Taking his game Euro

Published 12:01 am Tuesday, February 8, 2011

EDMONDS — The nervous excitement in the locker room while pulling on pads and a uniform. The cheers from the crowd in the moments before kickoff. The delicious feel of the football against your fingertips, and the thrill of seeing it spiral downfield to a streaking receiver, followed by the re

feree’s upraised arms for a touchdown.

For Eric Marty of Edmonds, some things about football were just too good to give up.

Even after four years of playing in high school and another five years in college, Marty was too hooked on the game to walk away. He still had goals to achieve and dreams to realize, and a love for football still to be satisfied.

And since the NFL never came calling, Marty took his quest to Europe.

In 2009, Marty was the starting quarterback for the Bolzano Giants of the Italian Football League, helping them win the Italian Super Bowl. Last year he quarterbacked the Danube Dragons of the Austrian Football League to another title, this time in the Austrian Bowl, where he was named the MVP.

Earlier this month the 25-year-old Marty returned to Europe for his third pro season. In a spring league that begins in March and continues to June, he is once again in Italy as the quarterback and offensive coordinator for the Bologna Warriors.

“It’s a great thing to have an athletic purpose in your life,” said Marty, a 2004 graduate of Meadowdale High School. “(Going to Europe) gave me the chance to keep competing.

“The biggest motivation for me was that my college career wasn’t as good as it could’ve been or maybe should’ve been. I came out of college feeling like I was a better player than I’d shown, and the bottom line was that I wanted to continue to prove myself as a quarterback. That’s the reason I’m over there.”

Marty played at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., but got no nibbles from NFL teams after his senior season. So he began contacting clubs in Italy, France, Austria and Germany, requesting the chance to try out.

As it happened, one of his coaches at Chapman had once coached in Bolzano and the team was looking for players. Marty got a call and was soon on his way to Italy.

About 15 European countries have football leagues, Marty said, including eastern European countries like Turkey and Serbia Montenegro. Most players are locals, but teams can also bring in from three to six “import” players, which are usually Americans.

The level of competition in the top leagues is probably comparable to NCAA Division III, he said. The players are essentially semi-pros — that is, most have jobs outside of football — but the teams have strong organizations and receive considerable media exposure, and crowds numbering from several hundred to several thousand show up for most games.

In Europe, Marty said, football “is never going to compare to soccer, or even to basketball or cycling or some of those other very (popular) European sports. But it’s got a pretty solid niche following. A big football game will turn out 5,000 or 6,000 people. And when Austria played Germany (at a recent international tournament), there were probably 18,000 to 20,000 people there.”

The standard first-year contract is about $1,000 Euros, or about $1,300-$1,400 American dollars, though Marty also has his living expenses paid for along with plane tickets to and from the U.S., insurance, a cell phone and other perks.

“You make enough that you’re living comfortably,” he said. “And if you want to save some money and send it back home, you can.”

And for the coming season, he added proudly, he negotiated a scooter into his contract. In many European cities scooters are useful for getting around on crowded, narrow streets, and for finding parking places downtown.

“Part of the experience, no question, is having the chance to try a different place, a different culture,” Marty said.

There are, of course, certain adjustments to living in a new land, and probably the biggest is language. His first year in Italy he had to scramble to learn “a very broken Italian infused with English,” and still he stumbled at times. He spent the first few months washing his clothes in fabric softener until the wife of a teammate taught him the Italian word for detergent.

Still, football is football, and Marty has savored the chance to further his career. Leading his team to the 2009 Italian Super Bowl title was a terrific accomplishment, and he duplicated that feat — and was the MVP — at last year’s Austrian Bowl.

“You have these moments and they’re almost surreal,” he said. “You’re playing football and you just won the Italian Super Bowl and your parents are sitting in the stands, and you don’t want to imagine that it’s fleeting or that it’s almost too good to be true. … It’s been an extremely gratifying experience.”

Marty expects to make a career in football, and his eventual goal is to transition to coaching. He returned to Meadowdale as an assistant coach a few seasons ago and is now the team’s offensive coordinator. At some point in the next few years he would like to get started in college coaching.

This might be his last season in Europe, he said, though he is willing to continue playing in the right situation, either in Europe or back in the U.S. But regardless of where he ends up, he feels lucky with all his overseas experiences and memories to date.

“How many people get the opportunity to go live in Europe and get to be accommodated for it, and then on top of that get to play the sport they love?” he asked. “Because if you’d told me coming out of college that all this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed it.”