Football Fever Spreading Among O.C. Vietnamese : Culture: In Little Saigon, the big-screen TVs are tuned to the NFL and the talk is of point spreads.

At the Hai Au cafe, on the edge of Little Saigon, the crowd of mostly young Vietnamese-American men smoked incessantly and sipped espresso and iced latte.

While a Vietnamese song about lost love was playing, the patrons talked football. Yes, O.J. Simpson starred for Buffalo before he went to the 49ers. And John Madden hates flying; that’s why the CBS announcer travels from game to game on a bus.

Then the kickoff began and all attention was diverted to the two big-screen television sets for the National Football Conference championship game between San Francisco and Dallas. The Cowboys ultimately won, sending them to Sunday’s Super Bowl game with Buffalo in Pasadena.

Football fever has become almost epidemic in Little Saigon and other Vietnamese-American enclaves across the United States. For newly arrived immigrants, perhaps it is a way to identify with being American, a sports sociologist said. Whatever the reason, they have embraced the game with enthusiasm.

At a recent premiere of a Vietnamese movie in Fullerton, the emcee wished the audience a “Happy Lunar New Year” and a “successful Super Bowl season.”

The director of the East Asian studies department at UC Berkeley had to reschedule a party to honor guests from Hanoi when told that no one would show up on Sunday because of the Super Bowl. “It was the first time any of my Vietnamese friends mentioned the Super Bowl,” Prof. Douglas Pike said.

The owner of the Hai Au cafe said business goes up about 60% whenever there’s a football game. The place is not a typical sports bar--no alcohol is served there. Regulars often drop by to discuss the point spread and the injured-reserve list.

“I like the strategy in football,” said Tung Nguyen. “Baseball shows off the individual talents, but it has little teamwork. Football is 11 men playing together.”

Others think its appeal is in the controlled violence. “Football is a metaphor for war,” said Andrew Lam, a writer from San Francisco.

Football also attracts in another fashion: the point spread.

“I used to get a $300-something paycheck a week, and there would be nothing left,” said Trinh Tan, an electronic technician from Van Nuys. “I was single and I didn’t care. Now my wife keeps all the money.”

But what about baseball? “No one watches the World Series,” said Dung Tran, the cafe owner, himself a football fanatic. “There’s no action.”

As crazy as they are about football, the Vietnamese-Americans in Orange County could not care less about baseball. As far as most of them are concerned, Joltin’ Joe not only has left and gone away, but isn’t missed.

“The baseball season is the most boring,” said Trinh Tan, a 29-year-old electronics technician and a 49er nut.

“Football has action that attracts,” said Tung Le Thanh, publisher of Suc Song, a weekly Vietnamese-language sports magazine.

Vietnamese publications in Orange County often ran commentaries about NFL stars such as Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice, but never about baseball stars Eric Davis or Mark Langston.

About 10 years ago, the nation’s largest Vietnamese newspaper, Nguoi Viet Daily News, ran a monthlong series on the rules of the NFL to help its readers solve the mysteries of Monday Night Football.

“Baseball, we never printed anything,” said editor Yen Do.

The football obsession with Vietnamese-Americans is part of a natural pattern, said Norman Baker, a professor of sports history at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Throughout history, immigrants have picked up sports as a way to assimilate in a new land.

Baseball was big around the turn of the century with Ellis Island immigrants. The game was the American sport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Baker said. “Clearly baseball played a significant role in creating the American identity” at the time, he said.

He noted that Charles Comiskey, the late owner of the Chicago White Sox whose name graces the stadium, was the offspring of an Irish immigrant.

“If you come here, the first thing that hits you is that sports is a big part of America,” Baker said.

The latest immigrants from Asia are looking for something that would readily identify them as Americans, he said, and football fills the bill perfectly.

It’s easy to watch and packs a wallop of visual excitement. Baseball is more complicated and subtle, requiring from its fans the knowledge of statistics and an appreciation of the game’s history and lore.

Ironically, football was shown in Vietnam on American armed forces television as early as 1966, but the craze never caught on until the exodus after the fall of Saigon.

Vietnamese-Americans are starting to play football too. Binh Tran, a junior from Costa Mesa High School, is one of the county’s leading rushers.

Tran’s father, a former South Vietnamese officer who spent six years in political prison, arrived in the United States in 1990. The Washington Redskins, the champs that year, became his favorite team. Now father and son sometimes watch football together, with the elder Tran giving his son tips on eluding tacklers.

But not every Vietnamese-American dislikes baseball.

Thanh Pham is an artificial heart researcher and an Oakland A’s fanatic.

His dream is to be the Abner Doubleday of Vietnam. He recently returned to Vietnam and trained a team from Da Nang in a game he calls “bong chay,” or literally, “bat ball.”

But he, too, said his Sunday was ruined when his beloved 49ers lost to Dallas.