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【中文标题】中国准备好迎接美式足球了吗？
【原文标题】China, Are You Ready for Some American Football?
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【原文作者】JONATHAN LANDRETH
【原文链接】http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/sports/football/13iht-nflchina13.html?n=Top%2fNews%2fWorld%2fCountries%20and%20Territories%2fChina&_r=0
橄榄球运动员在哈尔滨商业大学的一场表演赛后庆祝，这场比赛吸引了26000名观众。
丁龙来自中国繁忙的港口城市青岛，他是一个卡车司机家庭的独子，他在把中文所谓的“橄榄球”踢过门柱时，表现得非常不错。
去年，他带领佛蒙特州诺威治大学以7胜0负的成绩获得东部大学橄榄球联赛冠军。在常规赛决赛中，他三次射门得分，最远距离球门51码，让队伍取得胜利。丁身高1.83米，体重95公斤，在今年春天参加选秀时，吸引了全国橄榄球联盟（NFL）杰克逊维尔美洲虎队的注意。他受邀参加佛罗里达的集训，这让丁成为中国人的体育大使，尤其是当美国人试图在中国普及这项运动时。全面的身体接触和复杂的规则，让橄榄球这项运动在中国的排名远远落后于乒乓球和羽毛球。
NFL和它在中国的合作伙伴希望美式橄榄球的光芒——其极受欢迎、受益颇丰的冠军赛超级碗——也能在中国与篮球和足球这两项最受欢迎的运动形成竞争之势。
在NBA超级巨星迈克尔•乔丹的影响下，中国在80年代首次对美国运动着迷。从那时开始，NBA免费授权中国广播电视机构转播比赛，现在共有51家中国电视台与其合作，联赛中的运动服在全国各地的运动场随处可见。当上海鲨鱼队的职业球员姚明在十年前成为休斯顿火箭队的选秀明星时，这项运动受到了更高的推崇。
NFL希望让美式足球跻身中国前10项流行运动中，CSM媒体研究所在一项全国性的调查中发现，它目前排在第20名，落后于帆船和一级方程式赛车。
NFL中国总监杨瑞奇说，大联盟已经准备“在未来五到六年里”实现进入前十名的愿望。但他在近期接受路透社采访时也说，这项运动的群众基础还不够扎实，不足以支持开展正规的NFL比赛。
尽管NFL是美国的头号运动项目，但是在北美以外地区却鲜有普及。
NFL在80年代突然进入日本，尽管还比不上篮球、足球和相扑的普及度，但在体育界还有一定的话语权。NFL全球大联盟在90年代开始发展，逐渐进入欧洲，但是在2007年宣布解散。联盟认为，海外的忠实球迷更喜欢在电视上看真实的NFL比赛，或者偶尔到国外亲临赛场，而不喜欢看自己国家的球员与陪练队比赛。
中国是NFL试图加强渗透的5个国家之一，另外4个国家是英国、加拿大、日本和墨西哥。
为了引起中国越来越多的中产和富裕阶层的关注，联盟把美国最强大的一款体育节目“星期一橄榄球之夜”，在每周二呈现在中国最大的网络平台新浪体育栏目中。NFL中国还会转播星期天下午的比赛，加上“星期天橄榄球之夜”和“星期四橄榄球之夜”的网上直播，每周共有5个直播节目。杨觉得很难说服联盟在纽约的总部接受这个方案，他说：“困难之处不仅在于拿到这么多比赛的免费转播权，而且在于能否为中国球迷建立一个网络上的基地。”
所谓的基地就是PPTV.com，这里有橄榄球教学、比赛剪辑、比赛直播和点播，全部都是中文。专门负责NFL全球推广的英国人Chris Parsons说：“目前中国的整体体育产业还处于发展阶段，我们有机会在这个时候拓展我们的运动。”
新浪体育频道总监余航说，橄榄球进入中国所面临的障碍比其它运动要多，中国孩子一般不会被鼓励参与体育运动，而是在很小的时候就被强迫关注学业。他说：“中国的独生子女政策是大多数体育运动难以开展的原因之一，尤其是那些强身体对抗的运动。”他所隐含的意思是，父母担心让他们的“小皇帝”受到伤害。NFL的确曾经由于运动员的伤痛而受到抨击，尤其是脑震荡。
在NFL试训之前，丁龙在佛蒙特州诺威治大学踢球。
余曾经在英国学习，是个足球迷，他说自己并不大了解美式足球。但是他认为，中国的球迷其实不仅仅关注比赛本身。他说：“我们的观众很喜欢追求时尚，他们想看的是贾斯汀•比伯和麦当娜在超级碗的中场演出，以及商业广告，这可都是世界级的娱乐节目。但是在比赛之后，他们不再关注这项运动。至少目前还是这样。”
4年前，新浪开始与NFL合作培训解说员了解比赛规则。如今，余可以在网上查到中国最受欢迎的NFL运动员——纽约巨人队的四分卫Eli Manning，他们赢得了今年超级碗的冠军——以及带领新英格兰爱国者队取得3次冠军头衔的Tom Brady。
另外一位人所共知的运动员就没有那么成功了，Ed Wang出生在美国，父母是前中国奥林匹克运动员。在2010年选秀之后，在布法罗比尔队打了一个赛季，现在是个自由球员。2011年1月，中国主席胡锦涛在华盛顿访问时，NFL安排这位进攻内锋在白宫与主席照相。
为了提升这项运动在中国的级别，6所中国高校都在培养自己的队伍。组织者希望明年可以扩大到16只队伍，最终形成32只——和NFL目前参赛俱乐部数量一样。
Joe Wang是台湾人，曾经在纽约参加过高中橄榄球比赛，目前在加利福尼亚埃尔塞贡多开办了一个年轻人体育俱乐部。他说：“这项运动需要的不仅仅是投掷，当我们向中国的父母们展示运动的速度和灵活性时，他们都很高兴。” Wang和中国房地产商Ken Li合作，几年开始训练大学橄榄球队，模仿NFL组成了一个中国的联赛——美式足球协会。
Wang说：“中国人需要学会合作。网球、乒乓球、羽毛球都是个人运动，中国人不会交朋友，美式足球可以让他们学会兄弟情谊和体育精神。”问题在于，很多中国人把美式足球视为“格斗运动”，他认为这也是件好事，“橄榄球让男孩变成男人。”
王说，他们的训练和比赛在9月份的哈尔滨商业大学变成了一次全面的展示，总共吸引了26000名学生和校友。10月份在济南和北京的两次表演赛也吸引了类似规模的观众。40多岁的李是北京人，毕业于哈尔滨商业大学工程专业，他说：“我们需要让中国人感受比赛的设备和橄榄球。”李在美国和加拿大做生意时爱上了这项运动，他说很多中国人不知道“橄榄球重还是轻，甚至是不是金属的”。
王和李都在丁身上寄予一些希望，丁的大学选秀资格很快就会结束，但他会继续学业，今年12月，他将从财务专业毕业。王说：“丁龙需要引起NFL大佬们的一些关注，他们需要做的仅仅是多给他一些镜头，让别人看到中国人也可以踢球。”
丁没能成功转会，目前还在美洲虎队，这支队伍目前在积极向海外拓展，因为一个巴基斯坦人Shahid Khan买下了这支队伍。美洲虎队的发言人Dan Edwards说，丁在佛罗里达的短期培训并非海外扩展计划的一部分。Edwards说：“丁参加短期集训的目的是展示他的个人能力。海外的潜在市场颇为诱人，我们很感兴趣，但是他的合同并未涉及这些内容。”
NFL意识到，尽管它在美国本土一家独大，但成功取悦海外观众并不容易。同样，丁也意识到，他虽然在大学里已经取得等级3的体育奖学金，但是在职业联赛中复制这样的成功困难重重。24岁的丁对于在NFL中谋得一席之地没抱任何不切实际的幻想，他每天训练6个小时。
丁说：“我一般在上午练习力量，下午练习踢球，开球员的工作可不好做。”他不愿意把自己和姚明相提并论，后者在进军NBA之前就已经是顶级运动员了。“我和姚明差得很远。即使在他出现之前，中国人就已经对乔丹、他的六枚总冠军戒指和他飞翔的姿态着迷了。”他说的是职业生涯基本都在芝加哥公牛队度过的迈克尔•乔丹。“他绝对与众不同，每次他拿到球，整个体育场都会欢呼。”
原文：
Football players at an exhibition game at Harbin University of Commerce celebrating after the contest, which drew a crowd of 26,000.
BEIJING — Ding Long, the only child of a truck driver from the bustling Chinese port of Qingdao, has gotten pretty good at kicking what Mandarin speakers call the “olive ball” through the goalposts in American football.
He led Norwich University in Vermont to a 7-0 record and the league championship in the Eastern Collegiate Football Conference last year, hitting three field goals, the longest from 51 yards, as his team won its regular-season finale, 16-9. At 1.83 meters and 95 kilograms, or 6 feet and 210 pounds, Ding drew the attention of the Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League after he went undrafted this spring. An invitation to train in Florida briefly positioned Ding to become an ambassador for the most American of sports as it tries to gain ground in China, where its full-contact nature and complex rules rank it way below table tennis and badminton.
The N.F.L. and its corporate partners in China are hoping that American football’s flash — which peaks every year with its hugely popular, and lucrative, championship game, the Super Bowl — could someday give basketball and soccer, the top-ranked sports in China, a run for their money.
China first fell under the spell of American sports in the 1980s, thanks to the N.B.A. superstar Michael Jordan. After giving its games away to Chinese broadcasters for free beginning in the ’80s, the National Basketball Association now has partnerships with 51 stations in China, and the league’s jerseys are omnipresent on playground courts across the country. The sport’s popularity only increased once center Yao Ming, who got his professional start with the Shanghai Sharks, headed to the Houston Rockets as the No. 1 overall draft pick a decade ago.
The N.F.L. hopes to hoist American football into the top 10 most popular sports in China as measured by a nationwide survey conducted by CSM Media Research. It now ranks 20th in the country, below sailing and Formula 1.
Richard Young, the N.F.L.’s managing director for China, said the league was on track to achieve a top-10 ranking “in the next five to six years,” though he recently told Reuters that the fan base was not yet big enough to support an N.F.L. game being played in the country.
While the N.F.L. is the biggest sport in the United States, it has seen only limited success outside North America.
The N.F.L. made forays into Japan in the early 1980s, and while it is below sports like baseball, soccer and sumo, it is still part of the conversation there. The N.F.L.’s World League, a developmental league that began in 1990 and evolved into the N.F.L. Europe, was disbanded in 2007.
The league decided that its core fans overseas were more interested in watching the real N.F.L. teams on television and traveling to the occasional game abroad rather than in watching players develop on feeder teams.
China is one of five core countries where the N.F.L. is trying to increase its presence, along with Britain, Canada, Japan and Mexico.
To reach China’s growing and affluent middle and upper classes, the league streams Monday Night Football, one of the strongest brands in American sports, each Tuesday morning on Sina Sports, a channel of the largest Web portal in China.
N.F.L. China also streams Sunday afternoon games, Sunday Night Football and Thursday Night Football online — a total of five live games a week, an approach Young said had been tough to sell to the league’s headquarters in New York.
“What was difficult was to get to this many games to be able to be free and, more specifically, to start to build an online home base for Chinese fans,” Young said.
That base, at PPTV.com, offers videos teaching football, game highlight clips, full live games and games via video on demand — all in Chinese.
“We have an opportunity to develop our sport at a moment in China’s history when sport in general is in its development phase,” said Chris Parsons, an Englishman who heads the N.F.L.’s international push.
Yu Hang, the director of Sina Sports, says football faces a higher hurdle than many other international sports.
Chinese children typically are not encouraged to play sports but instead are pressed to focus on academics from a young age.
“China’s one-child policy presents a problem for most sports, and particularly for strong sports,” Yu said, alluding to parents’ fear of putting their “little emperors” in harm’s way at a time when the N.F.L. is under fire for serious injuries sustained by its players, especially from blows to the head.
Yu, who studied in Britain, is a soccer fan and says he does not fully understand American football. But he believes China’s growing fan base is drawn by more than the game.
Ding Long kicked for Norwich University in Vermont before he tried out for the N.F.L.
“Our viewers are keen to pursue fashionable things,” he said. “They want Justin Bieber and Madonna at the Super Bowl halftime show. They want to see the TV ads. That’s international-quality entertainment. But after the game, they may not continue to be fans of the sport. Not yet.”
Four years ago, Sina started working with the N.F.L. to coach its sportscasters to explain the game better. Nowadays, Yu can track who China’s favorite N.F.L. players are online — quarterbacks Eli Manning of the New York Giants, who won the Super Bowl earlier this year, and Tom Brady, who has won three titles with the New England Patriots.
Another popular player has had less success, though: Ed Wang, the American-born son of two former Chinese Olympic athletes, played one season for the Buffalo Bills after they drafted him in 2010, and he is currently a free agent. When President Hu Jintao of China visited Washington in January 2011, the N.F.L. arranged a photo opportunity with the offensive lineman inside the White House.
To help raise the level of the game in China, teams have been training at six universities in China; organizers hope to expand that to 16 teams by next year and eventually to 32 — the same number of clubs that now play in N.F.L.
“The game is not all about throwing. When we showed Chinese parents the speed and agility we could teach, they were really pleased,” said Joe Wang, a Taiwan native who played high school football in New York State and who now runs a youth athletics league in El Segundo, California. Wang and the Chinese real estate developer Ken Li trained the university teams this year, forming the American Football Union, a Chinese league they model on the N.F.L.
“Chinese need to learn to work together,” Wang said. “Tennis, Ping-Pong, badminton — these are individual games. Chinese don’t know how to make friends. Football can teach them both brotherhood and sportsmanship.”
The trouble is, many Chinese view American football as a “gladiator sport,” said Wang, who believes that can be a good thing. “Football makes boys into men.”
Their training, including games, led to a full-contact exhibition at Harbin University of Commerce in September that drew 26,000 students and alumni. Two other exhibitions in October, in Jinan and in Beijing, drew similarly large crowds, Wang said.
Li, a Beijinger in his late 40s who graduated from Harbin University of Commerce with a degree in engineering, said, “We need to get Chinese people to touch the equipment and feel the ball.”
Li, who grew to love the game while doing business in the United States and Canada, said many Chinese did not know if the ball was “light or heavy or even if it’s made of metal.”
Both Wang and Li pin some hope on Ding, who continued his schooling after using up his collegiate eligibility and is due to graduate in December with a degree in accounting.
“Ding Long just needs to be given a shot by one of these N.F.L. owners,” Wang said. “All it would take is one of them to give Ding a shot to let him show the league a Chinese can kick.”
Ding, though, failed to make the cut and stick with the Jaguars, who have made a concerted effort to broaden their reach internationally since they were bought by Shahid Khan, a native of Pakistan.
A Jaguars spokesman, Dan Edwards, said that Ding’s brief training in Florida was not a part of that international approach, however.
“Ding was signed for minicamp in order to get a chance to show what he could do,” Edwards said. “The international interest was great, and we welcomed it, but he was not offered a contract.”
The N.F.L. realizes that while it is dominant in its home market, it is not easy to make the jump in popularity abroad. On a similar note, Ding realizes that his success at the Division III level in college is much harder to replicate at the professional level.
Ding, 24, harbors no illusion about how tough it is to get a job in the N.F.L. He trains six hours a day.
“I like to lift in the morning and kick in the afternoon. I have to be patient, because jobs for kickers are hard to land,” said Ding, who balks at being compared with Yao Ming, who was a top-level player before heading to the N.B.A.
“I won’t even get close to Yao Ming. But even before he was around, Chinese were amazed by Jordan, his six championship rings, his ability to fly,” Ding said, referring to Michael Jordan, who played most of his career with the Chicago Bulls. “That guy was special. Every time he got the ball the whole stadium cheered.”
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狗仔卡
发表于 2012-11-30 11:48
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发表于 2012-11-30 12:39
