Schramm Envisions a Future for Overseas American Football

For years, they waited for the onrushing wave to smash on our shores. For years, they--the soccer aficionados who have always had to fight for what they saw as their rightful place in the American sports picture--said that it was inevitable.

Soccer was going to be the sport of the ‘70s. They said that in the 1960s. Soccer was going to be the sport of the ‘80s. They said that in the 1970s. And now in the ‘80s, guess which sport they say we’ll all be involved with in the ‘90s?

Their argument has always seemed logical. The rest of the world is obsessed with soccer to the point of occasional death and destruction when nations collide on the field. We are perhaps the most sports-conscious nation of all. And now soccer has become one of the most popular of our youth sports, particularly in the Valley.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the long-awaited sports revolution. The tide may be turning. American football, our own version of soccer, is crashing on distant shores.

The biggest roar of all came two weeks ago in London’s Wembley Stadium where a sellout crowd of 82,699, most of them British subjects weaned on soccer, watched the Dallas Cowboys and Chicago Bears play a meaningless exhibition game.

Not meaningless to those fans, however.

They rooted for William (Refrigerator) Perry, Jim McMahon and the Dallas cheerleaders and generally acted like their American counterparts.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we ought to start predicting that football will be England’s sport of the ‘90s or the next century.

But Tex Schramm, president and general manager of the Cowboys, says football has a future overseas.

“I don’t see it becoming a World Cup type of thing,” he said the other day, seated in his temporary quarters at Cal Lutheran where his team is back at work in training camp. “Football is not easily adaptable internationally. In soccer, size is not a factor. And there is not a money factor. All you need to play soccer is shorts, a jersey and shoes. It takes money to outfit a football team.

“You could have the natives of a country play football, but you wouldn’t want to stock the teams with Americans the way they do basketball over there.”

In other words, don’t plan on seeing London and Paris joining Washington and New York in the new, expanded NFC East in the near future.

“What you had in London,” Schramm said, “was two foreign teams playing a foreign sport. You’d be jumping way ahead to start talking about NFL teams over there. But you could have teams over there competing at their own level. You would have to build up the talent. They would have to grow up playing the game in school. It would take years.”

Schramm envisions a situation similar to the one in Canada where a separate, distinct brand of football has evolved, complete with its own rules. And he’s not limiting his vision of the future to just London, either.

“I could see NFL exhibition games played in Frankfurt or Rome or Paris or Tokyo. They now play a game between American colleges in Japan. You could even play in Moscow,” he said.

America’s Team against America’s most formidable opponent?

“Yes, I’d like to see the Cowboys play there next year,” Schramm said. “The Soviets have the numbers and the size to compete. Years ago, people said they’d never be able to compete with Canada in hockey. They did.”

Schramm is not talking about regular season games overseas.

“Not in the foreseeable future,” he said. “I think to play regular season games over there would be too disruptive to the teams. You have to do it right to make it successful. What we did this time was to go over and stay a week. If you went in the day before and then left right away, as you might have to in the regular season, there would not be the same reaction.”

But there was a reaction in London. Enough to question just which way the current is running.

“I think we may be seeing somewhat the reverse of what people have been predicting as far as soccer coming here,” Schramm said. “But soccer is still going to be played everywhere.”

And someday, the same could be said of football. Move over, you Russian ballerinas. The Cowboy cheerleaders are coming.