Australian fans of the NFL now have the same access to football media as the average American, but that wasn’t the case in the 1980s media dark ages

If September, with its focus on football finals across the country is the best sporting month of the year, then for me, October is not far behind. It is the month when those of us who follow American sport – granted, those of us with a Foxtel subscription – can flick on to ESPN and gorge on regular season NFL or post-season baseball every day of the week.

Who needs spring racing? And while the AFL trade period is compulsive, pressing the refresh button to update your #afltrade hashtag every 30 seconds has its limitations. It seems that these days, everyone in Australia is on the NFL bandwagon. Fantasy football competitions abound everywhere. Check the Instagram feed of your favourite footy player in the next few weeks and chances are they’ll be snapped at an NFL game somewhere as they enjoy their off-season.

I’m a diehard New York Giants fan and between various ESPN and NFL apps, a New York Times subscription, all sorts of beat writer Twitter follows and the best of Mike Francesa’s daily WFAN show on my podcast feed, these days I can be as informed and opinionated on the G-Men as “Vinny from Queens” and other regular callers to Francesa’s New York radio show. That’s when Odell Beckham Jnr isn’t throwing throwing another tantrum while watching NFL Redzone.

But it wasn’t always like that. Having as much American sport as I want to consume right at my fingertips is great, but I can remember the dark old days when it was only at the discretion of newspaper sports sub-editors that Australians might find out the NFL scores at all.

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I started following the NFL and the Giants in 1981 and for the next 10 years, TV coverage of the NFL in Australia was spotty at best. Back then, the NFL had a small, cult following. You might get one game a week at some ungodly hour, often on a delay of up to a week.

If the aforementioned newspaper subs chose not to run the scores, then you would tape then watch whichever game was on, taking note of the in-game progress scores at the bottom of the screen and hoping like hell that they would give the full scores from all the other games at the end of the broadcast.

Channel Nine was an early adopter of the NFL, right as its Wide World of Sports brand started to gather momentum. They showed a few live games of the playoffs following the 1981 season, including the famous Joe Montana-to-Dwight Clark touchdown that became known as “The Catch” as the 49ers beat the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC Championship Game.

As an aside, I recently discovered that this was the final football game ever called by the broadcasting great Vin Scully, who just retired as Los Angeles Dodgers baseball broadcaster after a 65-year run. He chose to stick to the summer game after being overlooked by CBS for Pat Summerall for the main NFL gig of working alongside John Madden.

Nine showed Monday Night Football in 1984, which also happened to be the last season that Howard Cosell was the lead broadcaster, giving Australians a belated experience of his outsized personality. He was every bit as colourful as advertised.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Australian fans of the NFL got their fill of legendary sports broadcaster Howard Cosell (right) in 1984. Photograph: Bob Riha Jr/Getty Images

Australian TV coverage was nomadic from there. After that first run of Nine’s, Channel Ten showed a weekly game for a few years, hosted by a clearly-disinterested David Fordham. Fordham is known one of the great blokes of Australian sportscasting, but clearly he didn’t regard fronting an NFL show for a few desperates like me as a career highlight, and it showed.

A typical week of NFL fandom for Australians back then: I remember the Giants playing a big game in Los Angeles against the Raiders. The papers hadn’t published the scores that Tuesday morning, so it took me the best part of a week to work my way through the three-plus hours to watch the game and find out eventually that yes, the Giants had won.

That was the other thing about watching (and recording) the NFL in the bad, old days. The games would be on late at night and would usually start well after they were advertised, meaning the three-hour VHS tapes would often run out before games were finished. I’m sure the 240-minute VHS cassette was invented for the NFL.

The turning point for Australia-based NFL fans came in 1990 when every Monday night at 9.30pm, we would tune in to the ABC and an icon of Australian TV would utter these immortal words, “Hi, I’m Don Lane…and thiiiiis is NFL American Football!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Australian broadcaster Don Lane introduces a decidedly off-Broadway American football encounter.

Actually, the ABC had held the TV rights for a few years before then, but their presenters also hadn’t shown all that much interest, either. Perhaps old mate “Fordo” had had a word to them. But then in an inspired choice, they turned to Lane, born in New York as Morton Isaacson and himself a big Giants fan.

The popular former late-night TV talk show host brought a new audience to the NFL in Australia. He knew the game, understood its history and genuinely enjoyed presenting the weekly broadcast. Yes, the games were a week old before we saw them, and he would regularly beseech us not to check the scores beforehand, but it was great to finally have a TV host who loved the game as much as we did, and shared our enthusiasm.

If there ever was a catalyst for kickstarting interest in the NFL in Australia, it was Don Lane.

The ABC held the rights until the mid 1990s and even sent Lane to a few Super Bowls, but by then pay-TV was starting to take off in Australia and live NFL games were a no-brainer for the heads of programming at these fledgling broadcasters.

Once ESPN was available, first on Optus Vision and then through Foxtel’s first incarnation Galaxy, we NFL devotees were in heaven. It wasn’t just the games, but hours and hours of Sportscenter, NFL Primetime and the best of NFL Films that we could devour. We’ve since watched on as support for and interest in the game has grown every year since.

But it was one thing to watch the game. It was another to try to learn and read about it. Back in the dark, old days there was a paucity of NFL information and reading material available to Australians.

The Melbourne High School library subscribed to Sports Illustrated when I went there, and would devour every issue. If the school librarians want to know why a few copies went missing from 1980 to 1983 I am finally prepared to confess, more than 30 years later, that I might be a “person of interest”.

You could also subscribe to The Sporting News, the sports weekly that was known as the “Bible of Baseball” and not too bad on the NFL too. But again, it came by boat so you were reading box scores, game reports and features related to matches that were played up to three months beforehand. It was great for college football and major events like the NFL Draft, which had no visibility in Australia whatsoever.

The International Herald-Tribune and USA Today were godsend for a time in the late 1980s. In Melbourne, air-freighted editions of both would sometimes lob at the iconic, now-gone McGills newsagency in the city and USA Today also had a phone service you could call to get the scores. Pre-internet, it was the best thing going, but it was expensive. If you were still living at home, you knew the experience of being read the riot act by parents when these calls started appearing on the phone bill.

What those papers and magazines also did was expose Australians to some of the great American sportswriting. The words of Rick Reilly, Dan Jenkins, Tony Kornheiser, Dave Kindred, Leigh Montville and the great Frank Deford would leap off the page. Some of us decided we wanted to be try and be like them.

When I joined The Age as a cadet journalist in 1990 and moved closer to my goal of becoming a footy writer, my first day on the job was the same day as Super Bowl XXIV (49ers 55, Broncos 10) ) and it was hard to concentrate on the editor’s “Welcome to The Age” pep-talk when he had the game going on his TV screen behind him in the office.

But there I learned a few of the reasons why the NFL got such a dreadful run in The Age sports section. Basically, the sports subs (who controlled what got in and out of the sports results section) were a bunch of cranky old Anglophiles. British football, county cricket and even the Williamstown croquet results would get a run before the before the NFL scores and standings. That one of them was known to all on the desk as “West Ham’’ should tell you all you need to know about where their sporting loyalties lay.

Once when I mentioned that an important NFL game had been played and they really ought to run a wire story about it, they relented. But only after rigidly enforcing the house style book and converting every measurement to metric. “A 38.6-metre pass from Troy Aikman to Michael Irvin with seven seconds left gave the Dallas Cowboys a 34-27 win over the Philadelphia Eagles…Emmitt Smith ran for 194.7 metres.”

By that stage I was only looking out for a small, but growing number of NFL tragics. Working at the newspaper gave me access all sorts of realtime NFL information – not just scores but thanks to access to various wire services there were match reports, news stories, injury updates and features from the major US newspapers. As a Giants fan, I was in heaven with all the local coverage at my disposal and I became a fan of the work of Washington Post star columnists Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon years before PTI was even dreamed up.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Long before they starred in ESPN’ talk show PRI, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon were only known to a small number of Australians through their Washington Post sports columns. Photograph: Randy Holmes/ABC via Getty Images

Before the leaving work for the day, I would stand over the printer, so I could take home all manner of stories, and for a time there I thought I knew as much as about the NFL as anyone in Australia. I rarely came across anyone who cared for it as deeply as I did.

In hindsight, I’m sure I was wrong about that and when you fast forward to 2016, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I work with a guy who knows not only the depth chart of his beloved Cleveland Browns from player 1 through 53, but almost all the other 31 teams in the NFL as well.

I play in a fantasy football league at work and I stink at it, because my opponents follow the game more closely than I do. Super Bowl Monday as it is here, has seemingly become a defacto public holiday for a certain type of Australian sports fan aged 18-55. NFL is more or less a mainstream sport in Australia these days and even casual sports fans know plenty about Tom Brady, JJ Watt, OBJ and Cam Newton. The dabs of Newton and the deeds of Bill Belichick are familiar to all.

But is the NFL as much fun as it was back in the early 1980s, when for me and a handful of others, it was a secret and guilty pleasure made all the more fascinating by the scarcity of information? Perhaps not.