Australian Rules Football is taking off in Seattle

They say the game was first played in the outback of Aboriginal Australia with a ball made of possum skin, filled with charcoal, and tied together with bits of kangaroo tail.

The players, wiry and naked, ran on unmarked fields about a mile long, their bare feet stained by the red earth, leaping over king brown snakes or spiky echidnas.

The best player was awarded the honor of burying the ball in the ground until the next day's game.

It is a long way from those ancient days of the Aboriginal game to the Australian Rules Football in America and the Seattle Grizzlies.

The Grizzlies began in 1998 when a few Australian expats in Seattle were able to manifest their longing for their homegrown game into a loose affiliation of players. "Basically, it was a few mates getting together and putting a club together from scratch," recalls Matt Muller, one of the Grizzlies' founding members and an organizational linchpin of the club.

They contacted some of the Australian Football League teams back home to see if they would help out a fledgling team on the other side of the globe.

"The only club to return our e-mails was the Geelong Cats," Muller said. "They sent us some old away jerseys from the season before, under the stipulation that we be known as The Geelong Football Club of Seattle.

"The next year we got a cheap deal on some Richmond jerseys, so for a while there we were wearing the colors of the Tigers. But as we got more organized, we felt like we wanted to create a club not reliant on or related to the professional clubs in Australia."

While Seattle's population of Australians, many of whom work at Microsoft or Boeing, would seem to guarantee the future success of such a club, Muller is clear that the club is trying hard to avoid becoming just an expat hangout.

"We're not interested in it being a bunch of Aussies creating their own little outpost," he said. "The aim is to develop the sport in the U.S., and we spend a lot of time and effort encouraging locals to get involved, people who have not necessarily grown up with the game.

"We are at the stage now where we have American players who have been playing for seven or eight years, and the skill levels of these blokes is indistinguishable from that of the Aussies, which is great."

Muller's drive to bring more Americans to the game is matched by that of USFooty, the game's governing body in the States. Teams must field a minimum of 50 percent American players, a figure which is being met and exceeded by all clubs across the country. In some clubs, the figure is as high as 90 percent.

In the national championships held in Louisville last month, Denver and San Diego continued their dominance of the American scene, facing off in the final.

But other areas are catching up. In San Francisco, the local league boasts over 100 players every week. The Seattle Grizzlies had 51 registered players last season, about 30 of whom are American.

The evolution of the Grizzlies is like that of many clubs around the country, says Paul O'Keefe, the founding president of USFooty.

"The majority of the clubs were started by expats just wanting to have a kick," he said from his Milwaukee office. "But a few of the clubs were started by Americans who were exposed to the game through ESPN in the 1980s ... and had the drive to take it out of the lounge room and onto the sports fields."

And it caught on fast. At the first nationals in 1997, there were six teams; nine months later there were 22. While some U.S. clubs are aligned with their AFL namesakes, such as the Milwaukee Bombers (Essendon Bombers), that support is more psychological than financial.

"I think what it mainly does is it gives the players and the league a sense of validation, that we are being recognized by the game's administration, and that we are in some way connected to all the other clubs around the world playing footy."

Although the game has been quickly adopted by American players, the same cannot be said of American business. There are no American corporate sponsors of USFooty. All the businesses that currently help the development of the game in the U.S. are Australian companies, or those patronized by expats. The Kangaroo and Kiwi Pub in Green Lake is the Grizzlies' major sponsor and the hub around which the club's social life revolves.

But the U.S. scene is drawing more attention from Australia and beyond.

Several megastars of the Australian game showed up on the sideline at the U.S. Nationals last month.

That tournament is now recognized by many as the largest amateur football carnival in the world. And the U.S. is starting to dominate the international scene, with about 40 clubs and 2,000 players of the 5,000 worldwide (outside of Australia).

But those at the forefront of the game in America still rely very much on a pioneering spirit and shoestring budgets, and continually face difficulties associated with running a game without the established infrastructure that other sports take for granted.

"Getting somewhere to play is always the biggest difficulty," said the Grizzlies' Jeff Purcell, a member of the U.S. national footy team. "I've played for three clubs in three different cities — Phoenix, Orange County and Seattle — and it has never been easy to find fields big enough for 18-a-side footy."

The standard Aussie Rules game runs for about an hour and a half, over a field about twice the size of a soccer field. The players wear no protective gear and are expected to remain on the field for most of the game.

"All the fields in the U.S. are built for soccer or American football, and nine times out of 10, when you find two soccer fields next to each other, there are trees, light standards or fences in between the two," says Purcell.

To combat this, clubs have developed Metro Footy, an abbreviated nine-a-side game that can be played on a smaller field. Metro Footy also serves as a good introduction to bewildered Americans who want a taste of the game but who may not be able to commit to train and travel to games.

Purcell played a range of sports growing up — soccer, baseball and basketball — but what attracted him to Aussie Rules was the all-around athletic nature of the sport.

"American football has very specialized positions that require specific skills," he said. "But to be a good Aussie Rules player, you have to be able to use your hands and your feet; you must have good stamina but have enough strength to withstand physical punishment.

"You have to be able to jump, catch, kick, jog, sprint, tackle, play offense and defense."

But these days, they don't have to bury a possum-skin ball.