America at Large:When it was first announced last summer, we'll have to admit that its name - The China Bowl - had a certain resonance that "Meineke Car Care Bowl" and "Weed Eater Bowl" somehow lacked, writes George Kimball.
Other than that, the National Football League's decision to pack the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks off to Beijing to play a pre-season game this August didn't seem to make a lot of sense.
The NFL would appear to have confirmed as much this past Monday when it pulled the plug on its proposed Asian adventure, announcing that its international arm would instead focus its resources on a scheduled New York Giants-Miami Dolphins regular season game slated to be played at Wembley Stadium on October 28th.
In over four decades' worth of covering Super Bowls, as thousands of journalists produced thousands upon thousands of reams of copy leading up to the big game, one could reliably count on a fellow scribe looking up from his typewriter (or, later, computer keyboard) to sigh in acknowledgement of the obvious: "You know, a billion Chinese don't give a spit." What, then, was the NFL thinking? Truth be told, the rationale had little to do with sport.
NBC, the television network which has the rights to the 2008 Olympics as well as a full slate of NFL games, saw it as a vehicle offering opportunities for cross-promotion. Showcasing the Patriots and Seahawks in the Olympic venue - the new, 91,000-seat National Stadium - might whet the appetites of television viewers.
NFL coaches and players consider such exotic trips detrimental to their meticulous preparations for the regular season and don't welcome them under the best of circumstances, but their misgivings were more than allayed by what the owners viewed as a marketing opportunity.
When the China Bowl was first announced, Patriots owner Robert Kraft had said: "If there's any country we should bring our game to, it's the most populous country on earth. Eventually, there will be football in China. And when that day comes, the Patriots would like to be a part of it." Translation: The NFL had looked on enviously over the past few years as the NBA made significant inroads into the Asian market.
In China today, Kobe Bryant jerseys outsell Yao Ming shirts. Nobody actually expected to see the Chinese run out and start playing American football. Dressing them up in team gear was another matter.
Unsurprisingly, construction of the National Stadium is running behind schedule, and the Chinese hosts had already proposed shifting the Patriots-Seahawks game to the half-century old People's Stadium (capacity 70,000), which didn't sit particularly well with NBC.
The retractable roof for Montreal's Stade Olympique wasn't put in place until 1986, fully 10 years after the 1976 Games. Athens in 2004 barely made it to the wire, and the Olympic venues collectively resembled one large construction site. To rely on the timely completion of an Olympic stadium in this day and age, one would have to be either hopelessly naIve or incredibly stupid, and since the NFL is usually neither, we must assume other factors to have been at work - among them, mounting evidence that a billion Chinese really didn't give a spit.
For official consumption, the China Bowl has not been cancelled, but merely postponed until 2009 - after the Beijing Games.
"Our assessment is that Chinese fans would be better served if our game in China is played at a later date, after we have . . . more effectively paved the way for the introduction of our game into China," said NFL vice-president Mark Waller in a statement acknowledging that the 2007 China Bowl had been vaporised.
"The Patriots' road to the Super Bowl," wrote Boston Herald scribe John Tomase, "just got 7,000 miles shorter."
"We remain very interested in participating in the first China Bowl, whenever that is," said Patriots' spokesman Stacey James.
Although the NFL has been going overseas with pre-season games for 21 years now, my own experience is limited to just two of them - the Patriots v the Dallas Cowboys at Estadio Azteca in Mexico in 1998 and, a year earlier, a Chicago Bears-Pittsburgh Steelers exhibition at Croke Park.
In neither case was the game itself especially memorable, but one can't help but note a decade later how many kids one is apt to encounter wearing NFL team jerseys in the streets of Dublin and Mexico City. There must be a connection somewhere.
The NFL's official position is that the situation changed dramatically once the owners unexpectedly approved the Giants-Dolphins game in London this fall. Chinese sources, on the other hand, have suggested that the NFL fumbled in failing to establish a good working relationship with the Beijing Olympic organisers.
Or it could be that they just didn't cross the right palms with silver.
Although the '97 Steelers-Bears game in Dublin was played up as a joint convocation of the Rooney and McCaskey Clans, it never would have taken place but for the ground-breaking enterprise of Jim O'Brien, who introduced American football to Ireland in 1988 with the Boston College-Army Emerald Isle Classic.
That game, of course, took place at Lansdowne Road. O'Brien had hoped to play the game at Croker, and struck his deal with the IRFU only after being resolutely informed that GAA's Rule 26 prohibited the staging of "foreign games" on the hallowed lawn at Croke Park.
That the Steelers and Bears wound up there just nine years later reminds of us of a probably-apocryphal tale, one variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill. Since you've probably heard it before we won't bore you with the details, but the punchline goes "Madam, we have already established what you are. What we're negotiating now is the price."
