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On a sunny Moscow day 20 years ago, nearly 100 Meadville football players and their coaches posed in Red Square, a sea of red, white and blue team jackets against the towering backdrop of the onion domes atop St. Basil’s Cathedral.
The men and boys were among nearly 200 Meadville residents — “Meadvillagers” as the New York Times called them at the time — who made the 22-hour journey for Friendship Bowl II. The event featured two football games between Meadville youths and their counterparts from northern Moscow, many of whom had made the trip to Meadville the previous Fourth of July for the first Friendship Bowl.
“To leave a town the size of Meadville and go to a major city like Moscow,” recalled Ken O’Keefe recently, “and see some of the things that only five years earlier had been very hard to see because of communism — I think it was a pretty special trip to be able to share with everyone.”
The trek, which came just five years after the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, was the brainchild of O’Keefe, the former Allegheny College head football coach and president of the Friendship Through Football program that organized the trip.
After leading the Gators to a Division III national championship in 1990, O’Keefe took a North Coast Athletic Conference all-star team to Moscow in 1992. His visit led to a relationship with Russian coaches and the formation of the Children’s League of American Football, a program that promoted youth football in Moscow.
O’Keefe conceived of the two trips — Russian youths to Meadville in 1996 and Meadville youths to Moscow in 1997 — more as experiments in cultural exchange and education than as strictly athletic competitions.
“We thought that football could be used as a vehicle between two cities and two countries and really open up the eyes of young people in Meadville to a bigger world out there,” he said from Iowa City, Iowa, where he is now quarterbacks coach for the University of Iowa.
Twenty years later, others who participated in the trip agree that the experience was eye-opening, but they go even further in marveling at what was accomplished, not just by the players and others who took part, but by the people of Meadville who first opened their doors to Russian players in 1996 and then made the Meadville trip to Russia possible in 1997 through their generosity and determination.
“It was such a team effort on the part of this little town,” said Alan Pepicelli, who was president of the Meadville Little Gridders at the time and went on the trip as well with his wife and two sons. “People throughout the community were reaching out to be part of it.”
The outreach included an “Adopt-a-Gridder” program that provided assistance to many players who otherwise might not have been able to participate, Pepicelli said.
All in all, about $200,000 was raised to make the two visits possible, according Bob Power, who served as treasurer for the organizing committee and as one of the coaches for the junior high team.
Months of planning and fundraising resulted in the first football games between American and Russian youth teams. In Meadville, Russian players stayed with the families of American players and others in Meadville. On the visit to Moscow, players from both teams were housed in the dormitories built for the 1980 Olympics, which the United State had boycotted following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
“It was the first time Americans had stayed in the Olympic Village there,” said Power.
Several themes were heard repeatedly as participants in the trip recalled their memories this month.
The Russian people were warm and welcoming, they said, and it was especially compelling to see first-hand the country that had been America’s arch-nemesis until the end of the Cold War just a few years earlier. Both the rich history and the sometimes stark differences in quality of life between the United States and Russia still stand out to many who participated. And 20 years later, while memories have dimmed with regard to some particulars, one thing still stands out: The food was terrible.
“Yeah, the kids weren’t so crazy about the food,” said Bob Heist, the Tribune sports editor at the time who accompanied the teams on the trip.
“It’s a good thing we took over some PB&J,” said Pepicelli, who served on the organizing committee and went on the trip as well.
For Karrail Phillips, a rising sixth-grader and member of the Little Gridders at the time, one dish that appeared on his plate multiple times stood out: pickled mashed potatoes.
“It was horrible,” Phillips said.
Other sources of culture shock included the sight of Russian children as young as 12 drinking vodka and smoking, several people said. They also described the contrast between the impressive beauty of the marble floors and staircases in the Olympic Village and the less impressive rooms off those hallways. The difficulty of getting ice or anything cold to drink stood out.
Phillips noted that popular culture that seemed to be stuck five to 10 years in the past, with Naughty by Nature’s 1991 hit “O.P.P.” blasting from radios. Heist described a kind of cultural disorientation that resulted from seeing TV stations that cycled between reruns of “Walker, Texas Ranger” and government-approved news programs.
While the food might have been horrible and the cultural differences surprising, Phillips and others said that those things were more than made up for by the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the sights of Moscow and get a taste of the history and culture of Russia. Participants cited memories of numerous places, including St. Basil’s in Red Square, villages that seemed like something out of a historical movie and Star City, home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, where Americans and Russians were training for missions to the Mir Space Station.
Rebecca Spadafore had just graduated high school when she took part in the trip as a dancer in the 16-member cultural group that performed American classics along with Russian youths who delivered traditional pieces of their own at Moscow’s Baku Theater.
“It’s such a memory,” she said. “It communicated to all of us that we can study and use our talents to travel all over the world.”
Where Spadafore found inspiration in the experience, others like Pepicelli and fellow organizer Scott Curtis saw their sense of appreciation grow over the eight days of the trip in late June 1997.
When they first arrived at the Olympic Village, Pepicelli said, the rooms struck him as “deplorable.”
“As the week wore on, it became clear they gave us the best of what they had,” he said. “I felt ashamed when I came back.”
The return to Meadville made an impression on Curtis as well. “When you come back to the U.S. after being in Russia,” he said, “you’re going to kiss the ground and hug the trees.”
Friendship Bowl II was the last interaction between Meadville and Moscow on the football field, though other programs continued to promote American football in Russia. O’Keefe, the driving force behind the relationship, left Allegheny for the head coaching job at Fordham University in 1998. Even had he stayed, sustaining the cost of such a program would likely have been impossible.
Today, O’Keefe remembers his involvement with Russian football fondly, particularly the two Friendship Bowls.
“Anytime you can make it so people can know each other from different cultures, it goes a long way toward opening lines of communication,” he said. “It changes lives and the world, even. We could use more of it now.”
A report on the 1996 visit from Russian youth football players to Meadville originally aired on the “Today Show” can be seen on the Meadville Little Gridders website at littlegridders.com/history.
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