Jottings from the Granite Studio

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 Dayton Triangles of the NFL as a halfback and defensive back. (Back then, players played both sides of the ball. None of this sit out half the game and let the specialists do the work crap…but here I’m letting my rugby prejudices get the better of me.) Statistically, well…let’s just say the boys in Chicago probably weren’t drafting “The Sneeze” early in their Prohibition Era Fantasy League. In two years, Achiu played in 11 games. He had 27 rushes for 27 yards and 2 catches for 17 yards. He also missed a field goal and had an incomplete pass. Walter tried it all and wasn’t really successful at any of it.

After his brief football career, Achiu became a professional wrestler. His wrestling career was longer if no less undistinguished. There’s a record of Achiu losing to Young Joe Montana (not THAT one, but a weird coincidence nevertheless) in Columbus in 1931. And in 1936, he was ranked by Ring Magazine as being in the 3rd tier (out of 5) of welter weight wrestlers from Ohio. There are newspaper clippings showing that he was wrestling as late as 1949, still in the Ohio circuit.

Walter Achiu died in 1989 in Eugene, Oregon.

Where did the nickname come from? That was Walter’s own doing, an invention for telling teammates how to pronounce his name. “Sneeze it and you’ll say it.”

Will Walter remain alone on the gridiron? Well, Timmy Chang had a successful career at the University of Hawaii but has bounced around the NFL looking for work. Norm Chow is the offensive coordinator with the Tennessee Titans and might be in line for a future head coaching position either in the NFL or, more likely, in the college ranks. And who knows? Maybe somewhere up there in Dongbei, there’s a 350 pound farmboy with hands of velvet, a killer’s heart, and Bob Kraft’s number on speed dial. You never know.
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Sources:
Asian-Athlete.com
NFL.com, “Pearls of Wisdom: 50 Years of Pro Bowl History.”
Football at JT-SW.com