How A Former NCAA Basketball Player Became The First American In Aussie Rules Football

Seems only fitting that in another country's national sport, one that barely exists in America's consciousness, an American athlete makes history in it while nearly all of his countrymen are soundly asleep.

America, wake up.

Don't know Jason Holmes? You should.

When the 25-year-old took the field with the Saints last month, all eyes were on him. It was a chilly winter evening at Melbourne's Etihad Stadium, the St Kilda Saints' home turf, where thousands had turned out for the match against the Geelong Cats; hundreds of thousands more were watching from home. The umpire slammed the yellow oblong ball to the grass and the crowd's murmur morphed into a roar as the 6-foot-8 Holmes, St Kilda's newest member, soared over his opponent to tap the ball to a smaller teammate, starting the match.

The Australian Football League predates our own National Football League by about 40 years. While a few thousand men and women compete in the amateur United States Australian Football League (USAFL), a born-and-bred American had never made it to the AFL. Until this summer.

Holmes's debut followed a two-year enterprise some Australian observers politely called unlikely and others dismissed as ludicrous. And who could blame the skeptics? Three years ago, Holmes, a former college basketball player from Elk Grove Village, Illinois, had never heard of Australian football. Who could blame him? Cable TV networks Fox Soccer Plus and Fox Sports 2 broadcast live AFL matches weekly, but viewership is small and matches are mostly played during America's collective graveyard shift. Bring up "Australian football" to most Americans and they'll say, "Oh, you mean rugby?"

No. Not rugby. Aussie. Except for tackling and playing with an oblong-shaped ball, rugby and Aussie rules bear little resemblance to each other. How so?

• Rugby is played on a rectangular field, while footy is played on an immense oval, far longer and wider.
• In a footy match, 18 players from each side are on the field at once, with each team having four starting on the bench; in rugby, there are 13 starters and four bench players.
• Rugby teams attack only by charging straight ahead, with ball carriers throwing the ball behind them to running teammates, who then aim to score "tries," by breaking opposition lines and touching the ball down on or across the opposition's goal line. Aussie rules is more of a 360-degree game, with players moving in any direction they choose. Players aren't allowed to throw the ball and can only dispose of it by "handballing"—balancing the ball on one hand and striking it with the opposite fist—or kicking to teammates who can "mark" (catch) the ball with their hands.
• Footy teams score by kicking goals through a pair of parallel goal posts, which, unlike rugby, have no horizontal crossbar.

An increasing number of AFL scouts believe American hoopsters can transfer skills used in jump balls, boxing out, rebounding, pass-catching and shot-blocking to play the Australian football position of ruckman, a role not entirely dissimilar to a basketball center. In Australia, unusually tall young men with extraordinary athletic gifts are rare. Meanwhile, American college basketball is full of such athletes—but the National Basketball Association has a limited number of roster spots.

Supply, meet demand. Three years ago, the AFL hosted its first American scouting combine, in Redondo Beach, California. With the help of an American college basketball talent evaluator and draft expert, league scouts invited about two dozen athletes, mostly former college basketball big men, to try out in speed and agility drills and basic footy skills, such as kicking and tackling.

Holmes is the first combine graduate to play a regular season AFL game, but he's not the only American excelling in the program. Eric Wallace, Mason Cox, and Alex Aurrichio—all combine standouts—currently play in the Victorian Football League (VFL), an AFL minor league. Wallace and Cox were drafted and signed by AFL clubs. Another American, Matt Korcheck, a former University of Arizona hoopster from the most recent combine, is in contract talks with an AFL team.

As Jason competed in Melbourne, the sun was rising in the Midwest. His father, Kevin, a former basketball player at DePaul University who went on to play pro ball in Europe, Israel and Argentina, was sitting at his office desk in a quiet residence hall at Ohio's Central State University, where he's now an assistant basketball coach. On the phone was his wife, Mary, calling from the dining room table of their Elk Grove Village home. Both were watching the three-hour match being streamed online.

"When I saw Jason rocking back and forth before the ball was bounced, it made me nervous," Mary Holmes said, chuckling. "You know it's an intense moment for him. I was thinking, 'Please let him win this first bounce.'"

As a power forward at Morehead State and Mississippi Valley State, Holmes was expected to win jump balls, rebound, shoot, and block shots. As a ruckman, Holmes's primary job is amassing "hitouts": tapping the umpire's bounced-down balls from the center circle or thrown-in balls from the boundary line, to smaller agile midfielders, who then clear the ball by kicking it toward other teammates in their team's attack zone. The team's aim is to kick six-point goals, through a set of parallel, vertical posts at the end of the field. Skilled ruckmen use their height advantage to "mark" (catch) kicks on the fly, tackle opponents to win ball possession, accurately kick to teammates and when the opportunity presents, kick goals.

"The first nine minutes of the game, I was running around thinking, 'This is gonna be the longest day of my life,'" Holmes said the morning after the game, while having his post-match breakfast—a lemon-lime Gatorade and a bacon and egg sandwich from a bakery he frequents in Mordialloc, an outlying, bayside community. "It took me until about the second half to realize everything that was going on. I was hoping it would pass quick and we'd get the win."

Instead, the Saints and Cats fought to a tense, 97-97 draw, after four, 20-minute quarters, during which there are no timeouts and afterward, no overtime. Holmes ended up with 34 hitouts—two more than Geelong's two opposing ruckmen, combined. He made three tackles, one of them a chase-down that won him possession of the ball. He took one relatively easy mark, but it produced noticeably robust, warm cheers from his new fans.

"His debut was very exciting for our footy club and even more so for the AFL," said Alan Richardson, St Kilda's head coach. "It's not often in footy we have someone who hasn't yet played a game but has already won the respect of his teammates. He's embraced everything we've thrown at him, then the poor bugger's had to deal with all the media attention. He's very well equipped to do the job."

At some point, the afterglow of his debut will fade, but Holmes may have what it takes not only to be a successful ruckman but to be an ambassador for the sport. Besides his athletic prowess, Holmes is handsome, articulate, personable and marketable; already, he can't leave his apartment in suburban Melbourne, Australia without people crowding around him for a chat, a handshake, or a selfie.

Late last week, Kevin and Mary Holmes flew to Melbourne with a handful of other family members to watch Jason play his second game, against the Sydney Swans. With some influence from the Australian Football Association of North America, an American organization dedicated to spreading awareness of the sport, Fox Soccer Plus ditched pre-planned coverage of another AFL match, to air the Saints' one.

"It still hasn't sunk in yet," Holmes said about making history. "I don't reckon it will for a while yet."

_Gil Griffin is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer currently chronicling the AFL journeys of Jason Holmes, Eric Wallace and Mason Cox for his forthcoming book, _Getting A Game: The Pioneering Journey of America's First Australian Rules Footballers, scheduled for a 2016 release.