Away, Running: A Look at a Different Paris

It’s June 1989, and I’m standing alone on the goal line of our home field in La Courneuve, a suburb of Paris, awaiting the opening kick-off of our quarterfinal game against the Jets from St-Cloud. The rest of my team huddles tightly on the sideline around our captain, a Corsican named Castano. Some five hundred spectators ring the field. Castano’s words echo out to me, something like: “For those bastard rich boys, we’re the lowly Flash. Communists! On the dole! Niggers and filthy Arabs!”

The Jets, former French champions, hail from one of Paris’s wealthier suburbs, the home of Jean-Marie LePen, the founder and presidential candidate of France’s far-right National Front Party, and the animosity between the two teams is palpable and long-standing. The Flash have never beaten the Jets, and La Courneuve is the photo-negative of St-Cloud: poor; a dilapidated landscape; a mostly immigrant population.

Through my facemask I watch the Jets, dressed in crisp white below their green helmets. They stand in a row, stretching from one thirty-yard line to the other. There’s the American receiver, a wanna-be model whose golden locks cascade out the back of his helmet. And there, the American linebacker, whom they’ve chosen to rest in preparation for the next round of the play-offs. He wears a tight fitting tank-top and shorts, looks like an Aryan Conan. He’s taking pictures with a 35-mm camera, a giant telephoto lens protruding out the front.

The Jets’ pasty arrogance dies to an inert gray as I catch the opening kick-off, bounce outside their coverage and sprint past them, past the linebacker, who stands erect and looks after me over his tripod. Picture this, I think. The kicker pushes me out of bounds at their twenty-five yard line, but the game’s over. We Flash play together as one, and we pepper the Jets relentlessly. We win 20 to 6, but it’s never even as close as that.

American football in France? Kidding, right?

Not at all. Most European countries have been playing for three decades; the French for 28 years. Today, France boasts 77 club teams over three divisions, from the Pyrenees to the Riviera to Strasbourg, with names like “Gaulois,” “Mousquetaires” and “Phénix,”along with the predictable: “Giants,” “Falcons” and “Ours” (French for, Bears). Each team can include up to three Americans; only the Americans are paid. Rosters include factory workers, law students, garçons de café. Most clubs, throughout Europe as well as in France, play on converted rugby pitches: one-hundred meter fields that must be chalk-marked only 90 yards long so that the uprights, which stand on the goal line in rugby, will be on the back line of the end zones.

Where the average Frenchman is usually thought to be about as big as a pubescent girl, many of the players in the premier division have good size and excellent speed. Philippe Gardent, a six-foot, 229-pound native of Grenoble, was the 2006 Defensive MVP of the now-defunct NFL Europe, the first European national to win the award. The Washington Redskins invited him to join their practice squad.

In the Keystone Kop days of the late 80s, the game was less impressive. The Flash players I coached from 1988–90 were grown men playing a game for boys with the grace of dump trucks and the temperaments of chain saws. Nationalized health care only nominally covered dental, and some of my teammates flaunted smiles that were more air than enamel. My QB-receiver duo, François Rouat and Jacques Tillet, didn’t have a full set of teeth between them. Tillet had served a stint in the penitentiary for taking pot-shots with a rifle at a group of young hoods who had harassed his wife and taunted him one night as they entered their high-rise. A crack shot during his mandatory military service, he used the rifle from his apartment window to pin the thugs between cars, taunting...