Tongue tied.

• Author: McMillan, Alex Frew
• Position: British American Business Council of the Carolinas Pres. Michael Teden

A common language - sort of - is just one of the things Michael Teden thinks make Tar Heels and Brits a good fit.

People usually have two questions when they hear that Tim Rice came to Charlotte five falls in a row to play cricket in the back yard of the Olde Providence Racquet Club. Who's Tim Rice? And what's cricket?

The first answer is simple enough. Tim Rice is Andrew Lloyd Webber's old buddy, the Brit who wrote the lyrics for Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar and won Oscars for The Lion King and Aladdin soundtracks. As for cricket, it would be quicker and probably more interesting to explain the finer points of quantum physics than the ins and outs of Britain's national pastime.

It's much simpler to explain why the guy who wrote Don't Cry for Me, Argentina would be standing in the midday sun of late September, dressed in white pants and hitting a red leather ball around a grass parking lot. That can be summed up in two words - Michael Teden.

Teden is president of the Charlotte-based British American Business Council of the Carolinas. As an expatriate, he's leading the charge toward bilateral trade and investment. Behind him is a network of 10,000 members and 25 BABC branches. From its start in 1992, the Carolinas unit has grown to 200 members, many of them top-ranked executives such as McDevitt Street Bovis Inc. CEO Luther Cochrane and Rexham Inc. President Eric Priestley.

America and Teden's homeland share more than a mother tongue. The British-American Chamber of Commerce reports that the United States is the largest investor in the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom, the second-largest investor in the United States. It's an exchange worth $95 billion in each direction and 1.75 million jobs total. North Carolina alone exported more than $700 million in goods to the United Kingdom in 1994, up 30% from the year before.

But Britain, like an old argyle sweater, is out of style. Emerging markets such as China are in vogue. Tar Heel exports to Europe have grown 16% in 1994, but those to Asia were up 27% and to Central America, 28%. The state's fastest-growing major export partners are all emerging nations, topped by El Salvador at 67% average annual growth, then Cyprus, Honduras, Costa Rica and Mexico. It's going to take all of Teden's charm and Old World savoir-faire to beat back Britain's foes. And he better. A good bit of his livelihood depends on it.

You could say Michael Teden ended up in America after a blind date that went really well. He was 25 and working for Lloyd's of London in London in the mid-'70s when he got to know an American colleague. Expats are expats, and like Fitzgerald's circle in Paris, everybody knew everybody else. At UT in Austin, Teden's friend had roomed with somebody who knew Anne Armstrong, then U.S. ambassador to Britain. Teden was young, employed and eligible. And he fit in well. "I was invited up there a lot to attend cocktail parties where they had the Russian ambassador or some such," he recalls.

His trips to the U.S. residence became frequent. He was there nearly every week, meeting Americans and finding to his surprise that he got along with them. The feeling must have been mutual, because Armstrong called on him for a dinner she had planned for Prime Minister Ted Heath and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller's daughter Mary needed an escort. So Teden ended up accompanying the daughter of one of the richest men in the world to a high-level diplomatic event.

"It was an interesting feeling," he says. "It was a real privilege to be asked to do it, and a little bit worrying, really. You're got up in black tie, and there's this very important person. And then afterwards, he said, 'Will you go and take my daughter down to Annabelle's and entertain her down there?' So we went down to Annabelle's, this discotheque on...