt that in 1986, the Bears won Super Bowl XX over the New England Patriots with guys like Walter Payton, Jim McMahon and William “The Refrigerator” Perry playing leading roles.
Over the next few years, I tried watching as much football as I could, even though local channels hardly showed any NFL games. When at school and during breaks, I’d be in the library reading up on NFL legends and classic teams that came from the early days of the league. Names like Vince Lombardi, Red Grange, Y.A. Tittle, Johnny Unitas and Jim Brown became as familiar to me as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan were. To truly understand the rules of football though, I had to play it. At the very least, I had to play a version of it in video game form. Enter John Madden Football 1992. On the old 16-bit Sega Genesis system, I learned how to run sweeps, pass from the shotgun formation, rush a quarterback with a blitz and defend against the long pass with a dime defense. Even on a (now) primitive gaming system, I could see how the quarterback was the brain of an entire offense and how everything rose and fell depending on his performance. I also saw that when on defense, guessing correctly what the offense ran could result in a loss of yardage or worse, a loss of ball possession altogether.
American football, with their glistening helmets, giant shoulder pads and oversized players, is such a different game from basketball that it is akin to a foreign language to most people. To me however, those differences are what made the NFL more appealing in the first place. Since this is such a physical game where injuries are so brutal, an NFL season is only limited to 16 regular season games. Playoff matches are all elimination matches and the Super Bowl, for all of its hype, gratuitous halftime shows and excessive advertising buyrates, is not a best-of-three but one ultimate game. Whereas a big basketball arena in the Philippines seats between 16,000-19,000 people, a typical American football stadium usually seats between 60,000-80,000 in the stands.
Living in the Philippines, where basketball is undisputed king, my love for the NFL has often been met with blank stares or plain indifference. After all, who could talk to me about why Marshall Faulk remains underappreciated for his great hands even as a running back or why Ray Lewis might be one of the greatest linebackers of all time or who truly is the best quarterback today: Peyton Manning or Tom Brady? Over the years though, I stayed a fan of the league, following players like Deion Sanders, Jerry Rice, Terrell Davis, John Elway, and We NFL fans are a niche market, even smaller than football (or soccer) fans. Soccer has the quadrennial World Cup and annual competitions like the UEFA Champions League, English Premier League competition or the Spanish Primera Liga with teams spread across Europe and Latin America. The NFL only has players in the continental United States with Canada’s Canadian Football League (CFL) adopting most of its rules.
Movies like Any Given Sunday, The Program, Necessary Roughness, The Longest Yard and Remember the Titans have all shown us glimpses of lives of football players. Truthfully, some of these football movies ended up being better than any basketball films save for Hoosiers and Glory Road. That’s not a reflection on the quality of the sport but more of how filmmakers have been able to bring out more drama or personality from American football.
In the US, when the leaves turn brown and autumn is in the air, the NFL dominates the headlines until February while hardly drawing any interest on Philippine shores. Even if the most recent Super Bowl saw the hated Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers for the title, the result still drew my interest. For those of us who learned to love the game and still have favorites (Go Bears!), we still get pumped up when August rolls around and we hear that classic opening line to Monday Night Football: “Are you ready for some football?!”
