Former college basketballer Jason Holmes will become the first born-and-bred American to play top-flight Australian Rules football when he takes the field for Melbourne team St Kilda Saints on Saturday.
The 6ft 8in (2.03m) Chicago native and brother of Andre Holmes, a wide receiver for NFL team Oakland Raiders, will make his Australian Football League (AFL) debut against Geelong Cats two years after being signed as an international rookie by the Saints.
Holmes, 25, played college basketball for Mississippi State before heading down under where he has reinvented himself as a ruckman in Australia’s high-contact indigenous sport.
Like centres taking jump balls in basketball, ruckmen are also key position players in Australian Rules who battle to tap the ball down to their midfield teammates.
Foreign-born players are relatively scarce in Australia’s richest and most highly-attended sporting competition, though a number have forged successful careers, including Canadian rugby international Mike Pyke, who is a ruckman for the Sydney Swans.
US-born Sanford Wheeler also played for Sydney in the early 1990s but moved to Australia when he was five.
Holmes has had to learn the game from scratch and his ability to adapt to the fast-paced game played on cricket grounds and other sprawling pitches has won admiration in the AFL community.
“It’s one of the dreams they sell us when they try to get Americans over here,” Holmes told local reporters of his trailblazing.
“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet and I understand it’s a really big thing. But I’m just proud to be a cog in the machine that’s going to help this sport grow internationally.”
Apart from an annual championship game in neighbouring New Zealand, AFL is confined to Australian shores and for most international sports fans remains a curiosity on cable TV channels.
Holmes’s relatives also find the sport, a cross between rugby, basketball and Ireland’s Gaelic football code, mystifying.
“I’ve almost started giving up on friends and family back home – ‘yeah, the rugby’s going well’,” he said.
The game’s local governing body will be keen for Holmes to make his mark in Australia, however, to raise interest from the world’s biggest sports market.
Holmes's ascesion to the AFL comes at the same time Australian rugby league star Jarryd Hayne pursues a career in the NFL with the San Francisco 49ers. Hayne, a standout in the NRL with Parramatta Eels from 2006-14, is in American football training camp and appears likely to land one of the coveted 53 roster spots afforded NFL clubs.
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