Punts, Kicks Biggest Hit With Soviet Fans in Football’s Debut

MOSCOW â€”  A few years down the road, when Joe Montana is quarterbacking the “Moscow Evil Empires” and Tex Schramm is general manager of the “Irkutsk Igloos,” they will look back on this day and remember with reverence how two squads of Oklahoma high-school boys played some fine American-style football in Dynamo Stadium Wednesday night, the first-ever game in the Soviet Union.

The boys played their hearts out. And the crowd loved it, though they seemed a bit confused. They were nonplussed by the touchdowns, which seemed to them random and obscure, but loved the great arc of the kicks and punts. “I think that’s their soccer background coming into play,” said Matt Cook, a quarterback for the eastern all-star squad, the Boomers. “It’s hard to imagine a place where the highlight is the extra points.”

The idea of bringing U.S. football to a soccer-mad country like the U.S.S.R. started a couple of years back when Dan Crookham, the athletic director at Tulsa’s Rogers High School, was drinking some “iced teas” with some buddies and watching the Dallas Cowboys play the Chicago Bears in London’s Wembley Stadium.

“Now that’s a hell of a thing,” one of them said, pointing at the William (The Refrigerator) Perry’s revision of English country manners.

“Wouldn’t that be something to bring our boys over to London,” said another.

“Well, how about Russia?” came the answer, and Crookham, a Sooner Quixote braced with iced tea and ambition, set things in motion.

“The first thing the Russians wanted to know from us was, ‘How many players are gonna get killed?’ Swear to God. I said, ‘The only one who gets killed in Oklahoma high-school football is the coach--if he doesn’t win.’ ” Crookham spoke Wednesday night as he stood on the sidelines watching his dream race up and down the artificial turf in front of a crowd estimated between 8,000 and 10,000.

In a tale of bureaucratic woe consistent with any native Muscovite’s daily experience, it took about a year for Crookham to get the right person on the phone. The Oklahomans finally got some help from the state commission on sports and the country’s rugby association. But they had a lot of explaining to do.

“The Russians didn’t know anything much about the game except that large people were involved,” Crookham said. “They were extremely concerned about broken bones.”

The Soviets cut themselves a sweetheart deal: the Americans would pay their own way for games in Moscow, Tallinn and Leningrad, and the Soviets would take 100 percent of the gate. Tickets were sold for four rubles apiece. “What the heck,” said Crookham, who has no future as a labor negotiator. “We said, ‘Let’s go.’ ”

The total cost of the trip is $600,000 and each player had to come up with his own expenses, which are steep -- $2,800 apiece. A few of the less well-to-do players managed to make it here with the help of bake sales and car washes, but many didn’t.

Upon arrival the players and coaches were somewhat less than dazzled by Moscow’s culinary offerings. No chicken-fried steak on the menu. The first meal was lumpy oatmeal and lukewarm Pepsi. The next was an alleged form of bird life.

“They said it was chicken but it tasted like pigeon,” said Jeff Dudley, a slight split end from Tulsa. “Their food’s got a weird taste, and my stomach can’t handle it.”

Moscow Radio has been advertising the games here and in Tallinn and Leningrad for days, and a small crowd showed up Tuesday for practice. The most enthusiastic among them was a group of six teen-agers from Chelyabinsk, a town 1,200 miles to the southeast. They are members of the country’s first and only U.S.-style football club. For equipment they have been using motorcycle helmets with soldered iron crossbars, waterproof life vests, hockey pads and a rugby ball.

“We came all the way here to Moscow just to see this,” said the group president, Alexander Kovrigin. “We’d seen a few film clips on pirated videocassettes, but not much. When I was in the Marines, I tried to play a little bit just to keep my legs from turning to stone. They say people get murdered in American football, but that’s all ridiculous.”

After practice, the Oklahomans gave the boys from Chelyabinsk a couple of footballs.

Baseball and golf have already made appearances in the Soviet Union, and neither one has taken hold. The Japanese are promising to build a ball yard and Armand Hammer, the American industrialist and longtime Soviet friend, says he wants to build a first-class golf course, but the Soviets themselves take all this with a certain bemused resignation. They have their own games in case anyone hasn’t noticed.

It was clear at game time Wednesday night that not a soul in the crowd -- save the few U.S. students studying at universities around Moscow -- knew a red dog from a hot dog, but they were intent on whooping it up in fine Sooner style. Although both sides had only a week to prepare and the offenses were running on about a dozen set plays, there was enough breakaway action to keep everyone interested.

The Boomers, if you must know, kicked the Stars around pretty good, winning, 28-6, with a triple reverse here and an on-the-run bomb there. But the crowd seemed happiest when anarchy was unleashed upon the field in the form of a fumble or a punt.

“It all looks like a lot of running around to me. I can’t quite make it out but it’s fun,” said one spectator, Sergei Dokin.

A lot of the fans wore their American finery. Yuri Bogomolov wore a T-shirt reading “He’s tan. He’s rested. And he’s back. Nixon in ’88.”

“I hear Nixon loved football,” he said, “and I do too.”