The St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Chargers became the first teams to play an NFL game outside of North America on August 16, 1976.

The game was called the Mainichi Star Bowl and was sponsored by the Mainichi Daily News, an English-language newspaper in Tokyo. However, a lettuce farmer from California, Frank Takahashi, was the sole promoter of the game. A self-described “football nut,” Takahashi footed the entire bill for the exhibition contest.

“If we have a sellout, I will break even,” Takahashi told Doug Grow of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a 1976 interview.

Unfortunately, it was not a sellout, and Takahashi reportedly lost tens of thousands of dollars to bring the NFL to Japan.

Regarding the game, Jim Hart’s 60-yard touchdown pass to Ike Harris helped give the Cardinals a 20-10 victory. It was the second victory of the preseason for St. Louis.

The highlight of the trip appeared to be the plane ride from San Francisco to Tokyo. Within a couple of hours, the plane was out of alcohol, and a few of the players had been “over-served.”

“I got a tap on the shoulder from our GM, Joe Sullivan, who asked me if I would go retrieve Tom Banks, our center, was wandering around the airplane upfront,” Big Red tackle Dan Dierdorf told Don Banks in an NFL.com story published in 2016.

“That’s right,” Jackie Smith added. “Banks got into the sake on the way over there, and he got plenty drunk. And then when we got to the hotel, he had a tough time negotiating the process of getting on and off the elevator.”

Tom Banks recalled the early part of the flight to Tokyo in my interview with him in 2019.

“Well, they took us to the airport (in San Francisco) like three or four hours early,” Banks said, “and what are a bunch of guys going to do? We went straight to the bar! So, everybody’s drinking, telling stories, and having a good time. We get on the plane and everything deteriorated pretty quickly. And you know, it wasn’t a charter plane, I think there were some regular passengers on there. We had seats all the way in the back. It was a long trip and I had too much to drink. Had a good time!”

The return flight from Tokyo was much more subdued as players were ready to return home.

“I think everybody felt the standard excitement that comes with going someplace you’ve never been before,” Dan Dierdorf said. “But I suspect if you’d have put that trip to a team vote, I can’t imagine anyone that would have voted to go do that in the middle of training camp. To go all that way to play a preseason football game? So it was more of an obligation than anything else.”

“It was a change in the schedule from regular training camp, so that part of it was kind of a novelty thing,” tight end Jackie Smith said. “Going to a foreign country. I had never been overseas at all. But more than anything, it was kind of a pain in the butt. The plane ride, the whole bit. Coming back, I remember that plane looked like a cargo carrier, we had so damn much stuffed in the back of the thing. It was stacked to the ceiling back there.”

“Yeah, that flight over, it seemed longer than even 13 hours, though, fullback Jim Otis said. “I had my mother and my wife on that trip with me, and we were all seated together. There were some people who really got into the sake pretty good. But I didn’t really have anything to drink, because I knew you could really get into trouble on a flight that long.”

“I think we each paid $1,000 so our wives could come along on that trip, and it turned out to be a great trip, Roger Wehrli said. “That was the other side of the world, about as long a trip as you can take, and I don’t think any of us had been there before. But even on the flight, it was a fun atmosphere with the whole team together, taking up a whole section of the plane. Just to have a stoppage of training camp back then was big. It gave us a break, and was really a fun experience for everybody.”

“It wasn’t a vacation for us, but I enjoyed it. I really did,” Otis said. “I’m glad if we had to travel that far, we at least did something good and won. The football game was really an afterthought, though. I was more excited about being able to go over to Japan. We were guys in our 20s, and it was a big thing for us to get over there. But we didn’t look at it like we were making history.”

“It was just an adventure,” said Smith. “It was nice to say you went over there and played the game and saw that part of the world. But to be honest, the most dramatic part of the thing was the long-ass ride back and forth.”

The Cardinals’ brief adventure to Tokyo may not have carried much historical weight for the players at the time, but it remains a unique chapter in team and league history. What began as a bold gamble by a California lettuce farmer turned into the NFL’s first step beyond North America, decades before international games became part of the league’s identity. For the Big Red, it was a quirky detour in the middle of training camp, capped by a win on the field and memories that have lasted far longer than the game itself.