Experiencing an NFL game in London
I was even more floored by his reaction to the theft. I had assumed, in all honesty, that he would shrug it off and move on. I had bought him the hat the previous Christmas, as part of what has become an annual tradition of Americana-themed gifts. I had obtained Gators gear for my nieces and nephews; a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts ground coffee for my brother-in-law (an inside joke, of sorts); a Montreal Expos T-shirt for my uncle (long story); and, for my dad, I’d bought a Jaguars hat. At a recent family reunion, he’d seen me wearing mine and mentioned that he liked the design, so we’d bought him one on a lark. But here he was, somewhere between hips, genuinely mourning its loss. “It wouldn’t be too much trouble,” he asked after he had related the story, “for you to buy a new one and FedEx it over?”
And so, duly touched, we had. Which, in turn, brought him closer to the team, and, by extension, to me. Not long after the arrival of the replacement hat, I began to get text messages asking if the Jags had won — and against whom — and by how many points — and so on. If I traveled to an away game, he asked for photos from the trip. When play-off season rolled around, he wanted to know if the team might conceivably make the Super Bowl. It was all rather pleasing. And yet, in another sense, it was wholly unsatisfying. He’d request the score, but possess no real grasp of what it meant. He’d ask which team they were playing against, but have no context within which to process the answer. He’d be happy they were in the playoffs, but remain unsure as to what that actually meant. Irked by this unusual breakdown in communication, I resolved to fix it as best I could.
Which is why, on a warm day in October, the two of us walked into the Tottenham Hotspurs’ remarkable new stadium in London, armed with two tickets to see the Jaguars play the Buffalo Bills. It is, I suppose, one of the great coincidences of my life that the NFL team that I happened to pick up when I moved to the United States was the one that plays at least one game each year in the country I left behind. Now, it perhaps seems unremarkable that the NFL is spreading its wings to other nations. But, back in 2013, when the Jaguars first began playing games abroad, the idea was nothing short of revolutionary. With good reason, many thought that the experiment would end in failure. Surely — surely? — there could not be enough NFL fans in England to fill a stadium, let alone to fill Wembley Stadium, which holds 90,000 people? But, as it turned out, there were. And, better still, it turned out that those people liked it so much that the Jaguars could make the journey an annual tradition. This year, for the first time, they expanded the jaunt to two games.
By the time I arrived in England, the first of those games had been played (in that contest, the Jaguars beat the Falcons by 16 points, just as the Founding Fathers intended), but the second game — against the Buffalo Bills — still remained. And what better introduction to football could there be than a good ol’ AFC brawl featuring Trevor Lawrence and Josh Allen, two of the most exciting quarterbacks in the league? In my heart of hearts, I did not expect the Jaguars would win it. But I did expect a spectacle, and, just as important perhaps, I expected some answers to a bunch of the questions that had been nibbling at me for a while: What was an NFL game in London like? Could the Brits really host — or enjoy — an event as unashamedly theatrical as this? Was my dad’s embryonic interest in football simply displaced attachment to his hat?
Within a mile of the stadium, it became readily apparent that I was not in Jacksonville anymore. At NFL games in the United States, you may see one or two conspicuously out-of-place shirts; in London, they were ubiquitous. Technically, this was a Bills “home” game, and it showed: For every piece of teal on display, I must have seen 50 or 60 shocks of blue. But interspersed with those were the colors and logos of every other team that plays football in these United States. In the seats around mine, I saw fans of the Patriots, the Packers, the Chargers, the 49ers, the Chiefs, the Titans (and there I was thinking that the English had good taste!), the Giants, the Vikings, and more — each proudly displaying the marks of their tribe.
Some of these fans were expat Americans desperate to see a game — any game. Others were eccentric Englishmen who had decided to adopt American football as a hobby in defiance of the overwhelming disdain in which it is still held in British culture. For both, the game represented a homecoming. Imperial Britain exported its games around the world, which is why one can watch cricket in India, rugby in New Zealand, and soccer in South Africa. Exceptional America kept its games for itself, which is why, with a handful of quirky exceptions, football and baseball have remained synonymous with the Stars and Stripes. When those games venture abroad, people are ready.
I had wondered if the foreign setting and the presence of so many neutrals would alter the feeling of the event and turn it into a bloodless exhibition match. As one would struggle to generate excitement at a political convention that was stocked with assiduously disinterested independents, to inspire joy at a wedding that was attended by guests who knew neither the bride nor the groom, so I feared that an NFL stadium filled with dispassionate onlookers might represent a carnival more than a competition. But I was wrong. Certainly, there was a gap between those of us wearing the colors of the two teams on the field and those who were in search of a nice day out and “a good game.” And yet, whatever effect the neutrals might have had was more than offset by the increased fervor of the partisans — people who, by definition, had either traveled a long way to get there, or who had been long starved of live football games in which they were closely invested. There are fans, and then there are the fans who care enough to attend a game staged in England — and it showed.
After the final whistle had been blown, Jaguars running back Travis Etienne commented immediately on the noise. “It was so loud in here — the intensity, the crowd — everyone was going crazy,” Etienne said. “I was leaning into the huddle and I couldn’t hear what Trevor [Lawrence] was saying. That’s the first time that’s happened to me in my NFL career.” My dad, who is no stranger to live sports, agreed with this. “That,” he said afterwards, “was the loudest crowd I’ve ever heard.” (The volume in the stadium was undoubtedly helped along by the fact that, as an exception to the usual rule, spectators were permitted to bring their beers to their seats, a practice that is typically forbidden to English fans, and which explains why, for all its remarkable technological innovations, Tottenham’s stadium completely lacks cupholders.)
Before kickoff, I had wondered to myself what my dad was likely to think of it all. He had never watched an NFL game in his life, let alone in person, and the sport that he does watch religiously — soccer — is different in a number of pretty important ways. For a start, soccer doesn’t stop. In that game, there are two halves of 45 minutes each, and, absent an injury or some other unforeseen event, the game continues unabated until the referee blows the whistle. There are no commercial breaks, no time-outs, no play clocks, no two-minute warnings. Substitutions are permanent, the players do not line up in set formations, and the offense and defense consist of the same people. Football, by contrast, starts and stops like a late-1990s Backstreet Boys song. It is halted briefly after each play, and for even longer after touchdowns, field goals, punts, turnovers, and reviews. Football is unimaginably explosive, and then it is completely quiet. When the advertisements are playing on TV, everyone on the field just stands around. And then there’s the clock, which inspires rules and conventions that are downright alien to the uninitiated. It is possible for a stranger to watch a soccer match and grasp its outline within minutes, but of football this is untrue. As a matter of fact, many of the rules of football are inscrutable to an outsider. What constitutes pass interference, who is eligible to catch the ball, when a throw represents intentional grounding, which formations are illegal, what counts as offside, when a punt is a touchback, why some behavior is holding and some is not — it’s confusing as hell.
When talking to my American friends, I still tend to preface any observations I may have about football with a pro forma “Of course, as a novice, I don’t understand the game like you do.” But, standing with my dad, a true novice, I realized just how much I have learned over the last five years. In much the same way as, when learning a language, there comes a point at which you suddenly realize that you can speak it without thinking about it at all, so, with sports, does there come a point at which newcomers grasp that they are fluent. On the train on the way down, I had sketched out the basics for him on a small piece of paper, and I supplemented this lesson as the game progressed, filling in this or that detail, suggesting what he should watch for, and explaining why I was nervous about this or that development. To my delight, he seemed to get it quite quickly, and, better still, he seemed to enjoy it, even going so far as to offer some solid observations about the game, such as that the Jaguars quarterback seemed to be hurried by the lack of protection and that the Bills offense was being thwarted by the coverage of the Jaguars’ cornerbacks. Perhaps most gratifyingly of all, he echoed back to me a characterization that I have often made at football games: “This,” he said, “is the successor to the Colosseum.”
And would you believe it, the Jaguars won. In the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t have mattered too much if they had lost; the purpose of the day was to see what the NFL was like in London and to introduce my dad to the game I love, as he had introduced me to soccer when I was a little boy. But goodness me did the victory put the icing on the cake! At the time, it felt enormously stressful, but in hindsight I got the best of both worlds: The Jaguars won, and in a close, high-scoring game that featured one of the best performances of Trevor Lawrence’s career and boasted one of the most riveting fourth quarters that I can remember. Drama is an invaluable teaching aid, and boy did we get that in spades. Within the course of a few minutes, I went from thinking that the Jaguars were going to blow it to thinking that they were going to win to thinking once again that they were going to blow it. We saw turnovers and touchdowns and a failed two-point conversion. We saw a running back burst through the line to presumably put the Jaguars beyond reach, only for the Bills to march down the field in just over a minute and respond with seven points of their own. The neutrals were entertained, the die-hards lost years off their lives, and my dad, the newcomer, was overwhelmed. What a wonderful sport football is.
And then it was over, and we started the long trek from America back to England. Not far from our oasis at Tottenham’s temporarily converted stadium, Arsenal F.C. had been playing a game of the other sort of football — the one that actually involves feet — and, as we walked the two miles or so back to the train station, a legion of their fans came pouring out of a nearby arena and joined us in our approach. For a moment, two worlds collided, with the NFL fans talking about their game and the soccer fans talking about theirs — never the twain to meet.
