Jon Wyse: A Touchdown in Five Decades - The Enduring Legacy of a British American Football Icon

Photo: Images supplied by Jon Wyse

When the Staffordshire Surge’s season finally got underway this month it meant Jon Wyse could continue a remarkable run of playing across all five decades of Britball. 

A 10-yard sprint for the last touchdown in the Surge’s 27-23 away victory at the Sandwell Steelers also continued a run of having scored in each of those decades. His senior career started in 1989 but a waterlogged pitch in week one forced the 53-year-old to wait, until the first Sunday in May, to run out for game 311 in adult contact football. 

Wyse, however, hasn’t been keeping count of his personal points tally over 35 years, including an MVP performance in a Britbowl championship and a European final, with nine clubs as “touchdowns are a team effort”.  

A Great Britain and GB students international,  Wyse said: “It’s never really been a big deal but what I’m most proud of in terms of touchdowns is two things; scoring in almost every way possible such as a fumble return, an interception, kick and punt returns, catch, run and throw, and I completed that a long time ago – I think with the Colchester Gladiators in 2005 – and the other is that I’ve scored in adult football in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, the 2010s and 2020s, so that’s touchdowns in five different decades.” 

The Covid cancelled 2020 season put that in doubt and Wyse sat out 2021’s non-competitive fixtures but returned to the Surge team, where he’d been head coach from 2018 to 19, as a player in 2022 when a simple short yardage catch was his first touchdown of his fifth decade. 

Wyse will turn 54 before the Surge play what should be the final two games of the BAFA Division Two North West regular season but the club – and quite likely Britball’s – longest-serving player has no intention of calling it a day. 

Photo: WAP Photography

Though named as a starting running back by the Surge, Wyse simply describes himself as a “footballer” and the trained teacher and lecturer, who works as an elite sport manager at Loughborough College, advises students to shun rigged positions. 

Wyse oversees the Diploma in Sporting Excellence (DiSE) programme, an A-level equivalent for elite performers, with various sports including golf and snow sports as well as flag football and was also involved in the process of the NFL Academy selecting the college as its base. 

Previously Wyse worked in Bristol where he was involved in 2008 in setting up the SGS Pride academy – though stresses all credit for its success is due to head coach Benjamin Herrod – before he was pulled aside to work on its partnership with Basketball England, which meant he would “rub shoulders” with Tosan Evbuomwan, from Newcastle, who is contracted to the NBA’s Detroit Pistons. 

Though there was the chance to manage the Pride, effectively working full time in football, Wyse, who now lives in Stoke-on-Trent, said he’d have followed the career he’s had “every single time”. 

Images: Supplied by Jon Wyse; Sophie Robinson

The married father-of-two has combined his professional career and family commitments and taken just four seasons out since his first senior campaign with the original Bournemouth Bobcats in 1989. 

A standout for the Bobcats Juniors at two-touch, the “full contact everywhere apart from on the ball carrier” form of the game favoured by youth teams without equipment, Wyse had started with flag and touch youth teams in and around his hometown Southampton. 

Wyse said a broken collar bone from two-touch is “probably my worst football injury” and he also learnt the pain of defeat, dropping a game-winning catch in a national semi-final for the Bobcats juniors against the Acorn Lazers. 

“The ball went through a forest of arms, bounced off me, and I didn’t make that catch,” said Wyse who “occasionally” reminds himself of the defining sporting moment – “the fish that got away” – courtesy of a DVD copy. 

“I feel okay with it because of what’s happened since but I still kind of go, ‘I still have something to prove’, and there’s some other deeper stuff down to my dad, I guess I carry this as a personality characteristic of wanting to prove that I still can. 

“I’m still playing at 53, almost 54, because I want to prove that I can still do it and at the point where I feel I can’t do it that’s when I’ll stop playing but until that point, I’ll keep doing it.” 

Dad, Roland, passed away 18 months ago, and was, Wyse said, “my first sporting role model” as well as the manager of his “soccer football” team – which led to Wyse stepping away from the association code to the one dominated by the Chicago Bears that teenagers in the mid-1980s had become hooked on. 

“Not to be biased, my dad would always make sure the other boys on the team got a fair crack at playing, which meant I would get taken off even though I was the best player. I kind of realised in soccer football I’m only going to be able to succeed or fail if I don’t play for his team, but that wasn’t going to happen. 

“American Football allowed me to succeed or fail based on me." 

Senior football meant the Budweiser League and the golden age of Britball when 3,000 fans would regularly pack the stands to cheer on the Bobcats. 

“We played the London Ravens. Victor (‘X’ Ebubedike), Joe St Louis, Mark Wynnick were in the backfield, Ron Roberts was the QB. These were people I’d seen playing as when I was a 15, 16, 17, 18-year-old. You’d see a few highlights on TV, not many, but read about them in First Down every week or the Gridiron monthly magazine. 

“Any time I got a mention in those, or there was a photo of me in the backfield with Laurence Dinham from the Bobcats, it was like ‘wow, these are guys, I’ve been reading about and now I’ve graduated to be an adult player’.” 

Wyse wasn’t overawed and was eventually rewarded with something craved since that dropped ball in 1988 – a Britbowl national championship with the Farnham PA Knights in 2004. 

An impromptu fake punt helped seal a 28-14 victory over the then seven-time defending champion London Olympians. Wyse outfoxed one of the greatest British players, the now Seattle Seahawks defensive coordinator Aden Durde. 

“They’d overloaded one side, we did a protection, and as punter, I noticed Aden, who was just like the best player on the field at that time, was on the other side being set up for a block, as he’s just going to out skill our blocker. I took the snap, put the ball kind of down, Aiden flashed across, I tucked it ran outside and got the first down.” 

However, it was earlier in the same season, in front of 4,700 fans in Innsbruck, in the European Federation of American Football (EFAF) Cup Final – despite being on the wrong end of a 45-0 defeat to the Tyrolean Raiders – that Wyse considers probably his greatest memory or experience in football. 

Reaching the Britbowl fulfilled a dream of being on the country’s biggest stage in front of so many friends and acquaintances, but Austria seemed beyond what Britain could offer. 

“That was at a point when I was playing at a really high level consistently. Because of the import rules we were playing under, I ended up converting from receiver to playing defence as well, as we’d fire-stacked the Americans on offence. I played the whole of the first half, I didn’t come off the field as I was the kicker and punter. I had an awesome game I just felt like that’s the kind of thing I’d love to do in a British environment.” 

While Britball may not offer the grand stages, or professional environments in Europe, Wyse, who is vice president of the British American Football Coaches Association (BAFCA) and has also served on the national governing body, BAFA’s board, isn’t ready to give it up yet. 

“I could be a coach or an official but it’s not the same as playing and I got up on Monday, and wasn’t aching too much, and wasn’t aching at all on Tuesday, so I’ll carry on, or at least until I can’t or I feel like I’m rubbish and not able to contribute.”

You can find Jon's latest game highlights from the Gameday Highlights Staffordshire Surge posted last week