This Isn't Your Ordinary Football

America is sports crazy. We love football, basketball, and baseball. All other sports are just filler for these big three that rule the talk on SportsCenter and dominate the topic of everyday conversations among a fair chunk of the population. America has plenty of people who don't pay much attention to sports or find the topic boring, but I'd say everyone would agree we are a sports obsessed nation as a whole. Well so is Australia. In some ways they might even be more sports crazy per capita. I found this out when I attended the ANZAC footy match a couple weekends ago. There I came face to face with the funny and entertaining sport of Australian rules football.

At first glance you'd think you were watching rugby. Of course, I don't know much about rugby but I know enough to recognize it. Footy (as the Aussies call Australian rules football), however, is not rugby. And you'd run the risk of insulting the Melburnians of Victoria by saying that. Victoria is known for it's footy teams, and for awhile the sport was only played in Victoria. Rugby on the other hand is very much a New South Wales sport that Sydneysiders get into more. This comparison of footy versus rugby plays into the larger competition of Melbourne versus Sydney that raises its head every now and again when I talk with Australians.

So as I said, at first glance you'd think you were watching rugby, but then you notice that they aren't laterally passing the ball, but bumping the ball to each other with a clenched fist volleyball style. Or they kick the ball to each other or towards four goal posts at opposite ends of the oval field to score a goal. As I over heard a guy from Los Angeles explain to some of his American friends, "It's like if football, soccer, and volleyball all got together and had one love child." I don't know that I totally agree (or if that's physically possible), but I see where he's coming from. Footy's a fast paced, high scoring game, and once you get the gist of the rules, it's a lot of fun to watch.

As I walked to the game with my Rotarian host, Kevin, his daughter, and her friend, I began to feel the excitement in the air. The sky was a bit overcast, but the stadium loomed large ahead of us, a gigantic oval with towering poles with hundreds of lights spaced evenly around the sides. To say this stadium is big doesn't quite cut it. It's enormous, titanic, gargantuan. Kevin told me that on some ANZAC Day matches, over 100,000 people show up to the match. This special match is always a face off of two of the oldest and most popular footy clubs in Melbourne: the Essendon Bombers and Collingwood Magpies. My Rotary host counselor had set me straight when I first arrived in Melbourne about who I should be cheering for. "Who do you barrack for?" he asked. I didn't really have an answer for him and was a bit stymied by his use of the word "barrack". "Well it better be the Bombers or you can go ahead and find yourself another place to stay," he chuckled. The Aussies ask this question a lot when the footy subject comes up. "Who do you barrack for?" is not interchangeable with "Who do you root for?" however. The second question takes on an entirely different meaning, as the Aussies use the term "root" in a sexual context. Anyway...

The game was exciting and entertaining to watch even for someone who didn't quite know all that was going on. The two teams were pretty evenly matched this year, and the game wasn't decided until a final kick by Essendon in the last 10 seconds to put them just a few points over Collingwood. That's right, my team won. The stadium that day had about 85,000 people in the stands all of them either Essendon or Collingwood fans. The fans erupted with excitement or complete frustration after that final kick and the whole place was an uproar. Some were jumping up for joy, spinning their Bomber scarves around in celebration, hollering at the top of their lungs, and others were cursing the umpires and loudly complaining about the last second clutch kick that put the victory away for the Bombers. Talk about being into the game. It doesn't get much more devoted than this.

Again, I'm struck by the fact that hardly a single American knows a thing about this sport. Little do we know that about 9,000 miles away there's an island nation of around 21 million people who go nuts when guys in really short shorts run around for a good two hours punting and volleying the ball to each other, racking up scores like 98 to 86 or so, and taking some pretty gruesome and even bloody tackles while doing so. Just goes to show a bit of the insularity that America still has in this ever more globalized world especially towards Australia and what is happening down here. However, it does make for some great surprises when you visit, and I'd say that footy has added another fan to its ranks.