It’s fair to say that when the Pats play the Seahawks next year in Beijing, there won’t be any Chinese playing on either side. Korea has claimed (finally accepted?) Hines Ward but so far no NFL equivalent of Yao Ming, Sun Jihai, or even a Wang Chien-ming has emerged on the gridiron. But that doesn’t mean China has not made contributions to NFL football. Consider the career of Walter “The Sneeze” Achiu. The first, and so far only, player of Chinese descent to suit up for an NFL regular season game.
I recently did a post on the only major league baseball player to have been born on mainland China, Harry Lees Kingman. There’s far less biographical data on Achiu, but I’ve found a few items of interest.
His full name was Walter Tin Kit Achiu and he was born on the island of Oahu in the town of Waialua. His father was a Chinese immigrant and his mother was Hawaiian and it was in Hawaii that the younger Achiu went to high school and began playing football. Achiu played his college ball at the University of Dayton and then, for two seasons 1927-1928, Walter roamed the field for the