"The Melbourne Demons, with Jerry Borassi showing the way, staged a late comeback and defeated Geelong 71 to 66, in the first exhibition of Australian Rugby ever played in North America." -- The Fresno Bee newspaper, Monday 28 October 1963.
No, it's not AI slop, nor a 1990s video game without the rights to use player names.
Decades before the NRL played games in Las Vegas, Australian rules football had similar ambitions to wow North American audiences.
That they called the legendary Ron Barassi 'Jerry Borassi' and described the sport as 'Australian Rugby' were just inevitable ego bruises along the way.
25 years apart, Australian rules teams made ambitious incursions into the US. That the events ultimately fell short of the grand hopes does not dim the audacity of those responsible, nor the absurdity of some of what occurred.
Subscribe to our weekly footy newsletter to get all the latest analysis, reaction, highlights and more from the AFL
1963
The World War II ties that bound Australia and the United States coupled with the increasing post-war cultural influence that America had in Australia (Hollywood! Television! Rock and Roll! Elvis!) made America a natural place of ambition in the era.
So, in 1963 when the San Francisco mayor George Christopher issued an invitation to Geelong Mayor A. R. McAllister for "two Geelong teams" to play an exhibition match in his city was accepted with glee.
The VFL voted in the affirmative to allow two teams to travel and play after the season finished in anticipation about what the Yanks would think of our great game.
Why the mayor issued the invitation is not terribly clear, though The Age speculated that a recent article about the sport in a US automobile company's house journal entitled 'Aussie Footy Unique as Kangaroo' might have been the trigger, as unlikely as that sounds.
And the natural team for Geelong to play? Well of course it would be Melbourne.
The two establishment clubs of the league had been blueblood cousins since birth, and a convivial relationship had forever ensued.
That would all change, momentarily at least, on this American tour. The fanaticism of Melbourne coach Norm Smith was central.
The Cats couldn't believe their lot in life. Not only had they triumphed to win the 1963 premiership, but its players were now receiving a once-in-a-lifetime holiday to the USA.
The Demon players, beaten preliminary finalists in 1963 yet amid a six-premierships-in-10-years run of dominance, were as excited as the Cats.
Their coach Smith and officials? Not so happy-go-lucky.
Smith thought the natural order was the Demons winning the flag. Combine that with Melbourne officials' petty grievance about Geelong promoting their expedition as being 'the first' Australian Rules team on American soil, and the tour took on a completely different complexion.
This was not a jaunt, this was revenge.
So much so that Melbourne adjusted their travel plans and headed to the first stop in Honolulu a week earlier to train and indeed be the first team to land in the US.
Television went along for the ride too, Channel 9's Tony Charlton and Channel 7's Mike Williamson and Gordon Bennett travelled to document the tour.
The fascinating Channel 7 documentary, '7000 Mile Kick', still survives on YouTube.
At the airport the Demons were welcomed by musicians and hula dancers who presented an uncomfortable looking Smith, and a very comfortable looking skipper, Barassi, with a lei and a kiss.
When told this was the traditional greeting, Barassi replied with a grin, "I'll have to make it back here again."
The acclimatised Demons then accounted for the Cats, the Geelong players shocked at the ferocity of the attack. Smith had wound them up for retribution, with Barassi flattening Cat champ Polly Farmer as the game turned brutal.
Yet this was just the undercard for the main event in San Francisco the following weekend.
The reporting of the visit in the San Francisco papers by some of its legendary columnists illuminates more about the visit.
For the one writer that called our famous figure 'Jerry Borassi', there was a group that took it all in with more care.
Art Rosenbaum of the San Francisco Chronicle told how the funding of the trip came from "a public subscription" with the rest tipped in by wealthy patrons.
This meant fans accompanied the teams on the tour, as Rosenbaum explained in an unintentionally amusing cultural clash; "the patrons (rooters) came along themselves to load the two planes."
Yet it was Smith that fascinated most.
Geelong had a comfortable half-time lead when he made a striking impression.
"Norman (Red) Smith, as fiery as his nickname, was giving'em hell. As the crowd gathered, his fury mounted. He wanted his players, he said, to show their manhood," Rosenbaum wrote.
Paul Lippman of the San Francisco Examiner went further.
"Smith, a carrot top with a rugged face assailed his players with the most gosh-awful hell-fire and brimstone message that ever passed by these eras."
Smith's tactics worked on the scoreboard. The game descended into ugliness, with numerous brawls, but his team won by five points.
"The Demons were now demonical," according to Rosenbaum.
The friendly nature of the two teams was quashed and caused major controversy back home.
For its part, the documentary tried to smooth it over with Williamson declaring after vision of another cheap shot, "but believe me all the boys finished up great friends at the end of the match."
The game clashed with two large college football games and telecasts, which was blamed for the sparse crowd estimated at being between 2500-5000.
Locals that did watch were apparently impressed though.
A San Francisco 49ers scout marvelled at the jumping and catching ability, while as Lippman reported "one gal even had the audacity to yell 'We'll trade the 49ers for you Melbourne'."
But it would be 24 years before the game came back to North America.
1987-1990
The cult hit that was the nascent ESPN TV network's embrace of Australian rules football in the 1980s had VFL officials salivating over the American market and its possibilities.
Yet it was not until a Canadian promoter named Tom Bryant came along in 1987 that the game took another leap across the Pacific.
Bryant's idea was simple: the sports fans who'd discovered the game on ESPN and its sister station TSN in Canada would flock to see it in real life.
Despite internal scepticism at Bryant's grandiose plans, the lure of the US proved too great once Bryant lobbied the VFL's Commission.
Exhibition games in London and Tokyo were being held at the time, so the American contests completed what was termed the VFL's 'World Challenge'.
Sydney and Melbourne would play in Vancouver, Canada, with the winner scheduled to take on North Melbourne (who'd won the London game -- the notorious 'Battle of Britain' brawl) in Los Angeles.
Promotional tactics were novel and lent into the notion that this was a game with no rules played by men only marginally evolved from neanderthals.
Sydney ruckman John Ironmenger (who ironically would later migrate the USA and be a pivotal figure in growing the game at community level) was infamously wheeled out to local television stations in this manner.
"There's a video somewhere floating around of me eating a raw steak sitting next to a Canadian eating a chocolate bar on the footpath," Ironmonger recalled on The Greatest Season That Was Podcast in 2020.
And naturally that's how the game at BC Stadium, its astro turf and smaller size meaning knee pads, elbow pads, and 15-a-side teams, was received.
'Aussie Footbrawl big hit with fans' was how the Vancouver Sun reported the match, Wendy Long writing that the crowd "welcomed a brawl between the Swans' Wayne Henwood and Melbourne's Todd Viney as though they were Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Savage."
By a quirk of the broadcast rights of flux of 1987, Network Ten broadcast all matches back to Australia, marking the first time Bruce McAvaney and Eddie McGuire would broadcast an VFL/AFL match. It was also broadcast locally.
Australian reports suggested mroe than 32,000 attended, and Melbourne won the game comfortably to progress to the 'World Challenge Final'.
Yet by then Bryant's plans to take the game to the USA had hit a snag.
With only 852 tickets sold to the massive LA Coliseum the final had been abruptly shifted to Vancouver.
A recent LA earthquake was the public excuse, but in reality, Bryant's plans had proven too good to be true.
The Los Angeles sales disaster was the final straw, the VFL stepping in to help fly the Swans home after they were left marooned in Vancouver awaiting Bryant's payments.
Melbourne stayed in Vancouver and beat the Kangaroos the following week by 16 points to win the global challenge in front of a much-reduced crowd of 8000.
Yet commentator McAvaney saw the positive.
"Sure, it was rough and tough today and there was plenty of physical action," he told Ten News. "But none of the violence we saw in London, or even in Vancouver in the first game and it was far and away the most outstanding football game we've seen overseas."
The sour taste of the Bryant debacle did not cause the VFL to retreat though. Instead, they would take control and finally make it across the border to the USA in 1988.
An advanced party of the VFL media director Mike Sheahan and injured Richmond full forward Michael Roach ventured to Miami to promote the coming game in the just-opened home of the NFL's Miami Dolphins, Joe Robbie Stadium.
That this was a major coup is evident by the stadium hosting the Super Bowl just months after the match.
Crates of Fosters Lager, footballs, and boomerangs were sent to radio stations in Miami and Toronto as part of the promotional blitz. Even the 'page three girl' in the Toronto Sun held a Sherrin football for the occasion.
Yet despite the VFL's wishes of an image change, the locals in Miami could not get past the lure of on-field biffo, turning to professional wrestling yet again to make a comparison.
"The Aussies land more kicks, takedowns and punches in five minutes than Hulk Hogan does in five matches" wrote the Miami Herald's Ken Rodriguez.
The players themselves did not help the situation, deadpanning tall tales to the stunned newspaper reporters.
Legendary Pie Darren Millane described himself as a "lean, mean, chopping machine," before telling them that having a beer after the game with whoever you knocked out was one of the game's great customs.
"Pain?" Cat Damian Bourke blustered, "I've learned to enjoy it."
The late Geelong skipper Michael Turner, playing his last official game for the Cats, appeared to have the most fun, if Rodriguez's story is anything to go by.
"Geelong's most colourful player, Michael Turner, a sports columnist/country-music singer, scored one goal. Now a solo artist, Turner used to play for a band called the Dead Livers," was faithfully reported.
Turner was a country music aficionado and major fan of the Melbourne band The Dead Livers (they even played at his 30th birthday party) but there is no evidence that he was ever a member of the band or a solo artist of any note.
Even the umpires got in on the act. For reasons that are not clear Peter Carey was photographed hurdling Bryan Sheahan, both shirtless, in the Toronto Sun.
There were also unconfirmed reports that the action from the Miami match between Geelong and Collingwood would be used in a plotline for television program Miami Vice.
Brian Taylor's eight goals to defeat Geelong made him the biggest star in Miami, though the idea that BT might have also appeared in Miami Vice is mind-bending.
When the Pies arrived in Toronto for the final at Varsity Stadium, ground size was an issue.
The128 metre long and 68-metre-wide playing arena prompted VFL boss Ross Oakley to propose a novel solution.
"We'll see how it goes up to half-time. We can always take a player or two off then, if necessary."
Collingwood Coach Leigh Matthews and Hawks coach Alan Joyce dismissed that with contempt, "it will get ridiculous," said Joyce.
Not as concerned were the beaten teams Carlton and Geelong, who were supposed to head back to Australia. After some changes were made to the prize money structure the VFL allowed the two teams to instead tag along to Toronto for a holiday to help promote the game - the most fortuitous end of season trip players had ever seen.
For all the hijinks, the final itself was a great game, and a healthy crowd of 18,571 turned up to see Pies' champion Peter Daicos' best afield performance drive a 14-point win.
Soon Collingwood was selling "1988 World Champions" t-shirts to their success-starved fans.
Many were wearing them when they finally broke their premiership drought two years later.
Despite the moderate success of the Canadian games over the period, the series would fizzle out after two more years.
In 1989, games were held in Miami and Toronto between the top 4 VFL teams before Melbourne completed their second 'world title' in London.
In 1990 that was reduced to one American game in Portland between Melbourne and West Coast. Its greatest legacy was Demon full forward Darren Bennett's first flirtations with punting an American football, leading to an NFL career and a production line of Aussie punters in the league.
The only time AFL clubs have revisited since was for a preseason match between under-strength young North Melbourne and Sydney squads in January 2006 as part of the 'G'Day USA' festival in Los Angeles.
All these years on, could the AFL follow the NRL's lead and resume those distant expeditions?
Given most of the streaming giants are housed in the USA, showcasing the game to them has strong strategic advantages given the want for competitive tension in its broadcast rights sales.
And of course, there is now a successful USAFL league not present during the 80s push that could at least guarantee some of the crowd if it was run in conjunction with its national championship
The lessons of those 1980s visits would suggest that targeting smaller American cities with stadiums that could be realistically filled would give the best chance of success.
If they did, there might just be a convert or two, like the girl interviewed by the San Francisco Examiner in 1963.
"I like this game better than ours," was her reaction.