Year of the Pigskin My hilarious, heartbreaking, triumphant season with the American Football League of China By CHRISTOPHER BEAM April 8, 2014 The day of the first game of American football ever...

Year of the Pigskin
My hilarious, heart
eaking, triumphant season with the
American Football League of China
By CHRISTOPHER BEAM

April 8, 2014
The day of the first game of American football ever played in Chongqing, China, Fat Baby held court in the locker room at the
stadium of Chongqing Southern Translators College. “Stadium” would be generous, actually—it was a soccer field with stone
leachers. So would “locker room,” in reality a pile of clothes and equipment strewn across the benches. Even “football team”
was arguable, come to think of it, but that’s what the Chongqing Dockers were there to prove.
Fat Baby and his teammate Bobo had just returned from a trip to Japan, where they’d bought matching Under Armour
skullcaps. “You can’t find these in Chongqing,” he said proudly. One of the team’s founding members, Fat Baby (his real name is
Zeng Xi, but like most of the teammates he goes by his online nickname) juggled the roles of wise elder (he was 29) and class
clown. He first got into football after watching movies like The Longest Yard—the 2005 Adam Sandler remake, not the 1974
original.
As game time approached, Fat Baby slipped on his favorite pink cleats. It didn’t look easy—he called himself Fat Baby for a
eason. Later, I asked if the pink cleats were meant to scare his opponents. “Yes,” his wife, Yangyang, interjected, “they’re scared
he’ll fall in love with them.” Yangyang, tall and matter-of-fact, wasn’t a football fan. “I hate sports,” she told me. But as a nurse,
she supported Fat Baby’s passion to the extent that it would help him lose weight.
Marco, the Dockers’ captain, scu
ied over, looking anxious. He was smaller than average, especially for a former personal
trainer, and his facial expression tended to hover between pensive and pissed off. When he got excited, his voice plunged from
alto highs to baritone lows. He wasn’t typical captain material, but he had mapped out a meticulous plan for the team’s
development, and media was key to his strategy. The more people knew about them, the more players they’d attract, the better
they’d get. Today’s contest, against the Beijing Cyclones, was their first home game, a chance to show everyone that they weren’t
just a bunch of posers in uniform, but an actual American football team in southwestern China. Unfortunately, a 6.6-magnitude
earthquake had hit Sichuan Province that morning, so only a couple of news outlets had showed up to see them play.
Marco took the referee microphone out to the middle of the field to test its range and to show off his football English: “Holding,
defense, number twenty-seven, first down.” On the opposite fence, a red propaganda banner hung: “UNITED, WE PROGRESS,
BREAKING BOUNDARIES, WE INNOVATE, STRIVING TENACIOUSLY TO BE FIRST.” Behind it, a strip of Chongqing
skyline: identical-looking office buildings next to skeletons that would soon be identical-looking office buildings. From the air,
Chongqing resembles a Sim City created by a ten-year-old off his meds. Perched between two rivers, fringed with ports,
Chongqing has exploded economically in the past decades, with an u
an population of seven million and the second-highest
GDP growth rate in the country. All this development makes Chongqing the u
an incarnation of China’s modern identity crisis.
It’s a city where the Liberation Monument dedicated to the 1949 communist victory is su
ounded on all sides by Cartier,
Armani, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Sta
ucks, KFC, and Häagen-Dazs; where Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing party secretary, is both
eviled for his co
uption and beloved for his populist policies; where you can be late to dinner because, when someone said to
meet at the Walmart in your neighborhood, he meant the other Walmart in your neighborhood.
Chris McLaurin, the team’s 26-year-old American coach, wanted badly to win. He didn’t let it show, exuding the air of calm
authority the teammates had come to rely on. But ever since he had a
ived in Chongqing the previous fall, the Dockers had
dominated his life, nights and weekends spent coaching, planning, promoting, recruiting, all on top of a full-time job at a
government-run investment firm. Without McLaurin, Fat Baby told me in English, “We would be a piece of shit.”
The Beijing Cyclones rolled in an hour before game time, 50 Cent serving as unintentional entrance music. Mike Ma, a Cyclones
captain and Beijing native who had spent his teenage years in Los Angeles, greeted McLaurin with a purposeful thug hug.
“Damn, you guys are deep, dog,” said Ma. Since many Beijing players couldn’t make the trip, Chongqing outnumbered them
almost two to one. This made McLaurin cautiously optimistic. Beijing had more experience and stronger athletes, including a
professional parkour practitioner. But between their home field advantage and numbers edge, he thought the Dockers had a
shot.
Fans, mostly friends and family, gathered in the stands. I asked a student named Liu Zhiyue if he understood the game. “A
little,” he said. “The quarte
ack is the most important.” Beyond that, he wasn’t totally sure. By the sidelines, a small squad of
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efs, all expat friends of McLaurin, put on the pinstripes they’d ordered online. One, a densely built Californian named Jeff , who
had played semi-pro football in Poland and had “never again” tattooed in He
ew on his shoulder, was getting nervous. “I don’t
know the rules, that’s my thing,” he said to the head ref. “You should have, like, taught us the rules before, dude.”
Queen’s “We Will Rock You” came on, the international sign that a sporting event is about to occur. The Dockers lined up along
the sidelines and made war whoops, as McLaurin had instructed. A smiley player named Kang had affixed masking tape to his
helmet to form 杀, the character for “kill.”

Beijing kicked off. The ball sailed deep, spinning backward, and bounced off the Chongqing receiver’s chest before he chased it
down. If the crowd was already confused about the game of football, what happened next didn’t clarify much. It almost looked
like the Dockers were trying to lose the ball. The Chongqing quarte
ack, Seven, fumbled a snap, then recovered it just in time to
get sacked. Not long afterward, he passed to a receiver who wasn’t there.
“Settttt, hut!” growled Leo, the Beijing quarte
ack. As soon as he took the snap, a Chongqing tackle drilled through the line for
the sack. “There you go! There you go!” shouted James “Fitz” Fitzgerald, another assistant coach. The euphoria was temporary.
Second down, Leo saw an opening on the left side, threaded through it and ran, as if alone on the field, all the way to the end
zone. He cele
ated by chest-bumping one of his teammates and miming a graphic strip tease.
The Chongqing players looked at each other. They ’d been practicing for months, running and sweating and studying the
playbook, rebuilding their bodies and reprogramming their
ains, learning this weird foreign game from scratch. For many of
them, football had not only become the center of their social lives, it had become their identity: Fat Baby had a custom-made
umper sticker on his car that said “CHONGQING DOCKERS FOOTBALL FATBABY.” Marco wore his Dockers t-shirt
everywhere. Football was already more than a game to them—it represented a whole set of stories and values and attitudes that
these young Chinese men had hungrily abso
ed and now wanted to project. And for what? So a Beijing quarte
ack could
gyrate his crotch in front of their loved ones. Fitz shook his head: “We’re about to get our ass kicked.”
“American football in China” is a sport/location combo that at first sounds like a joke, like “Jamaican bobsled team.” But
according to the rule that, in a country of 1.3 billion people, everything is happening somewhere, the existence of Chinese
football should come as no surprise. Unlike basketball, which missionaries
ought to China in the late nineteenth century and
which has long enjoyed government support (Chairman Mao was a fan), football is a recent import. It doesn’t come close to
eaking into the country’s top ten sports. Even the term in Mandarin—“olive ball”—sounds awkward. But it is here and
growing fast. The NFL first set up a China office in 2007 and started a flag-football league that has grown to more than 36
teams. Meanwhile, a raft of amateur tackle clubs has materialized, including, as of summer 2012, the Chongqing Dockers.
The Dockers started when Fengfeng, a 19-year-old freshman at the Chongqing Electronic Engineering University, created a QQ
group dedicated to American football. (QQ is one of China’s most popular online chat programs and, along with WeChat, the
way most of the players keep in touch.) He named the group “Rudy,” after the 1993 movie about a five-foot-six-inch steelworker
who dreams of playing for Notre Dame, which Fengfeng had seen ten times. Marco saw the message and reached out. They and
a handful of others, including Fat Baby, a
anged to hold a practice. Marco also invited a journalist friend, resulting in a full-
length write-up in the Chongqing Economic Times. Marco received more than 200 inquiries, and 30 guys showed up to the next
practice.

The problem was, they came expecting to learn how to play American football. Marco had studied some instructional videos
he’d found online, but had never played himself. “It was truly te
ible,” Fat Baby recalled. That didn’t stop them from accru ing
the trappings of a football team. They named themselves the “Dockers,” a reference to Chongqing’s armies of longshoremen.
They bought jerseys before buying pads, designed a logo before getting a playbook, recruited cheerleaders before doing anything
cheer-worthy. Nana, the squad captain, choreographed a few routines based on scenes from the Bring It On movies, employing
dance moves Chinese girls don’t learn in school.
None of this translated into actual skill. One day in the fall of 2012, McLaurin showed up to a practice. “It was like a bunch of
guys who’d heard of the sport trying their best to