Football Fling in Finland : Longtime Semipro Player Recruiting Team to Play in Arctic Bowl

Attention semi-retired football players who haven’t lost their lust for the game: Dig out the shoulder pads, shine up the cleats and kick the cat out of the helmet. Bob Faeber wants you.

Faeber, 35, owner of Action Buick in North Hollywood and a longtime semipro football player, needs a team to play in the Arctic Bowl on May 21. And in answer to your immediate question, no, it isn’t called the Arctic Bowl because it’s sponsored by an antifreeze company. The game will take place in Oulu, Finland, just a few hundred miles below the North Pole.

Faeber needs 30 Valley-area men who can afford to take a week off from work and pay $1,235 each for round-trip air fare. In addition to playing in the Arctic Bowl, a player will live with a Finnish family, eat free tuna pizzas and reindeer steaks, see the sights and get to play in a second game, this one near Helsinki in a city called Turku. Faeber promises to interrupt the good times with only 10 hours of practice.

“This trip is obviously for a guy who loves playing football and likes the idea of actually taking part in a bowl game,” says Faeber, who has named himself coach and general manager. The team will be called the California All-Stars.

But just because he is using the word all-star and playing in a bowl game it does not mean that Faeber is looking for players who were college starters in another life. The opponent in the Arctic Bowl, Northern Lights, plays in the Finnish-American Football Assn., which compares to “low Division III,” college football in the United States, Faeber says.

Faeber’s evaluation of Finnish football is supported by Vic Wallace, head football at St. Paul College in Minnesota. In 1984, when he coached at William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., Wallace took the varsity to Finland for a game against an association team.

“We beat them pretty easily,” says Wallace, whose quarterback at William Jewell, Kelly Groom, is now coach of the Northern Lights.

Faeber says that a passport and equipment are the only player requirements. And maybe the ability to remember to get on the bus. The team doesn’t have to be better than the one Faeber played on a year ago, one that was shut out by its Mexican hosts in the Friendship Bowl in Mexicali.

“The sponsors are asking that I don’t bring ringers,” says Faeber, who has played semipro football for 19 years in the High Desert Football League.

Information: 818-763-7511.