Away, Running: A Look at a Different Paris

Abstract

It's June 1989, and I'm standing alone on the goal line of our home field in La Courneuve, a suburb of Paris, awaiting the opening kick-off of our quarterfinal game against the Jets from St-Cloud. The rest of my team huddles tightly on the sideline around our captain, a Corsican named Casta?o. Some five hundred spectators ring the field. Castano's words echo out to me, something like: For those bastard rich boys, we're the lowly Flash. Com munists! On the dole! Niggers and filthy Arabs! The Jets, former French champions, hail from one of Paris's wealthier suburbs, the home of Jean-Marie LePen, the founder and presidential candidate of France's far-right National Front Party, and the animosity between the two teams is palpable and long-standing. The Flash have never beaten the Jets, and La Courneuve is the photo-negative of St-Cloud: poor; a dilapidated landscape; a mostly immigrant population. Through my facemask I watch the Jets, dressed in crisp white below their green hel mets. They stand in a row, stretching from one thirty-yard line to the other. There's the American receiver, a wanna-be model whose golden locks cascade out the back of his helmet. And there, the American linebacker, whom they've chosen to rest in preparation for the next round of the play-offs. He wears a tight fitting tank-top and shorts, looks like an Aryan Conan. He's taking pictures with a 35-mm camera, a giant telephoto lens protruding out the front. The Jets' pasty arrogance dies to an inert gray as I catch the opening kick-off, bounce outside their coverage and sprint past them, past the linebacker, who stands erect and looks after me over his tripod. Picture this, I think. The kicker pushes me out of bounds at their twenty-five yard line, but the game's over. We Flash play together as one, and we pepper the Jets relentlessly. We win 20 to 6, but it's never even as close as that. American football in France? Kidding, right? Not at all. Most European countries have been playing for three decades; the French for 28 years. Today, France boasts 77 club teams over three divisions, from the Pyrenees to the Riviera to Strasbourg, with names like Gaulois, Mousquetaires and Ph?nix, along with the predictable: Giants, Falcons and Ours (French for, Bears). Each team can include up to three Americans; only the Americans are paid. Rosters include factory workers, law students, gar?ons de caf?. Most clubs, throughout Europe as well as in France, play on converted rugby pitches: one-hundred meter fields that must be chalk-marked only 90 yards long so that the uprights, which stand on the goal line in rugby, will be on the back line of the end zones.