THE UN-KOALA : This Australian Plays American Rules Football

He calls his head coach “mate” and lives to tell about it. He has a standing offer to buy beer for the entire citizenry of St. Louis. He hops like a kangaroo after sacking a quarterback.

You would remember Colin Scotts if you met him. Somewhere between the story about driving a special car with square wheels and the one about his first experience with football pads, you’d have no choice. The legend of Australia’s latest and perhaps most curious export grows unchecked, like ragweed, and nothing can stop it, thank goodness.

“I’m a character, mate,” he says. “No worries, you know.”

The Rams will get to meet him, and judge for themselves, when they play the Cardinals Sunday in St. Louis.

As best as anyone can tell, including the folks at the National Football League office in New York, Scotts is not simply a character, but a curiosity, as well. If their research is correct, Scotts, a defensive end, is the first Australian to be drafted and actually start a regular-season NFL game.

He made his league debut against the Dallas Cowboys not as a starter, butas a second-quarter replacement. Scotts left with two sacks, which tended to put a lid on some of the banter from Dallas linemen.

A sampling of what Scotts has encountered from opposing offensive linemen:

“Hey Aussie, you look like a scared kangaroo.”

“Hey Aussie, you going to try to stick me on the barbie?”

Problem was, Scotts generally did just that. He is, after all, 6 feet 6 inches and 270 pounds, and is just now learning his way around the team’s weight room. What he lacks in technique, he makes up in nerve.

Where else can you watch someone perform a sack dance called the Kangaroo Hop? “I just hop away,” he says. “I don’t actually dance over (the quarterback), mate.”

And when the mood strikes him, Scotts isn’t afraid to do a rendition of the Crocodile Yawn, sort of an adaptation of the University of Florida Gators’ shtick--arms extended in front, then opened and closed in jaw-like motion.

It was during one of those near-meaningless training camp scrimmages, on a hot, humid day common to summers in Charleston, Ill., that Scotts made himself noticeable. Playing on a sore ankle, soaked in sweat, Scotts bullied his way past a blocker and pulled down a surprised Cardinal quarterback. That done, he stood up and yelled, “Bloody yeah, mate!”

Yessiree, that familiar NFL cry, “Bloody yeah, mate!”

By the time the annual rookie show arrived, Scotts, a third-round selection, was a team favorite. Hardly a meal passed when he wasn’t called from his seat by pleas of, “Sing, mate. Sing, mate.”

So he did.

“I was singing ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ ” Scotts said. “Later, they made me dance to the national anthem. That one’s hard to dance to for an hour.”

Scotts has a charming irreverence about him. His first question about St. Louis was, “Where’s the beach?” He loves to surf.

He calls NFL referees judges.

He occasionally finds himself face to face with Cardinal Coach Gene Stallings, of the Texas-dipped dialect. You would pay to listen to these conversations, what with Stallings’ drawl and Scotts’ Aussie accent.

“There’s a lot of, ‘Excuse me,’ and ‘What did you say?” Scotts said.

And this from Stallings, as told to reporter Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It’s kind of entertaining to listen to (Scotts) talk. But I have to admit that I can’t always make out what he’s sayin’.”

The Cardinals found Scotts at the University of Hawaii, which in turn, had discovered him on the UCLA campus, where he was playing for the touring Australian Schoolboys rugby team in 1981. The rest, as they say, is ridiculous.

For instance, Hawaii awarded him a scholarship on potential alone. The first game he saw, he played in. He was assigned a tutor, of sorts, to do nothing more than explain the rules of football.

“Colin didn’t understand what a first down was, who the quarterback was, what a touchdown was,” said Dick Tomey, the former Hawaii coach who now directs Arizona’s football program. “We had to start out with him and say, ‘This is a first down.’

“And in history classes, a professor would say something about the American Revolution and Colin would go, ‘What revolution?’ ”

Said Scotts: “I remember when they tried to teach me. They’d say, ‘First, we kick off the ball.’ I didn’t have a clue. And when they started writing Xs and Os on the blackboard, I thought they were playing some sort of game.

“There was a lot of resentment. Here I come, with no background at all. I couldn’t even put on my bloody pads, mate. They recruited two other Australians with me, but I was the only one who lasted. It was, ‘I’ll get out there and show you, mate.’ I thrived on it. I believed I could do it.

The first day of practice at Hawaii, Scotts was handed his playing equipment: helmet, cleats, jersey, pants, thigh, knee, shoulder and hips pads. He figured where everything went except those hip pads.

“I sort of looked at this first guy for help and asked, ‘Where does this sort of thing go?”’ Scotts said.

“He doesn’t answer. So I ask another guy, who’s even bigger. He goes, ‘What’s your problem?’

“I didn’t ask anymore.”

Instead, he wore the hip pad, which is something like an oversized girdle with a curved fanny piece, back to front for almost two months. It made things, well, uncomfortable. “It killed me,” Scotts said.

Scotts learned, though. By his senior year, he knew all about pads, and first downs and tackles and quarterback sacks. The NFL invited him to the annual scouting session, held this year in Indianapolis. No worries there. They loved him.

“The obvious plus that he had was that most of his greatest accomplishments were ahead of him,” said Tomey. “He was just beginning to blossom his last couple of years. Until we got him, he had never lifted weights. This is a young man of extraordinary intelligence and athletic ability. He’s the kind of guy that can steal your heart.

“And he’s very serious about football. He feels as if he’s representing an entire country and he feels that very personally, just like somebody would in the Olympics. You wouldn’t believe how much he cares.”

Scotts doesn’t have to play football. Actually, he doesn’t have to do much of anything. His father is a successful Sydney land developer. And in case that doesn’t work out, there are always the family gold mines.

Rugby was an alternative. Scotts was among the nation’s finest amateur players. A pro career awaited.

But Scotts is funny that way. He had seen American football as a teen-ager and decided he would play it one day. “There’s something special about the word, first,” he says.

“I got laughed at, abused at, people putting me down. I had a lot of pride in myself as an athlete. It took a lot of guts. Australia resented me at first and that made it hard. It was, ‘How dare you leave Australia!’ ”

But here he is, having the time of his life. The Australian media have followed his every move. He is a cult hero of sorts there, the latest in a long line of Aussie products to make good in the States.

Scotts plays the part, of course. He likes telling Americans about hunting kangaroos with cars with square wheels. That way, he says, the car can jump up and down, matching the kangaroos.

“Yankees love it,” he said, laughing. “I thrive on naive Americans.”

His advice to everyone, especially in the United States, is to loosen up. “Why so serious?” he asks.

“Americans worry about building the next nuclear bomb,” he said. “Australians worry about making a better tasting beer. I mean, laugh at life, enjoy the day.”

So Scotts enjoys. When a handful of his Cardinal teammates started dropping hints about visiting him in Australia during the off-season, Scotts was all for it.

“I’ll just have to tell Dad to put a few more rooms on the house,” he said. “Hey, no worries, mate.”