America’s Team : Canada Has Annexed Sacramento, Where Fans Are Willing to Spend to See a 110-Yard Field, : Three-Down Series and Players With a Story

It figures that when you extend a border 740 miles to the south, pretend Northern California is Saskatchewan and draw new lines on the best football field in town, somebody is going to get confused.

Just ask the 20,082 fans who watched the Sacramento Gold Miners lose to the Calgary Stampeders a week ago in the first home game for the newest Canadian Football League franchise.

They chanted “USA!” They heckled Canadian flag wavers. They called Doug Flutie a girl.

But what they mostly did was surround people like Sean Hannah, a student who drove day and night from Calgary to cheer the defending Grey Cup champions.

“They kept asking me, ‘What just happened?’ ” Hannah said.

*

When it was announced that the ailing CFL had added sports-starved Sacramento to its eight-team league last winter, its first venture to American soil, Mike Smith quickly shelled out $1,000 for four season tickets.

As a local football nut who had supported the Arena and World League versions of the game here, Smith believed he understood strange.

Then he received his CFL seat assignments.

On the 53-yard line.

“My friends said, ‘You got tickets where? ‘ “ he recalled.

If only such confusion were confined to the stands. It is generally agreed that the Gold Miners, who got their first

victory in four games Saturday against Saskatchewan, will do fine as soon as they learn the rules.

In Sacramento’s first exhibition game, Basil Proctor called for a fair catch on a punt. Moments later, he was looking at the sky from under a half-dozen unfamiliar bodies.

Important rule No. 1: There is no fair catch in the CFL.

David Archer, the quarterback, remembers something else about that first game.

“I took the field, I was out there for about 15 seconds and then here came the kicking team,” he said. “I thought, ‘Did somebody make a mistake?’ ”

Important rule No. 2: Only three downs and only 20 seconds between plays in the CFL, unlike the 45 seconds allowed in the NFL.

For the times Archer has thrown interceptions to defenders he never saw, there is important rule No. 3: 12 men to a side.

No wonder the Gold Miners far outdistance the league in penalty yardage and funny looks.

“In my first game in this league, I remember standing up on the bench and shouting, ‘What is going on out there?’ ” said Mike Pringle, former Cal State Fullerton running back. “I think everybody here is learning on the run.”

*

At a free autograph session held behind the Gold Miners’ end zone two days before the first game, the team ran out of card tables for the players to sit at.

Then they ran out of pens.

The next afternoon, owner Fred Anderson worried that his players would be asphyxiated while running out of a smoking mine shaft during a pregame ceremony.

And all of this while the battery on his hearing aid was dying.

“I think everyone in the autumn of their life should do something different,” said Anderson, 69, a local tycoon who made his money in building materials.

He had also owned the Sacramento Surge of the defunct World League, so he moved the Gold Miners into those facilities. The franchise has cost him an additional $2 million, including the first payment on a $3-million franchise fee, but with that money he has proven that nothing is impossible.

Bring to the United States a football game that is played on a field 10 yards longer and 11 1/2 yards wider than a regulation field here? Not to worry.

Just repaint your existing field at Cal State Sacramento, after moving a long jump pit and pole vault runway.

Still not enough room in the corners of the end zones? What’s a few yards to a pioneer?

“A couple of other fields in the league aren’t quite deep enough either,” said Larry Smith, CFL commissioner.

Altering the Surge’s practice field amid the pastures of Rancho Murietta was a little trickier.

Hay bales were put around a giant transformer along the 55-yard line, in the hopes they will prevent the Miners from becoming Chargers.

“I figured, as long as I have the facilities and have placed a lot of damn time and money into them, I might as well use them,” Anderson said.

The move required more than his courage.

It involved a burst of originality from an 86-year-old league that had not expanded in 38 years and in which two of the teams have the same nickname--with different spellings--the Rough Riders of Ottawa and the Roughriders of Saskatchewan.

“We could have been like those guys in the locomotive industry and refused to change,” Smith said. “Or we could have started building diesels.”

The interest in the new franchise, modest at first, has picked up steam.

Season ticket sales have increased from last season in six of the eight Canadian cities. Advertising revenue, including corporate sponsorship, has increased 200%.

So what if some of the new fans are coming to the Canadian stadiums so they can wave U.S. flags upside down and scream at the American team to go home?

“Nothing wrong with stirring up a little competitive spirit, is there?” said Smith, a former CFL player who ran a successful frozen-food business in Toronto before becoming commissioner in 1991. “We Canadians need stirring up. We need more self-esteem. We need to believe that we can be competitive with Americans.”

Lonie Glieberman, president of the Ottawa Rough Riders, said of the new franchise: “This is a challenge to Canadian pride. The biggest cross-border clash since the War of 1812.”

Glieberman seemed to have momentarily forgotten that he was born, grew up and owns businesses in Detroit.

Officials in Sacramento, where 10,000 season tickets for the 22,000-seat stadium have been sold, say they are trying to downplay the nationalistic approach.

But it is difficult, considering that federal labor laws have further separated the Gold Miners from the rest of the league. They must have an all-American roster, circumventing the league’s 57-year-old rule that each team can have no more than 14 non-Canadians.

This has led to predictions that the rule will be bargained out of the CFL players’ union contract in 1995, resulting in all rosters being filled with better-trained American players.

Until then, both sides will howl.

“I certainly don’t think it is us vs. them,” said Steve Skelly, the Miners’ marketing director.

As he spoke, outside his office employees were selling Miner T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “Border War.”

*

Shortly after answering a newspaper ad offering jobs as ticket salesmen for the new franchise, VeLoyce Shackleton realized he should have given it more thought.

“People thought I was selling gold mining equipment,” he said. “Then when I told them that we were in the CFL, they thought I was talking about rugby.”

Coming up with Gold Miners as a nickname for a team from this region was easy. Anything would have been better than the NFL-appointed nickname of Surge.

Surge is the name of a milking machine.

“As long as the World League was around, people would constantly ask me how in the hell could I name a team after something that goes on a cow’s udder,” Anderson said.

Coming up with players was a different matter.

“Imagine having an expansion team with no expansion draft,” said Kay Stephenson, the Miners’ coach. “And imagine having to put it together in a couple of months.”

The Miners were fortunate that Stephenson, who had coached the Surge to a World League title in 1992, agreed to stick around.

They were just as lucky that Archer, the quarterback of the Surge’s championship, turned down an offer to sit on the bench for the Philadelphia Eagles.

The rest of the Miners’ 37-man roster was filled out by more Surge players and other unemployed World League players from around the country.

For many, after being released by the NFL and disappointed by the folding World League, this league represents a last chance.

“One thing about our team,” Archer said. “Everybody in that locker room has a story.”

Part of the story is the locker room. It is a 1950s-style aluminum-sided Quonset hut. The training room is in a similar building next door, and the meeting rooms are in a third hut.

The buildings are part of a campus where, perhaps fittingly, people come to learn how to operate heavy equipment.

The space is leased by the Gold Miners because it is a block from their headquarters and practice field, which sits amid sod, horse and alfalfa farms more than 30 miles of winding country roads from anywhere else on earth.

Because Anderson owns the land, the team will not move any closer. The location is not so bad, really, except on days when practice will be interrupted with a problem that doesn’t often occur in the NFL.

“Hey,” a coach shouted last week in the middle of practice. “What is that smell?”

*

Randy Thornton is here because, after wrestling with Hulk Hogan and kick-boxing with some guy whose name he couldn’t pronounce, football is sort of fun.

“When they finally found me, I was ready to come home,” said Thornton, a defensive end who was on the Japanese Tough Guy circuit when the Gold Miners called. Mike Oliphant, running back, has a past that includes both the NFL and Jack-in-the-Box.

Charles Thompson has been a famous college quarterback at Oklahoma and an infamous resident of a state penitentiary.

Guard James Harper was loading trucks at United Parcel Service when the Gold Miners called.

Then there is center Mike Kiselak, a simple insurance agent who was intent on remaining one.

During training camp at University of the Pacific in Stockton, he diligently kept in touch with clients by using a pay phone at a nearby 7-Eleven.

“I think if I was given a couple of years, I could make it in the NFL. . . . A lot of guys here are like that,” said Kiselak, 26, who has been released by NFL teams twice before the start of the season. “But that has not happened.”

And they have come to Sacramento to keep their careers alive, even if it means unusual conditions and little pay.

Because of a $2-million total salary cap, which affects all but one player--Archer--the average Gold Miner makes about $55,000.

For this, players endure 37-man rosters, which means most of them play on special teams.

“The first game, we had like 16 punts and kicks,” Thornton said. “By the time I finished all those sprints, I was done.”

For this, they endure a schedule that included playing their first two regular-season games in a 72-hour span. Each team must do that once a season.

And for this, they must listen and watch as Canadians boo the national anthem, fly the flag upside down and berate them about being out of their league.

“All of that stuff really bothers me,” Pringle said. “I mean, this ain’t the Olympics.”

Robert Hardy, a running back, realized it wasn’t the Olympics when he nearly caused an international incident by taking the field for a game in Canada while wearing a bandanna painted like the American flag.

Much to the dismay of owner Anderson, Hardy recently discarded the symbol to avoid causing his teammates further grief. But then, things change fast around here.

Two weeks ago, Mark Spharler of Sacramento and his family had never heard of the CFL.

Then they saw an advertisement in a pizza parlor, made a few phone calls, and last week, Spharler was standing in line for autographs of players whose names he did not know.

At the same time his son Matt, 15, was bending over patiently while the back of his shirt was being autographed by an enthusiastic businessman that neither of them knew.

That man was Larry Smith, commissioner of your CFL.

“We Californians,” Spharler said, “I guess we’ve always been leading-edge type people.”