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The National Football League must cringe at the word “diversity”. This politically valuable word is one of the most popular and powerful in modern society, as racial stereotypes slowly bow down to an inclusive attitude towards all races in both the sporting world and society beyond.
A quick glimpse through the working rosters in the United States’ premier national sport will tell you that the sport is hardly teeming with a rich range of ethnicities. But even in a league lacking in so many ethnicities, the absence of men of Indian descent is noticeable.
In a 2011 poll, it was discovered that African-Americans and white Europeans make up over 90 per cent of the NFL’s playing staff. Asians made up less than 5 per cent, and at the time the survey took place there was only a single player of Indian descent in a league of nearly 2,000 players.
That man was Brandon Chillar, a linebacker who made his name with the Green Bay Packers and St Louis Rams. Chillar, whose father Ram Chillar is of East Indian descent, played in the NFL from 2004 to 2011, earning recognition as AJ Hawk’s replacement in the Packers’ defensive co-ordinator Dom Capers’ nickel packages. Chillar made over $14 million during his seven year career.
Through NFL history, which spans back decades to the 1960s, there have only ever been two Indian players in the NFL. Chillar was the most successful and the most recognised, but another player by the name of Sanjay Beach spent four seasons as a wide receiver for the New York Jets, the Green Bay Packers, and the San Francisco 49ers. His only notable accomplishment was that he caught Packers’ star quarterback Brett Favre’s first career completion.
As things stand, there is not a single player of Indian origin in the National Football League, and there hasn’t been since Chillar left the Green Bay Packers in 2011. Even off the playing field, there is only one person on any working NFL staff involved on the playing side; that is Sanjay Lal, a wide receivers coach for the New York Jets.
Lal began his NFL career as the wide receivers coach for the Oakland Raiders from 2009-2011, during which time he coached and developed a number of young receivers. Some, such as Darrius Heyward-Bay and Louis Murphy, proved to be unsuccessful. However, he is credited with extracting the potential in a number of other players, namely Jacoby Ford and Denarius Moore. Lal was hired as the New York Jets” wide receivers coach on January 13th 2012, and still holds that position today.
While all three give some hope to Indians hoping to develop elite skills in American football, the most important of the three in the development of American Football back in India is Chillar.
Chillar’s influence stands to prove what men of Indian descent can accomplish in the NFL if they want to, but even more important than that has been his support for India’s own American football league, the Elite Football League of India or EFLI.
EFLI line up during a pre-season scrimmage earlier this year
The EFLI is India’s own professional American football league. Set up in 2011, the league was backed by a number of prominent figures associated with the NFL, including former Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka, former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski, and former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin.
In August 2011, officials from the Elite Football League of India announced that Chillar would be among those primary investors and advisers for the league, and stood alone as the only man of Indian descent in the group. It is his association with this project, and not his playing career in the NFL, which stands as the great part of his sporting legacy.
In an interview conducted last November with another prominent investor, Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner, I asked the quarterback whether he thought the EFLI could eventually rise to such a standard of play that players can make the transition to the NFL. Warner, however, was very deliberate in declaring that that was not the goal. He said:
“Maybe [players moving to the NFL will] happen in the future, but that isn’t really what we’re looking to do here at all. The intention and the design of this league is that this becomes its own league; not something that readies people to leave for the NFL, but something that India itself can be proud of. The EFLI will hopefully be similar to the National Football League in its structure, but it is a different and unique league. The EFLI should have its own aspirations, to become something like the NFL, but the Indian version of it. We are trying to create something here that is unique to India. That’s where we’re hoping to take this league.”
This, in turn, is Brandon Chillar’s legacy also. He does not stand, as I believed a few months ago, as a figure of aspiration for exceptional Indian athletes to make it in the United States. Instead he stands for something much more patriotic and economical for India; the development of the great sport in his nation of origin, to create a brand not to be exported back to the United States but to be enjoyed by Indian people on their home soil.
There may be a serious lack of Indian American football players in the United States. That doesn’t matter. Through the efforts of men like Chillar and Warner, there may never need to be Indians in the NFL. Instead, there will be an exceptional league full to the brim of Indian, Pakistani and other Asian men right on their own doorstep, bringing the sport to their own people and for their own people.
American football may soon need a new name, because it is no longer simply an American pastime.
