Tigers on Tour pt1

Courtesy of the Orlando Sentinel

KISSIMMEE -- Craig Wilson, 18, sometimes feels like an outcast back home in Scotland because of his decision to play American-style football rather than soccer or rugby.

Wilson's kilt bunches up when back home: "I'm called a foreigner because I won't watch soccer."

He is doing what he can, though, to share his love of American-style football with his fellow Scots and make it a success in Scotland. Wilson is a 5-foot-4, 145-pound quarterback-safety for the Glasgow Tigers of the Scottish Youth Tackle League, which was founded by his father. He and 24 other players, ages 15 to 18, are out to learn more about the sport on a two-week tour of Sunshine State NFL, college and high school programs, including Osceola High School.

Feeling like historic countryman William Wallace, who waged war against England for Scottish independence in the 13th century, Wilson is at the forefront of another uprising eight centuries later.

American football isn't accepted or supported in Glasgow, a city of 4 million soccer-crazed souls.

"It's accepted there the way soccer used to be accepted here," said Alan Wilson, Craig's father, coach and the founder of the Scottish youth league.

The league has grown slowly since he decided to organize a program a few years ago after watching a satellite broadcast of a NFL game with his son.

"Craig asked me why we couldn't do something like that," said Alan Wilson, an Oakland Raiders zealot.

Now, he and the players are on a fact-finding mission. They will return home Saturday, but not before attending Osceola High's regular-season finale against Belleview at 7:30 p.m. today at Kowboy Field.

The men saw the University of Central Florida game against Syracuse on Saturday, the Jacksonville Jaguars contest against the Houston Texans on Oct. 27 and had been scheduled to see Edgewater play Boone in Orlando tonight. However, they changed plans after bonding with Osceola's players during a practice session last week and attending last week's Osceola-St. Cloud game.

The Scots now have perspective on what must happen to develop their program.

"The difference we see is bigger, stronger, faster athletes," said Craig Wilson, a San Francisco 49ers fan whose Scottish Athletics Association Tigers play a nine-on-nine football scheme.

Speaking in a brogue that Mel Gibson could cut with his Braveheart sword, two-way lineman Christopher Lanton, 18, and the Tigers' biggest at 6-1, 300, said: "We don't play 11-on-11 because it's hard to get guys interested in the game. Most are too busy with soccer."

Alan Wilson has identified an immediate need before Scottish teens are capable of vanquishing their American counterparts.

"We don't have anything like the weight rooms we've seen," the coach said.

"Back home, you have to be 16 to be allowed into a gymnasium," said Steven Wilson, 20, a former linebacker and no relation to the Tigers' coach. "And you pay $90 a month to use the equipment."

The backers of American-style football also have to convince their countrymen that the new sport can co-exist with Scottish favorites soccer and rugby.

Lanton, a part-time boxer and a former hockey goalie, complains that, "Rugby sees us as a threat."

But if rugby sees American football as a threat, fans don't see it much at all.

Only 300 showed up Oct. 13 to watch the Clyde Valley Hawks defeat the North Lanarkshire Rams 23-20 for the 2002 championship at Glasgow's Cambuslang Rugby Club.

Too old for Scottish Athletics Union-sanctioned play this year, Steven Wilson recalls trying to persuade his family to support his sport of choice.

"Boys should play rugby" is what the former linebacker's father told his 6-foot-3, 210-pound son.

Finding any field is tough, too. Finding good ones is next to impossible.

"Soccer fields won't allow us to use their perfect pitches," Alan Wilson said. "Rugby gets the second-tier fields, and we get what's left."

What's left is better suited for raising pigs. "I was up to me knees in mud the last game I played," Steven Wilson said.

So far, the American-style football has limited financial backing.

Aided by equipment donations and clinics help from the Scottish Claymores, a National Football League Europe franchise, Alan Wilson founded his league in 1998 as a program for flag football that expanded to include tackle football in 2000. He is working to construct a $3 million multipurpose, 5,000-seat complex for baseball and football.

The Amateur Athletic Union has sponsored the trip, and Walt Disney World's Rick Morris has stayed busy escorting the Tigers.

Their fact-finding mission isn't unprecedented. At the behest of a son, who fell in love with baseball while on a 1997 trip to Florida, Juan Renau introduced the sport to Glasgow at the Carmyle Community Centre after a similar AAU/Disney-sponsored tour.

In 2001, Glasgow entered a 16-and-under team in a Turn Back the Clock Tournament at Disney's Wide World of Sports.