A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 16
This was a fun one I stumbled on today. From the NYT:
LANDQUART, Switzerland — This town, cradled by snow-capped Alpine peaks, is not Green Bay. Not that it isn’t trying: it has plenty of cheese, this being Switzerland, and it has football — the American kind.
The local team, the Broncos, is a winner, in fact. On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, while some 300 fans munched ribs and sausages, the red-clad Calanda Broncos, named for a local beer that is a sponsor, trounced the visiting Zurich Renegades, 48–6.
Swiss athletes are known for prowess in skiing, ice hockey and bobsledding — but football? To be sure, it remains a niche sport.
Soccer remains the country’s most popular spectator sport, and ice hockey is №2, but fans say that football is probably third, even though it was introduced to Switzerland less than 30 years ago. There are clubs in all the major cities, with senior and junior teams, and even flag football for children and, in a few cases, women.
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The league’s rules allow teams to employ American coaches, to hone the players’ talents, and each team may list up to six American or Canadian players on its roster and have up to three on the field at any one time.
Greg Conti, 29, played center at Bucknell University and later worked as a construction equipment salesman in his native Pittsburgh before being laid off. A friend told him about European football. Knowing that the rules limited the number of Americans on European clubs’ rosters, he took advantage of his Italian ancestry to apply for and obtain dual Italian and American citizenship. Now he qualifies as an Italian player and does not count against his team’s limit of six Americans.
Each team may have an unlimited number of players from other European countries, though. Indeed, one big name on the Broncos roster this year is Iiro Luoto, a Finnish tight end formerly with the Helsinki Roosters who spent the 2007 season on a practice squad with the New York Jets.
This brings to mind a whole host of sports movies, either Americans who go overseas to play or coach (The Air Up There, Mr. Baseball) or internationals who take up a non-native sport (Cool Runnings).
So what if there’s a brand new semi-professional football team in a small town in Luxembourg. And they’re horrible. But they just hawked some object of civic pride to pay the franchise fee to join the Swiss football league. Pressure on. What to do? How about they reach out to Jimmy Swain, ex-NFL QB who was drummed out of the league on what he claims were false drug use charges. His life has spiraled downward ever since. Now he has a chance at redemption, but he’s a stranger in a strange land as a player-coach trying to drill this strange sport into the locals’ consciousness.
It’s Local Hero meets The Bad News Bears.
What do you think?
What would you do with this story idea?