美国《新共和》杂志即将以重庆美式足球队作为封面

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117246/chinese-football-my-season-chongqing-dockers

the day of the first game of American football ever played in Chongqing, China, Fat Baby held court in the locker room at the stadium of Chongqing Southern Translators College. “Stadium” would be generous, actually—it was a soccer field with stone bleachers. So would “locker room,” in reality a pile of clothes and equipment strewn across the benches. Even “football team” was arguable, come to think of it, but that’s what the Chongqing Dockers were there to prove.
Fat Baby and his teammate Bobo had just returned from a trip to Japan, where they’d bought matching Under Armour skullcaps. “You can’t find these in Chongqing,” he said proudly. One of the team’s founding members, Fat Baby (his real name is Zeng Xi, but like most of the teammates he goes by his online nickname) juggled the roles of wise elder (he was 29) and class clown. He first got into football after watching movies like The Longest Yard—the 2005 Adam Sandler remake, not the 1974 original.As game time approached, Fat Baby slipped on his favorite pink cleats. It didn’t look easy—he called himself Fat Baby for a reason. Later, I asked if the pink cleats were meant to scare his opponents. “Yes,” his wife, Yangyang, interjected, “they’re scared he’ll fall in love with them.” Yangyang, tall and matter-of-fact, wasn’t a football fan. “I hate sports,” she told me. But as a nurse, she supported Fat Baby’s passion to the extent that it would help him lose weight.Marco, the Dockers’ captain, scurried over, looking anxious. He was smaller than average, especially for a former personal trainer, and his facial expression tended to hover between pensive and pissed off. When he got excited, his voice plunged from alto highs to baritone lows. He wasn’t typical captain material, but he had mapped out a meticulous plan for the team’s development, and media was key to his strategy. The more people knew about them, the more players they’d attract, the better they’d get. Today’s contest, against the Beijing Cyclones, was their first home game, a chance to show everyone that they weren’t just a bunch of posers in uniform, but an actual American football team in southwestern China. Unfortunately, a 6.6-magnitude earthquake had hit Sichuan Province that morning, so only a couple of news outlets had showed up to see them play.

Marco took the referee microphone out to the middle of the field to test its range and to show off his football English: “Holding, defense, number twenty-seven, first down.” On the opposite fence, a red propaganda banner hung: “UNITED, WE PROGRESS, BREAKING BOUNDARIES, WE INNOVATE, STRIVING TENACIOUSLY TO BE FIRST.” Behind it, a strip of Chongqing skyline: identical-looking office buildings next to skeletons that would soon be identical-looking office buildings. From the air, Chongqing resembles a Sim City created by a ten-year-old off his meds. Perched between two rivers, fringed with ports, Chongqing has exploded economically in the past decades, with an urban population of seven million and the second-highest GDP growth rate in the country. All this development makes Chongqing the urban incarnation of China’s modern identity crisis. It’s a city where the Liberation Monument dedicated to the 1949 communist victory is surrounded on all sides by Cartier, Armani, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Starbucks, KFC, and Häagen-Dazs; where Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing party secretary, is both reviled for his corruption and beloved for his populist policies; where you can be late to dinner because, when someone said to meet at the Walmart in your neighborhood, he meant the other Walmart in your neighborhood.

Chris McLaurin, the team’s 26-year-old American coach, wanted badly to win. He didn’t let it show, exuding the air of calm authority the teammates had come to rely on. But ever since he had arrived in Chongqing the previous fall, the Dockers had dominated his life, nights and weekends spent coaching, planning, promoting, recruiting, all on top of a full-time job at a government-run investment firm. Without McLaurin, Fat Baby told me in English, “We would be a piece of shit.”

The Beijing Cyclones rolled in an hour before game time, 50 Cent serving as unintentional entrance music. Mike Ma, a Cyclones captain and Beijing native who had spent his teenage years in Los Angeles, greeted McLaurin with a purposeful thug hug. “Damn, you guys are deep, dog,” said Ma. Since many Beijing players couldn’t make the trip, Chongqing outnumbered them almost two to one. This made McLaurin cautiously optimistic. Beijing had more experience and stronger athletes, including a professional parkour practitioner. But between their home field advantage and numbers edge, he thought the Dockers had a shot.

Fans, mostly friends and family, gathered in the stands. I asked a student named Liu Zhiyue if he understood the game. “A little,” he said. “The quarterback is the most important.” Beyond that, he wasn’t totally sure. By the sidelines, a small squad of refs, all expat friends of McLaurin, put on the pinstripes they’d ordered online. One, a densely built Californian named Jeff, who had played semi-pro football in Poland and had “never again” tattooed in Hebrew on his shoulder, was getting nervous. “I don’t know the rules, that’s my thing,” he said to the head ref. “You should have, like, taught us the rules before, dude.”

The Beijing Cyclones rolled in an hour before game time, 50 Cent serving as unintentional entrance music. Mike Ma, a Cyclones captain and Beijing native who had spent his teenage years in Los Angeles, greeted McLaurin with a purposeful thug hug. “Damn, you guys are deep, dog,” said Ma. Since many Beijing players couldn’t make the trip, Chongqing outnumbered them almost two to one. This made McLaurin cautiously optimistic. Beijing had more experience and stronger athletes, including a professional parkour practitioner. But between their home field advantage and numbers edge, he thought the Dockers had a shot.

Fans, mostly friends and family, gathered in the stands. I asked a student named Liu Zhiyue if he understood the game. “A little,” he said. “The quarterback is the most important.” Beyond that, he wasn’t totally sure. By the sidelines, a small squad of refs, all expat friends of McLaurin, put on the pinstripes they’d ordered online. One, a densely built Californian named Jeff, who had played semi-pro football in Poland and had “never again” tattooed in Hebrew on his shoulder, was getting nervous. “I don’t know the rules, that’s my thing,” he said to the head ref. “You should have, like, taught us the rules before, dude.”

“Settttt, hut!” growled Leo, the Beijing quarterback. As soon as he took the snap, a Chongqing tackle drilled through the line for the sack. “There you go! There you go!” shouted James “Fitz” Fitzgerald, another assistant coach. The euphoria was temporary. Second down, Leo saw an opening on the left side, threaded through it and ran, as if alone on the field, all the way to the end zone. He celebrated by chest-bumping one of his teammates and miming a graphic strip tease.

The Chongqing players looked at each other. They’d been practicing for months, running and sweating and studying the playbook, rebuilding their bodies and reprogramming their brains, learning this weird foreign game from scratch. For many of them, football had not only become the center of their social lives, it had become their identity: Fat Baby had a custom-made bumper sticker on his car that said “CHONGQING DOCKERS FOOTBALL FATBABY.” Marco wore his Dockers t-shirt everywhere. Football was already more than a game to them—it represented a whole set of stories and values and attitudes that these young Chinese men had hungrily absorbed and now wanted to project. And for what? So a Beijing quarterback could gyrate his crotch in front of their loved ones. Fitz shook his head: “We’re about to get our ass kicked.”

“American football in China” is a sport/location combo that at first sounds like a joke, like “Jamaican bobsled team.” But according to the rule that, in a country of 1.3 billion people, everything is happening somewhere, the existence of Chinese football should come as no surprise. Unlike basketball, which missionaries brought to China in the late nineteenth century and which has long enjoyed government support (Chairman Mao was a fan), football is a recent import. It doesn’t come close to breaking into the country’s top ten sports. Even the term in Mandarin—“olive ball”—sounds awkward. But it is here and growing fast. The NFL first set up a China office in 2007 and started a flag-football league that has grown to more than 36 teams. Meanwhile, a raft of amateur tackle clubs has materialized, including, as of summer 2012, the Chongqing Dockers