It’s safe to say that Bart Houston had thrown a myriad of touchdown passes before Saturday’s 24-13 win against the Illinois Fighting Illini. Yet it’s not hyperbolic to say that Houston’s two touchdown passes on Saturday were unlike any he’s ever thrown prior to this weekend.
That’s because, unlike at Wisconsin, sitting up in the sterile booth hanging high above Memorial Stadium are David He and Bruce Lu.
He and Lu aren’t American and didn’t grow up enamored with football. Instead both He and Lu grew up in China, thousands of miles away from the likes of Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman.
Yet like Michaels and Collinsworth or Buck and Aikman, He and Lu make up a football broadcast duo. However, there is one major difference: He and Lu broadcast their games in Mandarin and their broadcasts are the first college football broadcasts ever in a second language.
They are the Marco Polo of Chinese broadcasts, except instead of exposing Europe to textiles, bronze and ceramics made on the Silk Road, they are tasked with venturing to the red zone, exposing China to college football, a far less glamorous but substantially more profitable product.
He’s first time setting foot on American soil was not until he began school at the University of Illinois. He had never seen a football game before; he didn’t know the difference between pass interference and offsides. And he had never even thought about broadcasting.
“I had never done it before,” he said. Later adding, “I never thought I’d do something in broadcast.”
But since nearly 12 percent of the University of Illinois’ student population consists of Chinese students, the university realized they had an obligation to engage a large portion of their student population that differed from the rest.
Karl Feak, the assistant director of Fan Development and Marketing at the University of Illinois, remembered Senior Associate Athletic Director for External Relations Mike Waddell pitching the idea to him a few years ago.
“A lot of our Chinese students are interested in football, but didn’t really know much about the game,” Feak recalls Waddell telling him.
Shortly after that conversation, the tandem, as well as other members of the athletic department, began hosting a “Football 101” seminar, which was less like a discussion seminar and more like a mini-NFL combine designed for students who couldn’t differentiate an end zone from a time zone.
But to Feak and his associates, “Football 101” was really just the beginning.
“We wanted to build off that program and start offering more programming directed toward helping our Chinese students learn more about football and also become fans of our team,” Feak said.
Feak pointed out that prior to the Mandarin broadcasts, “Chinese students and international students were not coming to games.” Yet since the broadcasts began, Waddell and Feak have seen an increased number of Chinese students watching Illini football in the stands.
On multiple occasions, Waddell has been seen walking around the student section, observing the masses of Chinese students using earbuds listening to He and Lu’s broadcast. Such an exercise serves as a barometer for Waddell and his associates to track the popularity of their experiment.
And for He and Lu it was also truly just an experiment.
He said that his lack of experience was “really a challenge,” adding that the two of them “just pretend that people listening are blindfolded.”
Both He and Lu disclosed that many listeners watch the games on the Big Ten Network without sound and simultaneously listen to their broadcast instead.
But unlike He, Lu, the play-by-play man of the duo, was more acquainted with football before arriving in Champaign. He first came to the states during his junior year of high school as part of an exchange program.
He lived in Kansas City, and it was there that he fell in love with both high school and pro football.
“I felt like I instantly fell in love with the sport,” Lu said.
Lu said that watching the Kansas City Chiefs for an entire season further enhanced his passion for the sport and admitted that broadcasting games was “somewhat a dream job for me growing up.”
Even with a budding passion for football, Lu began this fall as the broadcaster’s equivalent of a rookie.
“I’m still trying to pick up the flag calls, penalty rules,” he said. “Illegal formation, that’s the penalty I’ve never understood.”
Meanwhile, He needed to watch “one game a day” over the summer and even talked with an announcer at NFL China, the network entrusted with broadcasting football games such as the Super Bowl to the Chinese populace, to prepare for games.
Yet even with their inexperience pertaining to the nuances of football, both He and Lu agree that the hardest part of the broadcast occurs not on the field, but in the booth.
“Trying to keep the energy up. That’s the biggest challenge,” Lu said.
Reid Magnum, the sports director of WSUM here in Madison, echoed Lu’s sentiments and admitted that the energy, as well rhythm, of calling a game can be especially difficult for most tandems.
“The best ones know when the other person is gonna stop talking and when the other person is gonna start talking. And they kind of set them up and know where they are going,” Magnum said.
Even in another language He and Lu have formed the chemistry Magnum referred to. It shows as the duo is beginning to understand their roles more and more as the season progresses. And as the color commentator, He tries to keep it simple when calling games.
“Time, score, situation. Time, score, situation,” He said. “You need to talk about those three things over and over again.”
Magnum again echoed He’s sentiment and recognized that even in a different language, “painting a picture” using the time, score and situation is the most important job of a radio broadcaster.
Not surprisingly, according to He, Lu and Feak, the response to their games has been nothing but positive.
“The students on campus think it’s pretty cool. They are interested and have tuned in,” Feak said. “In general I’m not sure it could have been a much better response.”
The duo receives a ton of positive feedback via WeChat, a “Chinese WhatsApp” as they described it, and interacts with their users, explaining aspects of the game they might not have been able to eloquently describe in the moment in more depth.
The duo has done so well, so quickly, the school is thinking of expanding into more sports this coming winter.
“The goal is to expand the program into more sports,” Feak said. “It is unique and a growing trend. Some schools haven’t seen a need to go into that space yet. But I would hope these kinds of steps would make international or Chinese students feel more welcomed.”
With more than 5,000 Chinese students on campus, the University of Illinois has the largest Chinese student population in the country. They have seen a growth of more than 4,000 percent since the year 2000. And such efforts not only help integrate the international students currently on campus, but also increase in the international popularity of the school.
The University of Wisconsin, much like the University of Illinois, is currently admitting more international students per year than ever before. For example, UW-Madison has seen a growth in international students of more than 300 percent since 2003.
As a result of the influx of international students, the question of integrating Chinese and international students into the community has become a major question for administrators. For many, one answer is obvious: sports.
“Some students might attend just one game at Camp Randall for the sheer spectacle of a Big Ten football game. Other international students are fans who buy seasons for their preferred sport,” Jason Jonely, the associate director of the International Student Services office at UW-Madison, said via email.
But for many international students, football is not their preferred sport for many of the reasons Lu and He posited.
Instead, the university has turned to soccer as a means to draw international students to sporting events.
“International Night with Badgers men’s soccer is an excellent way to increase attendance,” Jonely wrote. “We also have a number of international students who are athletes; highlighting these students might be a way to further engage international students.”
Among those international students is freshman Sam Brotherton. Brotherton is from Auckland, New Zealand, and played on New Zealand’s under-20 national team before arriving on campus. His presence will not only make the Badgers a better soccer team, but will also likely increase the popularity of the university in New Zealand, something that Feak said was a mission of Illinois’ Mandarin broadcasts.
Magnum, one of the voices of Wisconsin’s campus, harked on the importance that sports have on forming a stronger and more widespread community.
“Any way you can get people to understand the sport and feel like it’s closer to them is for the better,” Magnum said. “As soon as you get that relations factor, it will make people feel like it’s something they can enjoy.”
And yet even with the rising international population on campus and countless benefits to the second-language broadcast, Wisconsin is yet to join the Fighting Illini in the second-language space.
One issue, according to Magnum, is that, “there is only so much [physical] space for broadcast.”
Yet an even more likely reason for why Wisconsin is yet to experiment with such an idea goes back to simple statistics.
Even with Wisconsin’s rising international population, it is still a fraction of the Chinese population attending Illinois. Couple that with the fact that no one international demographic occupies a large chunk of the student population like how Illinois’ Chinese population makes up almost 12 percent of their student population, and it seems reasonable that Badger broadcasts are still only in English.
“I’m sure some people are seeing how this goes. And then based on the success that they have would think about these other things,” Magnum said.
Magnum’s likely right in his sentiments. Because the Mandarin broadcasts are an overwhelming success on campus and international students populations are rising yearly, it is more than likely that in the near future, people all around the world will be able to listen to Badger games in their native language. And when parents of Badger students are listening to Badger football on the radio in Mandarin, they’ll have He and Lu to thank for blazing the second-language trail.
