The NFL’s first game outside North America came with a long list of oddities before the St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Chargers ever took the field in Tokyo on August 16, 1976.
That preseason trip - later known as the “Mainichi Star Bowl” - was supposed to be a football showcase, but it turned into a strange little chapter in league history. The Cardinals and Chargers were the league’s first international exhibition, and both clubs have since left the cities they represented that day.
St. Louis became Phoenix in 1988, while San Diego returned to Los Angeles in 2017.
The logistics alone made the whole thing feel surreal. The Cardinals’ journey started with a four-hour flight from St.
Louis to San Francisco, then a trip out to Alaska to refuel. Their final leg to Japan came on a commercial Japan Airlines 747, not a charter, with players riding in the back alongside other passengers bound for Tokyo.
The Chargers, at least, flew out of San Diego directly.
Travel by itself was only part of the circus. The game was staged in the middle of training camp, cutting into both teams’ work. Players could bring their wives along for a flat $1,000, and the seating on the plane was three across in coach - manageable for some, miserable for the linemen on a 13-hour flight.
The trip got even stranger once the plane hit turbulence. Running back Jim Otis had to use the restroom, only to find the door popping open again and again as the aircraft bounced around.
By the time the Cardinals reached Tokyo, the only alcohol left on the plane was sake. Center Tom Banks found it, got pretty drunk, and had trouble being helped off the plane and onto the hotel elevator.
There were plenty of culture shocks after landing. During customs, Cardinals DT “Big Louie” Kelcher said, “Man, there sure are a lot of Japanese people here.”
Later, players who visited Tokyo bars - or “Izakaya,” meaning “stay-drink-place” - learned they had to buy an entire bottle and drink from it over time. When they left, their names were written on the bottle so they could return later.
Some players believed their bottles are still sitting on shelves in Japan.
Getting around the city caused its own headaches. Players who went sightseeing after practice often told taxi drivers the hotel name on the way back and somehow ended up at the Imperial Palace instead.
After that, they started carrying hotel matchbooks to show the driver. For anyone who didn’t like Japanese food or couldn’t get enough to eat from the smaller portions, a local McDonald’s was down the street.
The surroundings were just as unusual. The Japanese thought the Cardinals’ bird logo was a woodpecker.
The game was played in a pro baseball stadium that smelled like fish when the Cardinals practiced there, with baby sardines and other fishy trash part of the backdrop. The field lines for football were temporary, painted with white flour - the self-rising kind - over Astro-Turf.
A light mist during the game caused some of those lines to fade, disappear after tackles, or even begin to rise.
Even the stadium staff got tripped up. Cardinals personnel told them to put the football coaches in the press boxes above the fans, but the word “coach” translated to “bus,” so the crew couldn’t figure out why the Americans wanted buses installed so high up.
The locker rooms were cramped under the stands, with slanted ceilings. The Cardinals gave the bigger players the front lockers and tucked the smaller ones toward the back, where the ceiling dropped lower. The urinal was a concrete trough in the middle of the room.
And through all of it, the Japanese crowd had its own clear preference. The loudest reaction didn’t come for diving catches or bruising runs.
It came on high balls - long passes, field goals, kickoffs and punts. The fans might not have known exactly what was happening, but they liked the high balls.
Today, both teams still say they belong in the “Japanese Football Hall of Fame.” That Hall of Fame, as it turns out, is based on soccer.
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