Appeal of college football transcends languages, oceans

Charles Bierbauer

Poland in the fall of 1980 was enthralled with Solidarnosc, the popular insurgency launched in the shipyards of Gdansk against decades-long communist rule. Poles also had an eye on the U.S. presidential elections, welcoming a Ronald Reagan victory as putting an anti-communist ally in the White House. American football was not on many minds.

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Over the years, more than a few Polish names have highlighted the Penn State roster. I’m sure you can name them. But I may have been the only person in Poland that fall trying to keep up with the Nittany Lions, en route to a Fiesta Bowl victory over Ohio State.

Not as easy as it might seem today. In 1980, there was no Internet, no www.psu.edu, no YouTube, no Twitter. ESPN had just begun broadcasting, but not to Eastern Europe. Ted Turner’s CNN, which I was soon to join and spend more than 20 years with, had just launched. But CNN International was a few years off. The International Herald Tribune was flown in from Paris, a day or two late, if you could find a copy. What’s a football fan to do? Back in Bonn, Germany, where I was then based as bureau chief for ABC News, I’d recently met a young American woman working for The Associated Press. She knew of, but did not share, my enthusiasm for Penn State football. Susanne was a Nebraska journalism graduate.

But with a spark of collegiality, and perhaps a spark of something else, Susanne would copy a paragraph or so of the AP’s report on the weekly Penn State game and send it by telex to my hotel in Warsaw or Gdansk during the time I was reporting there.

Telex? Do you really have to ask? Well, before the digital explosion and before satellites, our most reliable communications were via trans-Atlantic cable. Telex was a means of relaying reports by punching a code into a paper tape and transmitting by wire. Telegraphy.

On Sunday mornings, the hotel clerk would announce “there’s a Telex for you.” And, thanks to Susanne, I’d catch up on the games. We beat Syracuse at Homecoming that year, remember?

There is, of course, nothing like showing an interest in football, even if feigned, to reach a man’s heart. Susanne and I have been married now for 26 years.

We’ve become Gamecock fans, a bit out of necessity, since 2002 when I became dean of the communications program at South Carolina. But nothing transcends our devotion to (his) Nittany Lion and (her) Cornhusker football. Over the years, we’ve been to games in Happy Valley and Lincoln.

Nebraska beat Penn State during that 1980 season.

But the Lions evened that score in their 1982 national championship season. We were at Beaver Stadium for the Lions’ 27-24 victory over the Huskers. My father-in-law had produced tickets for us, so you can imagine who had the only blue sweatshirt in the otherwise red visitors’ corner of the stadium.

Nebraskans still think we have an oddly shaped field where one ever-so-close-to-the-sideline catch led to our game-winning score.

But doesn’t part of the appeal of college football lie in its many intricacies, the unflagging devotion of its fans, and even its romantic attraction? Try explaining that in Polish.

Charles Bierbauer earned an undergraduate degree in journalism and Russian at Penn State in 1966 and a masters in journalism in 1970. He can be reached at bierbauer@sc.edu.