Nyet Worth of Football in Moscow Will Be Seen

As long as the Soviet Union is supplying us with hockey players, we might as well reciprocate and send them some college football players--but, hey, provided they all have round-trip tickets. The Glasnost Bowl, scheduled Sept. 2 at the Dynamo Stadium in Moscow, will pit USC against Illinois in the season opener for both schools, and we just can’t wait to see who is named the Stolichnaya Lite player of the game.

Ordinarily when Pacific 10 and Big Ten football squads meet in a bowl game, it marks the end of a season, not the beginning. This one, though, will be a Rose Bowl in a brighter shade of red. There will be no Beef Stroganoff Bowl at the Moscow branch of Lawry’s Prime Rib, but otherwise, it will be your usual big-time American college football game--and the Soviet Union’s first.

Larry Smith, USC’s coach, has just returned from the longest scouting trip of his coaching life. He and Athletic Director Mike McGee flew to Moscow to check out the facilities, the accommodations, the general atmosphere and, oh, you know, the little things every football coach needs to know, like, will there be armed guards following us around with machine guns?

Smith’s players have other, more serious considerations.

“They want to know if they can take things over there to trade,” the USC coach said. “You know, like jeans.”

Nobody in the Soviet Union interrogated Smith on important points, such as, what is the difference between a quarterback, a halfback and a fullback (and would a chiropractor be of any help)? Or, who are the Illini, and why are they Fighting? Or, why did Rodney Peete not get picked until the sixth round? Or, why do you travel to Paris year after year to visit this Notre Dame place, when there are many other fine Gothic cathedrals throughout Europe?

What the Soviet officials did want to know is how many ambulances USC and Illinois would be requiring.

“One gentleman said, ‘We’ll have seven to 10 ambulances at the stadium. Will that be sufficient?’ I think they think of football as more of a gladiator sport than it is,” Smith said.

“Their concept seemed to be that football is a very brutal game, with men laying on the ground all the time, broken and bleeding. I told them we rarely had more than one ambulance available at a game. That surprised them. I think they expect us to be carting off players on stretchers every couple of minutes, until eventually you run out of players.”

There is some football played in the Soviet Union, Smith found out, and not just soccer. There’s “that stuff you see on ESPN,” the rather rugby-like Australian Rules Football type of game, but mostly, Smith said, the people he met were completely unfamiliar with American football, and were looking forward to seeing some.

It should be a spirited game, insofar as it will count just as though it were being played in the Coliseum or in Champaign, Ill. This is not a meaningless exhibition, nor is it one of those postseason gigs that is little more than a cultural exchange, as with the Mirage Bowl played in Japan.

When USC played in Japan a couple of years ago, not only was the game insignificant, but the hotel rooms were so small that, to borrow an old joke, the Trojan players had to go outside just to change their minds. Some of them literally did have to change clothes outdoors, because the only way they could fit into their rooms was horizontally, at bedtime.

Smith, before being hired by USC, took one of his Arizona teams to that same Mirage Bowl. Except from a tourist standpoint, he found the experience useless. The Arizona and Stanford players flew over on the same plane, hung out together, went through the motions during practice and played without intensity, to the point that Smith said, “I really never saw what we gained by going.”

That is why he was apprehensive at first about USC’s going to Moscow. He asked for assurances that the team have an open weekend upon returning to the United States, and that the next game it played be a home game. And even though he was willing to have the Trojans and Illini share the same hotel, he prefers they avoid the buddy-buddy stuff before the game.

“(The Soviets) don’t understand that part,” Smith said. “They think of it as a sporting contest, and nothing more. To us, though, it’s a serious game, our season opener.”

The squad will arrive on a Wednesday afternoon and practice twice before the game, which will be played Saturday at 8 p.m., Moscow time, and televised live in the States at 9 a.m., Pacific time, that day. The next day will be reserved for sightseeing, shopping and so forth, at which time the USC and Illinois players are free to fraternize, swap their Levi’s and Madonna cassettes, whatever.

Packing for the trip figures to be 10 times tougher than the game. The Americans must bring with them all the necessary equipment, from footballs to goal posts to 25-second clocks. They also intend to transport their own cooks and their own food-- all of it --for 75 fully grown football players on each side, plus coaches. Smith estimates that USC itself will bring a semi truck’s load of beef and chicken alone.

Then, the little things.

“We have to bring our own supply of ice,” Smith said. “And if you know football, you know that a team like ours might go through a ton of ice a day.

“I don’t know how we’re going to do it, frankly. The Russian people still don’t have very good refrigeration, and they don’t serve ice in drinks or provide machines in hotels. We did locate one machine there that makes ice, but in very low quantities. I never thought I’d be facing a football game where one of my big concerns was where to get ice.”

Most coaches can remember times when a long trip meant a two-hour bus ride. Now, college football is going global. The Glasnost Bowl, if successful, will become an annual event, and already USC and Illinois have been invited back in 1999 for a 10th reunion game, should the inaugural ball turn out all right.

“The day we arrived, we encountered the May Day parade, and it was a display of Communism at its best, if you know what I mean,” Smith said. “Red banners everywhere, giant canvas murals of Lenin and Marx, an unbelievable display of Communism. We saw it in all its glory. It was fascinating to be exposed to all of that, and yet not feel unwelcome, not feel any hatred toward Americans.

“A couple of times I found myself saying, ‘Hey, I’m behind the Iron Curtain.’ Well, nowadays I guess you don’t hear that term anymore.”

When some future generation of Soviet youth is asked to identify the Iron Curtain, perhaps he will ask if that was the defensive line with L. C. Greenwood and Mean Joe Greene. Football is coming to Moscow. Be listening for the betting spread from Jimmy the Russian.