They Shop, Sight-See, Get Conned : London Suits Rams’ Visitors to a Tea

At first, Midge Hughes didn’t have much interest in following a football team all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

“When I was approached by the Rams organization to go along with the team,” her husband, Mike, said earlier this week, “I went home and said to her, ‘Do you want to go to London?’ She said, ‘No, not particularly--what for?’

“I said, ‘To go to see a football game.’ And she said, ‘Hell no!’ ”

But now, said Hughes, who is executive director of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce, she’s glad she changed her mind. Since they arrived here Monday, the Hugheses have seen St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

All of that and football too.

“It really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said.

The Anaheim couple are among more than 100 Southern Californians, many of them from Orange County, who are here for the second annual American Bowl Sunday, in which the Rams will face the Denver Broncos before a sellout crowd of 80,000. Many of the group, including Angels owner Gene Autry and Anaheim Mayor Ben Bay, made the trip on a chartered jumbo jet with members of the Rams team and their families, at the invitation of team owner Georgia Frontiere.

Most of them say they don’t know quite what to expect Sunday at London’s 150-year-old Wembley Stadium, where the 6 p.m. game will be televised to the United States (10 a.m. Anaheim time on Channel 4). With the sellout, it’s certain to be an enthusiastic crowd.

When tickets went on sale here in June, the entire stadium--including 35,000 standing-room-only tickets for the end zones--was sold out in four hours.

Now scalpers are getting about $30 a ticket--three times the face value. Last year, at the first American Bowl between the Chicago Bears and the Dallas Cowboys, tickets were going for up to $300 at game time.

Some Londoners, Hughes said, seem to be “fanatically interested” in American football, which was introduced to the British Isles by an independent TV station four years ago. Now, the pubs swarm with fans on the nights the games are televised, and 14 million Britons watched a live telecast of last year’s Super Bowl, which began at 10 p.m.

Not everyone shares that sentiment, however.

A very Scottish bartender at the Mayfair Hotel, where the Rams are staying, said he had not a whit of interest in Sunday’s game. He was, however, impressed with the Rams’ size from the perspective of a rugby enthusiast.

“Aye, those lads are big brutes, aren’t they?” he said. “I wouldn’t half mind having them on my team. I fancy they’d make good ruggers.”

Several of the Orange County fans are also staying at the Mayfair, which is about half a block from Picadilly Circus in an exclusive neighborhood of mostly Georgian architecture. Others are at the Brittania, near Hyde Park. Frontiere is staying at her own London apartment.

In lieu of a tailgater Sunday, Frontiere is planning to throw a little brunch at the stadium for about 350 people.

While the game is the focus of the trip for the Orange County visitors, sightseeing has dominated their activity this week.

“In some cases, we’ve been a little overwhelmed by the hospitality and the manner in which we’ve been treated,” Anaheim Chamber of Commerce President Floyd Ferano said. “I think that’s certainly made our trip. When you travel to another place and you do these things, it’s people that make a trip, and it’s been very nice.”

“We’ve done some sightseeing,” Mike Hughes said, “and my wife has done some shopping. We’ve gone from floor to floor in Harrod’s. Of course, we were appalled by the exchange rate (more than $1.60 to British pound sterling), but a store like Harrod’s is fantastic. Anyone coming to London just shouldn’t miss it.”

There was, of course, that little incident with the man in his 70s who ran into the Hugheses near Buckingham Palace and offered to show them around. They had a very nice time, Hughes said, but the $40 fee for the afternoon tour seemed a bit steep.

“I’m on a small pension,” Mike Hughes quoted the man as saying.

“We were conned,” Midge Hughes said.

For Anaheim Councilman Fred Hunter, the high point of the trip so far has been a visit with several other city officials to London’s Borough of Brent, where Wembley stadium is located. Hunter and Bay met with the borough’s two mayors and some of its council members there Wednesday.

“We spent about two hours there, talking about government,” Hunter said, “and Brent is very similar to Anaheim, in the sense that there are 250,000 people and they have a stadium. They just had David Bowie there, and they’re having Madonna. We just had Madonna, and now we’re having David Bowie.

“They have soccer, and we have football. We have many of the same kinds of problems that they have--traffic, rowdyism, people drinking too much--it’s very similar. I think that they would be an ideal sister city for us, same size, a stadium and many of the same problems.

“The only thing really different is that we have five members on our City Council, and they have 63 members. I don’t know how they get anything done.”

As for Sunday’s game, Hunter said it’s a preview of a great season for the Rams: “I’m excited about this year’s team. We finally seem to have the quarterback controversy settled. I think Jim Everett is a great young quarterback and good team leader.”

Hunter said that’s the key to his high expectations: “I’ve been a Rams fan for 20 years, and it’s the first time I can remember there being no quarterback problems. This team will go all the way.”

But first, of course, there’s Sunday.