For One Day, London Calls on NFL

On each Miami first down, the public address announcer said, in his clearly American accent: "That's another Miami Dolphins . . ."

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"FIRST DOWN!" the crowd roared back.

"It's not just a curiosity; people really do understand the game," said Oliver Brown, a sports correspondent for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. "But there doesn't seem to be a great will here to sustain the sport. I don't think people see it yet as a way to spend a weekend."

But the "perceived glamour" of football makes it a spectacle that can easily fill a huge stadium like Wembley, Brown said. "There's a sense of occasion about it," said Brown, who traveled to New York and Miami last week with a large group of British journalists writing advance stories for Sunday's game.

Brown said many British people have grown up watching Super Bowls with glitz and glamour that make British professional soccer games look like a village competition. The NFL has played nine exhibition games in London since 1983 -- the same year the Super Bowl was first televised live in Britain. The NFL grew in popularity on British television throughout the 1980s as games were broadcast live on Sunday nights and Super Bowl parties became "in vogue," Brown said.

"It was the first American sport on terrestrial TV, and it really caught the imagination," Brown said. "It was this alien, exciting, glamorous thing that was coming into people's living rooms on a Sunday night."

Joan Lee, 66, came to Sunday's game wearing a Houston Oilers jacket she bought in the early 1990s. She said she first saw football in the 1960s when British television would show reruns of college bowl games. She recalled her father walking in once and asking, "What on earth are you watching?"

"I don't know, Dad, but it's very interesting," she said. "That was it," she said. "I was hooked."

Thanks largely to the popularity of the televised games, London even had a football team from 1991 to 1998 -- the London Monarchs of the World League of American Football, an NFL affiliate that later changed its name to NFL Europe.

While the Monarchs drew crowds of 40,000 or more at first, fans eventually lost interest and the team disappeared. William "The Refrigerator" Perry played on the team in 1996 after his retirement from the NFL. NFL Europe eventually dwindled to a six-team league -- five of them in Germany -- before the NFL pulled the plug on it in August.

Lee's son-in-law, Andrew Beaver, 46, came to the game wearing a Washington Redskins jacket, cap and jersey. He said he became hooked on football and the Redskins in 1984, when he watched the Super Bowl live on British television. "It took off from there," said Beaver, who was joined at the game by Lee, his wife, Nancy Beaver, and their three children -- two of them in Redskins gear.

For a half-dozen years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Beaver, 6-2 and 200 pounds, played tight end for the London Capitals in a now-defunct British amateur league. He said he's gained weight and can no longer fit into his John Riggins jersey, but he still plays fantasy football in a league with more than 10,000 participants in Britain. He and his family paid almost $700 for their six tickets. Beaver said he hoped the Wembley game would spark a resurgence of British interest in football -- and maybe even a London NFL franchise.

"If they did have it again," Nancy Beaver said, "it would take off."