Today the first National Football League game outside of North America took place. Well, the first one that was part of the regular season. There have been a few others but they were pre-season games and therefore not very meaningful.
There are no doubt a number of things that could be learned and projected from this "milestone event" but there was one peculiar item that really appealed to me.
In the first quarter, I noticed on 2 different plays something that is not witnessed here in the States. On each of these plays, someone made a good tackle or caught a pass and the person making the play then ran a few steps out from the crowd and strutted forward making some kind of gesture clearly stating: "Yo! Look at me! I am the reason this great play occurred. Can you dig how cool and great I am?"
And you know what I distinctly heard from the London crowd? Boos. Yes, boos! How refreshing. Maybe I was imagining it, but I believe there was a healthy group of London fans who just don't go in for the "look how great I am" athlete and they made themselves known to the two players who felt compelled to strut their personal stuff.
This phenomenon of individual players showing the world how great they are individually seems to happen most often in football. You do see it sometimes in basketball, very rarely in baseball (the player who hits a home run and then stops to admire it) and almost never in ice hockey.
When an athlete does something absolutely incredible and wants to celebrate it because it made a impact on their team's success, that's very cool. But it's easy to see the difference between that kind of celebration and the one where the individual is making a statement mainly about himself.
The less we see of the latter the better.
