Mexico City – On one side of town there were clinics for aspiring coaches, while elsewhere, National Football League commissioner Paul Tagliabue dedicated a computer laboratory at a local school.
But the place to be on Saturday was a pockmarked patch of land some 30 miles from Estadio Azteca, site of the league’s first regular-season game outside the United States.
There, on the campus of the International Technological Institute, Arizona Cardinals’ guard Rolando Cantu came out to meet his people. The only Mexican native in the NFL and the only one ever to make it without playing American college football, Cantu is regarded as something of a national treasure.
And what was labeled a “talk” to children became something far greater.
The audience was supposed to be limited to 180 children who play in local football leagues; but the crowd had swelled to at least three times that size. Cantu was supposed to sign autographs for about an hour, but that schedule was a flight of fancy.
The children approached from every angle, in lines as long as the football field. The sizable number of adults in the crowd, fenced off from player and children, were equally exuberant, calling Cantu’s name, begging him to look up as they snapped photographs.
“I’m the only one now, but someday a couple of these kids will be in the NFL, too,” Cantu said, as he joked with players from the Diablitos, Bucaneros and Vietnamitos local youth teams. “I only wish I could do more to help them get there. American football is so expensive for them, that’s why soccer is so popular here, you only have to roll out a ball.”
But the game is growing. The NFL says there is a fan base of 20 million people in Mexico, the largest outside of the U.S. In 1994, more than 112,000 attended an exhibition, one of five that have been held in the country.
Ultimately, numbers like that have become too great for the league to ignore. When the 0-3 Cardinals and 1-2 San Francisco 49ers take the field tonight, there will be no playoff fever, no talk of Super Bowl implications. Yet, for the NFL, the game may be the biggest regular season contest of the season.
“We say it’s history in the making, and it is, but what it really represents is a key milestone in our international development,” said Gordon Smeaton, vice president of NFL International.
Smeaton admits the NFL has no idea where its foreign initiatives will ultimately lead. Without a team in Los Angeles and with the New Orleans Saints indefinitely displaced, there are more immediate concerns domestically. Even so, that hasn’t stopped the league from grappling for a toehold in the lucrative international market.
Three years ago, the NFL set up shop in China, no doubt envisioning the day when they could stage a spectacle like the one in Mexico City, the culmination of a “Hispanic strategy” that began about 10 years ago.
The teams will play before a sellout crowd of 85,000, included among them will be sports and government officials invited from Europe, Japan and Canada. And the league hopes they will soon be clamoring to host NFL games. Similarly, league officials would like nothing better if viewers from the 218 countries receiving a telecast of the game are so excited and impressed that they log on to the league’s website or pick up the latest NFL-licensed video game.
In downtown hotel lobbies in Mexico City, fans can buy NFL merchandise, along with the jerseys of Cantu or 49er Tim Rattay, Tom Brady and Rodney Harrison of the Patriots, Terrell Owens of the Eagles, Drew Bledsoe of the Cowboys and the Broncos’ Jake Plummer.
That’s indicative of the league’s desire to have the game resonate with Hispanic populations throughout the U.S., be it in California, Arizona, Florida, Texas or Colorado.
“It’s the fastest-growing ethnic population,” Smeaton said, “It’s nice to bring this game to this fan base, but it’s just as important for us with Mexican-Americans in the United States. We think they’ll tune in.”
In some ways, the NFL is a latecomer to this particular game, playing catch-up with the other major sports. The league lacks an influx of foreign talent like the Latin and Asian element in baseball or the European influence in the National Basketball Association, which has played regular season games in Japan on-and-off since 1990.
Mexico was a natural place for the NFL to begin its movement. Professional games have been televised there since 1966.
In 2004, the NFL says there were 19 million television households with 84 million viewers watching NFL games, making the league the fourth-biggest sports property behind the professional soccer leagues, the national soccer team and the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.
According to the Mexican American Football Federation, there are 250,000 people between the ages of 5 and 26 in organized leagues. A Mexican team won the 2003 flag football world championship and another was runner-up a year later.
The most accomplished players can be found at the collegiate level. At the conclusion of the last eight seasons, an all-star team has competed against a NCAA Division-III squad.
“It is a very important amateur sport, but we want to take football to another level,” says Edgar Zapata, an assistant coach with Monterey Tech, where the team wears powder-blue uniforms like the San Diego Chargers and practices at 6 a.m.
The offensive coordinator for the undefeated Borregos Salvajes – the “Wild Ships” – Zapata favors empty-backfield sets and other formations gleaned from the time spent in clinics with the likes of Kansas State University coach Bill Snyder and Pete Carroll of national champion University of Southern California.
“He’s very kind, very generous,” Zapata said of Carroll. “He shared his playbook with us.”
But on Saturday, while Zapata and his fellow coaches were busy studying film with representatives from the NFL teams, Cantu was engaging the quarterback for the Puma Unam youth tackle football team.
Before the swelling crowd, the NFL hero called up the young woman clad in a jersey, sweat pants and a Broncos cap, and presented her with her own game ball.
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
