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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/ZappaOMatic on 2024-06-21 16:09:40+00:00.
Original Title: [OC] In 1990, the Soviet Union invaded the United States under the command of former Broncos HC John Ralston. The Moscow Bears were outscored 185–0 against American minor league teams before winning their last game 2–0 against a practice squad.
“Karl Marx used to say that religion was the opiate of the people. Apparently, he’d never seen a football game.” – Editorial opinion piece from The Herald, July 15, 1990
Red Dawn, the original Modern Warfare trilogy, Freedom Fighters. All of these share a common premise: what if the Soviet Union or Russia invaded the United States?
It’s a popular alternate history topic and for rather unsurprising reasons. But what if I told you that it actually did happen (kind of)?
As glasnost and perestroika took effect in the late 1980s, various parties in the Soviet Union were eager to begin connecting with the West and vice versa. Of course, nothing says American culture quite like, well, American football.
One of these was the Moscow Bears, who became the top team in the USSR American Football Union and represented the country in international games as the Soviet national team but was still a ragtag squad compared to the rest of the world. In 1990, with the blessings of their overseas peers, the Bears decided to invade America with a sixteen-day tour that entailed playing five games against minor league clubs.
It didn’t go too well. For head coach John Ralston, the tour provided an experience quite different from his days leading the Broncos.
Birth of the Bears
While 1989 is regarded as the birthyear of football in the Soviet Union, interest began much sooner. Much of the public’s early exposure to the sport came through entertainment like the 1971 miniseries All the King’s Men, based on the novel of the same name; football scenes were at Lokomotiv Stadium in Moscow.[1]
Some Americans hoped to bring the sport in themselves, but the Soviet government didn’t share the same excitement. In 1979, American promoter Tom Kelly, who worked for a company called Perestroika Joint Venture which was trying to build an office complex in Russia, pitched an exhibition game between NFL teams as a trial run followed by forming a domestic league if it worked out. Kelly dubbed his strategy “Gridiron Diplomacy”, explaining he wanted to “use football to open up tensions between east and west.” This failed to materialize and Kelly claimed he was booted out of the country by the KGB after trying to start a team in Moscow; he eventually tried again in Hong Kong.[2]
Back in Russia, Alexander Kovrigin, who worked at the Mayak nuclear plant in Ozyorsk and coached hockey in his spare time, organized a football practice session on December 15, 1987. The lack of suitable equipment meant everyone wore modified motorcycle helmets and hockey gear, but this was considered the first organized American football activity in the USSR.[1]
As American-Soviet relations improved through the decade, there were plans to play a college football game in Moscow in 1989 called the Glasnost Bowl between USC and Illinois, though this was abandoned when negotiations broke down. Despite this, Tulsa head coach Dan Crookham proposed having Oklahoma high school players make the trip, a plan approved by both nations and the Oklahoma state legislature. 92 players formed two teams, called the Boomers and Stars, that played each other in a series of exhibitions in Moscow, Tallinn (Estonia), and Leningrad later that year. They spent four days in each city, prioritizing sightseeing over the games themselves. According to Boomers player David Wright, 19,000 attended the Moscow game followed by 5,000 in Tallinn and 40,000 in Leningrad.[3]
With the Oklahoma experiment a success, the Soviets began to form football programs of their own. For example, Ukraine’s first taste of the sport came in 1989 when Arthur Martirosyan and Yuri Kirsanov launched a team in Kharkiv called the Atlanteans consisting mainly of rugby players.[1] Soviet national rugby team coach Edgard Taturyan also helped translate football’s rules into Russian.[4]
Interest in the sport continued to grow, leading to as many as 24 teams to comprise the USSR American Football Union. Unlike other Soviet leagues where the state ran the teams and thus provided financial backing for them, the AFU’s clubs were all privately owned.[5]
The Bears, being from the Soviet capital, were tasked with playing international games as the Soviet Union national American football team, and made their debut on September 17, 1989 against the Berlin Adler, the reigning champion of the German league.[4] Outmatched in every way, the Bears lost 77–6 with Edward Zraigzne scoring their lone touchdown in the fourth quarter. A week later, the Bears and Atlanteans played the first organized game between Soviet teams, which the Bears won 26–0.[1] Another international game took place a month later against a youth team in Helsinki, where Moscow lost again 20–8.[4]
In 1990, the Soviet team finally claimed an international victory when they beat the Toulon Cannoniers on their tour of France.[4]
From there, they looked across the Atlantic with the hope of taking on some teams from the country that started their sport.
On conducting a special football operation
On April 27, 1990, in an Oklahoma City conference room, Ed Watkins and the fledgling Minor League Football System had a big announcement: a team from the Soviet Union was coming to America in the summer to play some preseason games against them. The tour was organized by Kent Dunston of the Sports Connection Program, on which Watkins was its organizing committee director.[6]
“I don’t want to build it up as Rocky III or anything, but there will be some fireworks,” Watkins said. He then had Bears’ team personnel call in to provide comments only for the speaker system to malfunction.[6]
To help acclimate the Soviets to life in America, the Bears hired John Ralston as head coach. Ralston, a college football great at Stanford who led the Broncos in the 1970s, went to Europe to continue his career as it entered its twilight years in the late 80s.
Building the Bears
Ralston knew he had his work cut out for him when he spent most practices explaining—via interpreter—how to wear pads. Prior to his arrival, the team mainly practiced on an indoor soccer field at CSKA Moscow’s (Central Army Sports Club) training facilities; according to Life reporter Gregory Jaynes, their regimen consisted of weightlifting, running plays, bumming cigarettes in the restroom, and eating pirozhkis with grape juice and beer.[7]
The players came from non-football backgrounds like track and field and rugby. The starting quarterback Yuri Boldin was a javelin thrower who never touched a football before 1990, while his supporting cast included gymnast/weightlifter Gemady Sidelin and judoka Eugene Kalugin on the offensive line along with bobsledder Alexei Tcheglovsky at receiver.[8][9] Linebacker Alexander Katsman, a rugby player, admitted he decided to sign up when he saw a flyer near his training facility seeking “all strong, wild people.” Another player purportedly became interested when he read a state propaganda piece that said all American football players took painkillers before games and were “crazed and vicious and slightly unbalanced,” which “sounded pretty good” to him.
The roster only had a single tight end to start the tour because both backups were detained by the KGB for unspecified reasons prior to leaving for the States.[8] Six players total and the team’s interpreter ended up missing the trip due to visa problems, forcing them to bring in a backup.[11]
“It’s quite an undertaking,” said Ralston.[5] "You have to understand that in the Soviet Union, they know nothing about football. They are basically outstanding athletes, but we have to teach them how to play football. We’re not a very good football team, but you can’t expect that at this particular stage. We don’t have the overall speed, nor do we have the overall size.
“The only different between a good blocker and a bad blocker is about 10,000 blocks. And believe me, these guys haven’t put in their time. Some of these guys have only played football for a month.”
Despite the language barrier, the players quickly developed a rapport with their coach and the sport. Dmitri Ivannikov, one of the only players who could speak English and thus served as a translator, called Ralston a “wonderful man. Over the last six weeks, he has taught us so much.”[5]
“American football is a wonderful game. Certainly, it’s better than soccer,” said Sidelin.[5] "Our coach, John Ralston, he is saying that looking at a soccer game is like watching the grass growing.
“No one [in the Soviet Union] really knows about American football. There have been only a few games, exhibitions, so you see, everyone thinks that American football is a game for crazy people.”
Despite them being new to the game, Dunston was relatively optimistic about the Bears and even went as far as to suggest the Soviet league could challenge the NFL in five to six …
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