Former BYU football star uses Mandarin — not NFL status — as foreign ambassador

CEDAR HILLS — Chad Lewis, the former BYU standout tight end and multi-year All-Pro with the Philadelphia Eagles, is billed as the National Football League's ambassador to China, having made multiple official visits there in recent years.

Unofficially, he doubles as China's ambassador to the world.

"I love going there and being a part of a people and a culture that I got to love and eating their food," said Lewis, adding a light-hearted disclaimer of Chinese cuisine, that "it's not Panda Express."

Talk to the towering 6-foot-6, 36-year-old Lewis about his China experiences, and he's less likely to focus on himself and his experiences ... Instead, conversations drift into his favorite topics — Chinese places, Chinese people and Chinese personalities.

"They teach me so much with their friendship and acceptance," he added of the Chinese," and they're so forgiving of my inability to speak."

But when it comes to America's four major sports of football, baseball, basketball and hockey, no one this side of the NBA's high-profile China natives of Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian can communicate with the Chinese in Mandarin like Chad Lewis, who first learned the language as a LDS Church missionary in Taiwan in the early 1990s and continued studying it at Brigham Young University.

And at the tail end of Lewis' productive pro career, the NFL recognized the benefit of deploying Lewis to the Far East. He made his first trip with then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue in 2002 and served as color analyst for the first Chinese NFL broadcast at the 2004 Super Bowl between the Patriots and Panthers.

Since then, when the NFL has a need in the People's Republic of China, it calls on Lewis — sometimes with less than a week's notice. And he delivers there, comfortably chatting in football clinics with young players, coaches and referees or effortlessly mingling in formal functions with diplomats and dignitaries.

A couple of years ago in China, Lewis was invited by the U.S. ambassador to China to speak at the Fourth of July festivities that the latter was hosting.

"You talk about catching people off guard," said Pete Abitante, the NFL's senior director of international affairs, to the Boston Globe. "You can't get any more American-looking than Chad, and then he opens his mouth and he's speaking to the people in their language. He even signed autographs in Chinese characters."