Da zhen! NFL is now promoting football in China

BEIJING — Are you ready for some "Mei shi gan lan qiu"?

The NFL is intent on finding out if that is indeed the case in China. The league is venturing into untested territory and hoping the country's vast marketplace will respond to its product.

Clearly, there are details to sort out. For one, the language. The sport's vocabulary may resonate from Maine to Maui, but it's a poor fit in Chinese. This, after all, is a country where American football is largely unknown.

"We've had to come up with an entirely new nomenclature for the sport," Gordon Smeaton, an NFL vice president, said during a recent promotional tour with the New England Patriots. "This is a situation we don't face in any other country and it will take some time."

For the record, in Chinese the game is known as "Mei shi gan lan qiu," which can mean "American-style rugby" or "American-style olive-shaped ball," depending on the translation.

A touchdown is a "da zhen."

The quarterback is the "si fen wei" — the one-fourth position.

And then there are the byzantine rules. New England Patriots tight end Benjamin Watson has been spending a few days trying to explain strategy and tactics to Chinese fans and reporters.

"We need to teach about throwing and catching and some of the rules of the game," Watson said. "About where players line up. The game is almost like a chess match."

Basketball has been played for 100 years in China. Baseball is an oddity, but at least it has roots. The NFL may be the most popular game in the United States, but it arrived in China only a few years ago and is playing catch-up in a country of 1.3 billion with a swelling middle class.

"I think the reason we might be further behind is we're not an Olympic sport," Smeaton said. "The NFL has only been active in China for the last four years. I suppose we are further behind, so we have to work twice as hard."

For now, the NFL is thinking small. It's been sponsoring a school-age flag league involving 5,000 players. An NFL game is shown weekly on China's state-run CCTV. Smeaton said the NFL is about to announce a "much broader distribution of games" in the country. It may also change viewing times and may add more live telecasts. He said the annual Super Bowl telecast drew up to 10 million viewers.