Super Bowl: FootballNot Just for Americans

Although professional sports in the United States have become very international, football players are still primarily American. But this year a German, a Jamaican, and a Romanian, among others, add an international touch to the Super Bowl.

The 46th championship event of this sport, practiced very little outside of the United States and Canada, is a struggle between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants on Sunday at Indianapolis.

Since the 1990s, the NBA has seen a huge influx of foreign basketball players, American hockey players are now a minority in the NHL and baseball players from Central and South America have inundated Major League Baseball for quite some time. Only football remains profoundly American.

In the United States, the sport that the rest of the world calls “football,” is called “soccer.” Although its name indicates otherwise, “football,” is played — with the exception of a few kicks — with one’s hands.

In 2009, there were only 16 foreign players in the NFL: Ten Canadians, three Australians, two Britons and a German.

But this spectacle of a sport, which is by far America’s favorite, has managed to capture the attention of people outside the United States, especially in Canada and Mexico. In addition to 110 million Americans, several million spectators will watch the big game on television all over the world.

Among them will surely be the families of Patrick Chung, the Jamaican defender for New England; Zoltan Mesko, the Romanian punter for the Patriots; and his German teammate Sebastian Vollmer, a blocker (charged with protecting the quarterback). “They are probably watching all of this and thinking the same thing I am, that it’s all so crazy,” said Chung, who was born in Kingston to a Jamaican mother and a half-Chinese father, making him unique in the NFL.

Mesko was born in Timisoara, Romania, near the Hungarian border. Originally a soccer player, he became a punter by accident, after one of his kicks broke the projector on the ceiling of his school’s gym. The team took him on immediately!

At the age of twenty five, the engineer’s son is the best-known NFL player in Romania. “There’s no way people don’t know Tom Brady more than me,” he countered, referring to the star of the Patriots, a quarterback who has helped his team win three Super Bowls and is married to Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen.

Vollmer was also born in Europe. Although he’s not as strikingly tall as his compatriot Dirk Nowitzki — last season’s champion of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the best European players in the history of the NBA — this strapping young man, who stands at 2.03 meters and 143 kilograms, hopes that his presence at the Super Bowl will encourage other young Germans to follow in his footsteps.

An avid swimmer until the age of 14, he later turned toward American football. “I was following the game, watching the Super Bowl in the middle of the night,” he remembers. “I just picked up a book and learned it and then went out there and played. Don’t be ashamed about it. Just play.”

Although he didn’t even speak English, the University of Houston recruited Vollmer after a European selection tour in 2004. Here he is seven years later at the biggest football event in the world.