It was already halftime by the time I got up and out of my apartment, rode my bike across Kunming and finally found O’Reilly’s Irish Pub, which to my knowledge was the only public establishment in the city that was screening Super Bowl XLVI, a.k.a. the revenge match-up between my beloved New England Patriots and the nasty New York Giants. As if it wasn’t disorienting enough to be going to an Irish pub in China to watch American football – my first and only game of the NFL season since arriving in August to teach English here for a year -- it really seemed weird that the air was not cold on Super Bowl Sun…make that Monday; a 7:29 a.m. start, China time – the 15th and final day of Chinese New Year celebrations.
I’d taken a couple of wrong turns due to unintelligible (or nonexistent) signs, found my way over to the right street, walked my bike past the pub without knowing it, and gotten two blank looks and a shrug when asking Chinese locals in broken Mandarin if they knew where O’Reilly’s was. Luckily, in my frantic search (“Brady needs me!”) I spotted Sarah from Atlanta, whose hair blonde hair stood out in the crowd -- she was headed to watch the game too. How could I have missed the Guinness sign right in front?! After locking my bike to a fence, I entered the pub, and was puzzled to find only two young guys watching a small flatscreen in the corner. Surely more “lao wai” (foreigners) than this would turn out for such a huge sporting event, wouldn’t they? Of course…there must be a larger TV upstairs – confirmed by the bartender – and I realized that was where Sarah had disappeared to.
Upstairs, the mood seemed pretty mellow among the 30 or so ex-pats, milling around, a few with plates of fried eggs or glasses of beer, as Madonna and friends were going through their paces in the halftime show. I scanned the room for a seat and landed next to a friendly older fellow who said he was from the same small town in Nebraska where Patriots running back Danny Woodhead played Division II college ball. “I don’t really care who wins, I just want to see a good game,” he said.
As I settle in, I pick up snippets of conversations from around the room. At the table next to me, a woman in glasses and a Boston Red Sox cap is discussing the “evolutionary cycle of toxicity” in insects with a guy who looks very smart – a scientist of some sort. “Only in Boston,” I think to myself, and wonder what the heck they’re doing in China. Most of the Westerners I’ve met in my first five months here are either students or teachers. (It seems that since the cost of living is lower here than in eastern China, a lot of ex-pat drifters land in Kunming and are able to get by “teaching” English at one of the many private language schools scattered throughout the area.) But, based on other bits I overheard, the mostly Americans in this Super Bowl crowd sound like they’re doing a lot of different kinds of work here, from biology to golf course construction. I did also notice two Chinese-looking guys, and wondered what their interest in this game might be, but perhaps they are Asian-Americans.
I got a quick update on the first half from my new friend from Nebraska. As it was already 9-0 Giants when I left my apartment, I was encouraged to hear that as I’d fought my way through morning rush hour traffic in Kunming, the Patriots had pulled things together in Indy, and now held a 10-9 halftime lead. Before the second half began, I noticed that a wood beam was partially blocking my view of the TV, so I moved to an open stool by the window, closer in.
Apparently, the pub ran out of eggs quickly (the owner generously cooked and served them for free), so I put my jacket on the seat to save it, hustled across the street and bought a large loaf of sweet bread with bean paste filling, which I nervously gnawed on, like a frightened ferret, throughout the second half.
At the start of the game, the pub had tried streaming the game live from their computer onto the TV, but after having delays in the streaming, they checked their satellite channels and found that one Chinese network, the Star network, was televising the game. The picture was crystal clear, with no delays – excellent!
It was bizarre to be seeing Chinese characters on the telecast of an American football game. And the Mandarin-speaking announcers sounded comical, especially when they got excited. I wondered how knowledgeable they were, or what they were saying. Probably something like, “look how big that guy is!,” or “what a hit!”, as I’d guess that might be what the average Chinese viewer was thinking. Or maybe they trotted out a Mandarin-version of those hackneyed clichés American commentators always say, like “that Tom Brady is some kind of ball player,” (what kind?) or “that Welker really has quick feet” (can feet really be quick?). Unlike the NBA, which is regularly televised and well-known throughout China, very few Chinese have any knowledge or interest in American football – 美式足球 měishì zúqiú (may-sure tzoo-chio) as they call it in Chinese, which means “American-style football.” On the screen the team names read: 巨人 jùrén (joo-ren) vs. 爱国者 (àiguózhě), which literally translates as, “Huge People vs. Love Country Elders.”
A quick aside: one afternoon in November, I tried to teach some kids at my high school here how to play touch football. They had trouble understanding the rule that you’re not allowed to pass the ball more than once per play, unlike in soccer and rugby, which are more familiar to them. So it was almost impossible to end a play, as they kept passing the ball to teammates all the way down the field, even after they’d been downed by two-hand touch.
Anyway, back at the pub, there was one outspoken Pats fan trash-talking (in a good-natured, if profane, way) and doing a loud, running commentary, who may have turned our little crowd against the Pats. I noticed that several guys who early in the game had said they didn’t care who won, by the fourth quarter were loudly cheering for the Giants.
Near the end of the game, when things got really tight, the picture from the satellite feed started freezing for several seconds at a time, causing us to miss entire plays -- which is excruciating when you’re already on pins and needles, as I was, twisting my body to will the ball into the receiver’s hands and push him across the first down line. It was as if the football gods decided to torture us more by freezing the picture at key moments, and displaying an exclamation point icon on the screen – how appropriate!
With two plays remaining, someone from downstairs announced that their TV was working, so suddenly, 30 people at once rushed down the stairs just in time to see the last play. As I watched Brady heave his last-ditch Hail Mary pass into the end zone, I breathed one last gasp of hope. When the ball fell incomplete – just beyond Gronkowski’s grasp – I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach, stunned that yet again we’d lost the championship to the 9-7 New York Giants. It didn’t matter that I was in China, so I wouldn’t have to hear the media re-hash all week, or see gloating colleagues strut around in their Giants jerseys at work the next day. I still was too sullen to talk to anyone; I just wanted to be alone with my misery.
As we filed out of the dark pub into the bright Kunming sunshine, I had kind of a surreal feeling – like it had all been just a dream, like I had walked out of a morning matinee and back into the light of reality. The locals were going about their daily routine: the water delivery guy trudged by, schlepping two huge bottles on his back; stir-fry chefs wearing tall white paper hats relaxed outside their little eateries, having a smoke and a rest before the lunch crunch; an old woman swept the street with a bamboo broom.
--Randy Hoover
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