Shanghai Daily news

The US National Football League has followed the National Basketball Association to China but getting the locals excited about American-style football is going to be hard. However, Zhou Zuyi reports, there is one area where the NFL has been successful -- senior schoolboys.
 Lu Jianzhong has just been out sweating for another two and a half hours with his teenage charges. Now it's time to study the video tapes of the training session. The coach's days lately have been filled with training, video watching and devising game plans. He's like one of those million-dollar managers seen on television striding down the sidelines of a big football match -- except he hasn't got the million dollars.
He hasn't got the attention of many Chinese sports fans either. The big match in the offing for Lu and his team won't signify much to most local sports freaks: the 2005 Chinese National Flag Football Championship, which will be held at the Shanghai Stadium on Sunday. It's a one-day tournament, a scaled-down version of the bone-crushing sport of American football, or gridiron, and while it may not have captured the imagination of the general public, for the three teams of super-charged teenage warriors vying for the national title, the game really sends thrills down their spines. And Lu insists his boys -- from Shanghai Gongkang Middle School -- are the most determined of all the players in the Chinese teams. ``We have worked hard for this and we just don't think about anything else except how to win the trophy on home turf,'' says Lu. Two months ago, the Gongkang lads earned the only berth set aside for a Shanghai team in the competition after they emerged as the winners in the local qualifying round. ``We should have snared it earlier,'' says Yisiha Ciren, Gongkang's running back, referring to a one-point loss to Shanghai Changning Middle School in last year's qualifying competition. Just as his name indicates, Yisiha is not an ordinary local student sports enthusiast. The 14-year-old has traveled all the way from Tibet to pursue a better education under the aegis of a charity project. In Gongkang school, tucked away in the city's northern Zhabei district, dozens of Tibetan adolescents study and live. Somehow, most of them have developed a passion for American football, a sport that has traveled to China from even further away than Tibet. ``The Tibetans have been the backbone of our flag football team ever since the first day it came into existence,'' says Lu. ``There are 10 of them in the 12-member varsity group. They live in the school dorms, stay together for most of the day and that's a natural incubator for team spirit.'' Lu believes his players' seamless teamwork is the underlying reason for Gongkang's success ahead of speed, strength or agility and this sounds just heavenly to Paul Tagliabue, a commissioner of the National Football League in the United States who wrapped up an historical visit to China last month. ``The game is not only about a player's height or huge size,'' Tagliabue said during his Shanghai visit. ``So I just don't worry about whether Chinese players are as physically big as American football players or not. It's a very important part of education to make kids work together and fulfill their mission as a group.'' The NFL means what it says. The most powerful American professional sports entity has been working jointly for the past two years with China's education authorities to integrate football -- known in China as ``Olive Ball'' -- into the local school sports curriculum. The fledgling flag football project -- a non-contact version of the game played in helmets and body armor in the United States -- is the result. Flag football players wear flags attached to the belts on their running shorts. Boys chase one another down and grab the flags rather than tackle but the skills required are the same as in the real version of the game -- running, throwing, catching and kicking an oblong ball. The commissioner announced upon his arrival that China, for the first time, would host the NFL Flag Football World Championships and nine international teams will soon be descending on Beijing accompanied by media entourages from their respective nations. Teams from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Mexico are to battle for national pride this August in gridiron. And the team to represent China will be decided this weekend when three teams from Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing vie for the honor. Tagliabue seems to be aware that there is a long way to go before the sport will make any impact in the world's most populous nation. ``Maybe it will take 15 years, or even more,'' he said. ``We will be very flexible in promoting the sport. For instance, in China, if necessary, normal rules could be altered to have fewer players or more strict rules on physical contact can be introduced.'' The NFL drive, as Tagliabue and officials in his entourage confess, is modeled on the National Basketball Association's triumphant entry into the Chinese market. The NBA, little known in China even a decade ago, has established a stronghold in China thanks to years of relentless promotion and the God-given gift of Yao Ming, the Shanghai-born super star center who plays for the Houston Rockets. The NFL's crusade could turn out to be much tougher. ``Basketball had already become part of life for a considerable number of Chinese before NBA came in. However, until 2003 virtually nobody in China had heard of American football,'' says Lu. Lu himself only found out about the game by accident when he ran into a touring American university football team in the 1990s. And back then the former sports academy student could never have imagined himself today being only one step away from taking a team composed mainly of Tibetans to represent China in an American football championship. ``It's a world where miracles always happen,'' says Lu. ``And I hope my team will be the next one.''