It Is Football Follies, but Owners W-LAFF to the Bank

Could it be that the W-LAFF will get the last laugh? Could it be that this silly idea of playing American football games in front of crowds of Europeans, to whom football is soccer, just might work?

From the beginning, when the NFL proposed the World League of American Football as a global extension of itself, the jokesters had a field day. This was something ready-made for a Johnny Carson monologue. Would the Europeans “kick a touchdown?” Would they call defensive backs “goalies?”

The W-LAFF label was born quickly. America’s sports columnists, if nothing else exceedingly quick with both the quip and the rip, were gleefully fast to their word processors on that.

So were others, among them those prominent commentators on the world sports scene, the authors of the comic strip “Tank McNamara,” syndicated in most of America’s leading sports sections. W--LAFF was worth at least a couple of weeks’ worth of strips for the minds that create Tank.

But, as it turns out, what you hear is not exactly what you get when seeing a game in person. The reality is that the game is not the show, the sideshow is the show.

The quality of football is mediocre. Americans watching this will be about as impressed as Europeans watching American soccer. On a scale of one to 10, the W-LAFF is about a three. It is an accumulation of dropped passes, missed tackles and slow, unimaginative offenses.

Scanning a roster of players will leave all but the freakiest of football freaks with blank expressions.

Barcelona played Frankfurt here Sunday, and the roster of recognizable Barcelona players stopped somewhere around Bruce Clark, the aging defensive lineman who was once the No. 1 draft choice in the NFL; Lydell Carr, who once had a big Orange Bowl game for Oklahoma, and Tony Rice, the great run-no-pass quarterback who led Notre Dame to a long winning streak a few years ago. Other than that, you have a lengthy collection of Olaf Hempels from Germany and Yepi Pau’u’s from San Jose State.

But there is an attraction to this, and even though it has little to do with the quality of the game being played, that attraction was evident Sunday.

The Barcelona team, nicknamed the Dragons, plays its games at Estadi Olimpic Montjuic, the Olympic Stadium that seats 55,000 and will be the center of worldwide attention 14 months from now, when Barcelona plays host to the Summer Olympics. The stadium is a refurbished relic, built in 1929 with the hopes of attracting the 1936 Games that went instead to Adolf Hitler’s Berlin. It will be expanded to 65,000 seats for the Olympics and will be the site of the opening and closing ceremonies and track and field competition.

The stadium sits atop a hill, Montjuic, that looks over the Mediterranean, and although it has been polished and shined for the Olympics, it still has a historic feel not unlike the Los Angeles Coliseum.

The game drew a crowd of 29,753, and even though Frankfurt won, 10-3, the Barcelona faithful were just that, right up until the end. Traffic is terrible here, probably worse than in Los Angeles, but there were few early departures.

The spectators are very young, mostly in their 20s. They are the European MTV generation, and they seem to represent an interesting study on what has become a love-hate relationship in Europe with just about everything that is American.

Many of them stand throughout and dance--the music during interruptions of play is American rock and roll--and they carry team flags and national flags and dress only in the colors of their team. Sunday’s crowd was a sea of green and gold, Dragon colors. Jack Teele, the Dragons’ chief executive officer, said that this team has been doing about $140,000 a week in merchandising revenue. At the concession stands, a Dragon hat is 2,000 pesetas, about $20, and a Dragon T-shirt is 2,500 pesetas, about $25.

One banner hanging from the rafters Sunday seemed to sum up the scene. It read: “Sex, Dragons and Rock and Roll.”

The W-LAFF has averaged 34,000 for games in Europe, and the 29,753 for the Dragon-Galaxy game was actually below the 31,000 average for the four previous home games in Barcelona.

“We had to start the game at 3 p.m. because of a contract with German television,” Teele said. “Plus, it was a holiday weekend here and it was the lunch hour, so all of that hurt us a little today.”

Holidays are numerous in Spain. There are probably twice as many as in the United States, and they usually trigger a mass exodus to the mountains or sea from a city squeezed on space and bustling with nearly 3 million people. And the lunch hour, from 2 to 4 p.m., is a near sacred rite, with few stores or businesses of any kind open.

So, with so little real football quality to sell, and so many unfamiliar customs to work around, the Americans who run the W-LAFF have leaned toward extravaganzas in their marketing approach. Selling to a crowd much more attuned to Madonna than Mozart, they have leaned not so much toward the hard sell as the loud one.

For the first game, in Frankfurt, league President Mike Lynn, the former Minnesota Viking general manager, flew into the stadium in the middle of a pregame light and music show in a helicopter. The league later referred to that as Lynn’s “dramatic” entrance.

At other games, the fare has ranged from circus acts to sword-swallowing to Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Great Balls of Fire.” Sunday, they let the game begin after a giant dragon spewed fire for about two minutes.

Teele, the man in charge here, is a former Ram executive, who moved from the Rams to the Chargers in 1981 and stayed in San Diego until deciding to embark on this strangest of all adventures for a former NFL official.

And strange it has been.

“They asked me how to put in the goal posts, so I told them to dig a hole down six feet for the upright, he said. “At 5 1/2 feet, they hit water, so we had to pour the concrete as fast as we could before the hole filled up.

“Then they told me, that because of the Olympic track, our end zone could only be seven yards deep. What could I do? You just live with it. I told our wide receivers to run a lot of short hook patterns when they get down close.”

But Teele’s fondest memory of his first year as top Dragon was his attempt to find a practice field for one of the visiting teams.

“I went to a little town outside Barcelona because I was told that they had a soccer field we could use,” Teele said. “When I found the soccer field, it was locked up, so I asked somebody how I could find out about getting it unlocked.

“They said I had to find the man who ran the field, the soccer impresario. They said he was always at a tavern, two blocks down and three blocks to the right.

“So I went and found him, and he looked like Sidney Greenstreet. He took me into the back room, all smoky and dirty, and we sat around a giant pool table, with the cloth ripped right down the middle. First thing he said was, “You want my soccer field, it will be $1,000 a day.

“So, since this thing was right out of a Cagney movie anyway, I pull the big bluff. I shrug my shoulders, say OK, and get up to leave. He grabs me, we talk some more, the room gets smokier.

“After I buy three rounds of drinks and tell him how clever he is, we settle for $150 a day. Ah, Spain.”

Ah, Spain. Ah, the W-LAFF.