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Monday, November 17, 1997

British fan goes to great lengths for Cowboys

By Michael E. Young

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS -- It isn't always easy being a Dallas Cowboys' fan, especially when home games are 4,750 miles from home.

But Greg Oates, as fervid a fan as the silver-and-blue can claim, won't allow something as modest as the Atlantic Ocean to keep him from his seat at Texas Stadium.

So about a half-dozen times each season, he boards an American Airlines jet at Gatwick Airport near his suburban London home, tucks in for the 10-hour flight to Dallas and prepares to cheer his heart out for his beloved 'Boys.

"It's getting to where some of the air hostesses are starting to recognize me," says the 35-year-old Oates, who works in the computer department of a London bank.

"So I just tell them I'm coming over on business. I mean, you can't really shout about why you're coming. It sounds a bit strange."

Strange or not, he's been following the same routine for six years now, from the day he and his wife, Deborah, became Cowboys' season-ticket holders.

Deborah Oates, a part-time computer consultant, is pregnant with the couple's second child and makes fewer of the mind-numbing trips than she once did. She has missed all of the Cowboys' home games this season.

But Greg Oates will attend four by year's end, including Sunday's battle against the Washington Redskins and the game with the Carolina Panthers on Dec. 8.

Such dedication doesn't come cheap, but Oates tries to keep costs down by buying plane tickets well in advance and bunking occasionally with friends he met in his corner of Texas Stadium, down near the end zone.

"It's got to be $5,000 (a year) by the time you're done with tickets and hotels and car hire," he said, "and that's just for me.

"If Deborah comes as well, you can almost double that. But now that she's pregnant again, she isn't into the weekend trips."

Who can blame her?

Even with his years of training, Oates admits that hurtling your body across six time zones, forcing yourself to stay awake when your brain says sleep, then flying home with your Sunday night passing in a few hours' blur is no picnic.

"It's certainly easier coming to Texas because you can make yourself stay awake," he said. "But coming back is hell."

Then why does an English lad, raised on a whole different sort of football, pay that kind of price for a game that barely registers in sports-mad Britain?

That, Oates said, is a long story.

It begins about 20 years ago with Oates, then a teenager, sitting before the telly in his family's living room.

The credits roll, the music swells with the sweeping grandeur of the Old West, and suddenly Oates is transported to a starkly modern cityscape rising straight up from the North Texas prairie.

"Dallas" had come to England. And Oates was hopelessly hooked.

"I watched it every week," he said. "I wouldn't miss an episode."

Fast-forward a few years, to the early '80s, and the advent of American football on British TV. Compared with English soccer, a rough-and-tumble sport by any definition, this new game offered a kind of beautiful brutality, supersized men of superhuman strength dressed in superhero costumes.

"All my friends decided we'd each pick a team to be our favorite. And I ran down the list and saw ÔDallas,' and that was it," he said.

For a while, at least, the National Football League was all the rage in Britain, Oates said, but its popularity seems to have peaked.

One of the satellite TV channels, Sky Sports, shows an NFL game live each week, at either 6 or 9 p.m. Sunday. Of course, there's no guarantee it will be the Cowboys' game.

"We've had a couple this year, which helps," he said. "We had Dallas-Chicago and the Cowboys-49ers."

But last Sunday, when the Cowboys were beating the Phoenix Cardinals, Oates was watching the Miami Dolphins and the New York Jets, waiting for periodic updates on the Cowboys' score.

Yes, it isn't always easy being a Cowboys' fan in England.

"I'm pretty much out there on my own, I think," Oates said. "People will occasionally come over with me. My brother-in-law comes sometimes. He's a Packers fan."

Mostly, though, they tag along because they want to see America, not a football game, Oates said.

"There are only a few people who are really into the game of football," he said. "It's really a pretty small band."

It doesn't help that the NFL year coincides with the first half of soccer season in England, where soccer is king.

"It's pretty much like baseball and football are to you guys," he said. "American football just can't get the market share."

So from August to January, from preseason to postseason, Oates is a voice in the wilderness, a man with a passion few others in his country share.

While he frets over the Cowboys' image problems, or the latest rumors of coaching changes, or the pounding his favorite player, Troy Aikman, seems to take week after week, his countrymen spar over the merits of Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea, the soccer club Oates follows once the NFL season ends.

But as long as the Cowboys keep playing, Oates remains true. He tracks the team on the Internet, so he's as up to date as most fans on the latest machinations at Valley Ranch.

On Barry Switzer's coaching future, Oates is pragmatic. If a coaching change makes the team more competitive, he's for it.

"But it doesn't mean anything if you don't get someone better in the job," he said.

And as for the troubles that have dogged some of the 'Boys, well, Oates would just as soon look past that and focus on football, improving the offense, scoring a bit more often in the red zone.

The Cowboys have put themselves in a tough position, Oates said, and the playoffs hang in the balance.

Ah, the playoffs. Such a lovely thought, even if they mean more trans-Atlantic flights, more money, more jet lag.

Fortunately, Oates has a very understanding wife.

She doesn't even mind the Cowboys' cheerleaders, he said, a part of the American game that would be unthinkable in British soccer.

"If you had cheerleaders there," he said, "no one would watch the match."

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(c) 1997, The Dallas Morning News.

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