The morning workout is already under way. I finish up at the restaurant, then walk over to the sports club. I take a seat on a grassy hill and watch the team progress through the usual warm-up drills. Soccer volleyball is played without hands and with a net only waist-high. In passing triangles, three players keep the ball away from an unlucky fourth player trapped in the middle. I watch a circle of forwards juggle the ball in yet another drill. They are loose, laughing, trying on purpose to keep the ball afloat with minimal physical effort. No one lunges for the ball until the very last second. No one exerts more than a quick foot flick or head snap or shoulder twitch. It’s amazing how skilled these guys are. Here at practice, away from the harsh grades of competition, their athletic gifts are obvious—and dazzling. Even old man Coco looks graceful. They all keep the ball in the air for a very long while.
The drills continue for more than an hour before Pepe Treviño blows a whistle. The head coach divides the players into two teams of roughly equal talent. Gabino, the traveling secretary who used to play professionally for the Juárez Cobras, launches into laps around the field, his usual endurance workout. I’m so seduced by the setting that I decide to run, too. I opt to hit the country roads around the resort complex. I jog about five miles up and down rolling hills, cutting through farmers’ fields and passing vacation homes both modest and opulent, many of them for sale; the global economic recession has hit Guadalajara, too. By the time I make it back to the resort, the whole team is swimming in the Olympic pool. All the players who lost the scrimmage have been ordered to jump off the high dive. It towers ten meters above the water—three stories, way up there. I’ve never been on a high dive before, so I take off my shirt and running shoes and climb to the top just to check out the view. My knees start shaking when I walk to the edge. High diving looks fairly easy on television. Actually standing on the top platform is something else. Mistime my entry and I could rupture a spleen. My health insurance plan isn’t exactly comprehensive, if it even covers me in Mexico. I turn to walk back down.
“Salto! Salto!” Jump, gringo! An entire professional soccer team razzes me. My manhood is questioned. I realize I’m trapped. I walk back to the edge of the platform. I gaze down at the water. My knees again buckle, and I must grab a railing to stay upright.
“Salto!” Jump! I retreat once more. I can’t help it. I can’t possibly drop from this height. A young midfielder from a line of Indios backing up on the platform loses his patience. He runs forward, leaping off like an Acapulco cliff diver, somersaulting a full revolution before untucking into the water with barely a splash. Yet another reminder that these guys, for all their struggles on the field, really are fantastic athletes. I have no choice. I’ve got to jump, too. I plug my nose with one hand, not even aware that I’m doing it—“That jump was feo, gringo. Ugly!”—and step off with a prayer for simple survival. I survive. Nothing breaks. Better still, I emerge from the water fully accepted by the team.
“You’re our hero, man,” an assistant coach tells me at lunch. Not one of the coaches had jumped off even the lowest platform. After lunch everyone will hang out by the hotel pool, watch television in their rooms, or maybe surf the Web on the Wi-Fi floating over the grounds. Tomorrow the team will put in a light workout, then we’ll drive down to Guadalajara proper. It’s all great fun, even lunch. We share fajitas and pasta Alfredo and salad and fruit and, for dessert, flan or Jell-O if we want it. Pitchers full of fruit juice rotate around the tables. Who looked better yesterday in Champions League action: AC Milan or Real Madrid? Alain N’Kong cracks jokes, funnier because Spanish is the least his three languages. Pepe Treviño jokes along with him, pulling out his wallet at one point to bet pesos that, contrary to King Kong’s claims, there’s no eighteen-year-old fashion model wife waiting for the striker back in Cameroon. We’re all kids at summer camp. Marco hanging with his best friend Maleno Frías. Everyone playing the sport they love, and for money. Juárez feels very far away.
“This is our life,” the assistant coach says as we linger at the table for another hour. I understand more than ever why they don’t want it to end.
The next afternoon, we take the bus down to the city. A WELCOME INDIOS banner hangs in the lobby of our hotel. We’re still in the big leagues, a team worth celebrating. Three clubs in the Primera are based in Guadalajara, and this hotel is where the Indios bunk down every visit. The restaurant staff, which knows the Indios’ schedule by now, has a meal waiting. After dinner, everyone marches up to their rooms to watch movies and catch some sleep. We’re all exhausted. I’m tired, too, which is surprising. I went for another run this morning, but aside from that I haven’t really done anything. I never realized the physical toll road trips take on professional athletes. It seems like no big deal—flight, bus ride, rest—but traveling as a team can be a grind.
The schedule on Wednesday gives me only a couple hours to tour Guadalajara. That’s not enough time. Some five million people live in a dense urban area that stretches across the state of Jalisco down to Puerto Vallarta, on the Pacific coast, more than a hundred miles away. There’s supposed to be a good zoo in Guadalajara. They distill Jose Cuervo, appropriately, in the nearby town of Tequila. I’m told the murals of Hospicio Cabañas are a must-see. I don’t have time to see them. I have only time for a surgical strike. After lunch, when I ask a taxi driver to take me to the heart of the city, he drops me off at the Guadalajara Cathedral. It’s a really big church, the burial place of three cardinals, including one shot fourteen times at the airport in 1993. Officially, the cardinal got caught in a shootout between rival cocaine cartels. But maybe he was specifically targeted because of his opposition to cartel violence. Or perhaps his assassination was ordered by members of the government of La Línea–friendly president Carlos Salinas. There have been several investigations over the years, with conflicting conclusions. The U.S. Department of Justice has pinned the cardinal’s murder on a leader of the Tijuana Cartel. Nobody really knows for sure.
By the time I step out of the church it’s started to rain. There’s little time to travel anywhere else, so I duck into a coffee shop to read the local papers. An English-language newspaper serves forty thousand Canadian retirees clustered in the suburb of Lake Chapala. I know Canada lacks a tropical province, but why retire to a foreign country just to hang around people from the homeland? I switch to the Spanish-language press to read up on tonight’s game. Atlas is the least of the three Primera teams in town. Chivas is far more popular, locally and throughout Mexico. Atlas stays afloat by developing good young talent, then selling this talent to the richer clubs. The Atlas game against the Indios is acknowledged in the papers, but most stories look ahead to more exciting matches on the schedule. I find myself a bit annoyed. The Indios aren’t that bad. Their defeat is not guaranteed. Atlas remains one of the two or three other teams in danger of relegation, should the Indios get their act together. I’ve just seen up close how good the Indios players can look. I’m excited for the game. When I glance at the clock on my cell phone, I realize I need to get going if I want to watch the game in person. I taxi back to the hotel just in time to catch the team bus to the stadium.
Estadio Jalisco, which is one of Mexico’s soccer temples, is surprisingly run-down. Constructed in 1952 during a public-works building boom, and the venue for two World Cup semifinals, the place isn’t half as fancy as I’d expected. It’s an aged concrete bowl lined with bleachers of dented steel. The stadium’s primary tenant, Chivas, will move into a new palace next season. I’m guessing they’ve stopped paying their maintenance fees on this dump. Even the playing field is a disgrace. With Atlas, Chivas, and two minor league teams all hosting games here, Indios players run pregame sprints across what can be described as slop. No grass remains in one entire corner of the pitch. They’ve actually sprayed green paint over the mud to make this embarrassment look better on television. I’ll never insult Juárez’s Olympic Stadium again.
It’s Ash Wednesday, which I hadn’t realized even whe
n I toured the cathedral. A priest working a small chapel in the stadium’s bowels smears black soot on the forehead of Pepe Treviño and other coaches and players. Treviño’s ash mark remains visible even after everyone has warmed up and dressed and pumped up on bad heavy metal music. The head coach calls everyone into the center of the locker room. Marco quickly ties special cleats with long metal spikes appropriate for a muddy pitch. A boom box playing the Scorpions is flipped off. It’s time once again for Pepe to motivate his men. It’s not that hard a task. I’m even willing to write him a proper speech—“Atlas isn’t very good. We’ve played ourselves into a hole, but it’s not too late to turn things around. We’ve all had fun over the past couple of days. Let’s have fun out here tonight.”—but Pepe really and truly isn’t the kind of coach to seize the moment. He asks an assistant to play a clip from a movie starring Al Pacino.
Gil Cantú recognizes the need for something more. Gil wasn’t with us in San Luis, or at the mountain hideout. He flew down today just for this game. When the movie clip concludes, he steps forward to address the team. Gil turned his life over to Jesus Christ two decades ago. Whenever he talks, about almost anything, he usually finds a way to weave in his faith.
“There are five churches in El Paso praying for you tonight,” he tells the team. “One lady said she won’t pray just for the Indios, because God might want the other team to win, so she just prayed for you to fight hard and do your best.”
That’ll have to do. The players gather in a circle, say a prayer, count to three, and shout the word “Indios!” Everyone touches the tapestry of the Virgin of Guadalupe, then runs onto the field. My cell phone vibrates with a text message from Ken-tokey’s girlfriend, Sofia, back in El Paso. El Kartel is watching, she says, and is confident of a victory. Gil and I sprint up to the visiting team’s skybox, hustling so we can make it there before kickoff. We find something less than a luxury suite. The small room we enter looks more like a concrete bunker built by the French to repel the Nazis. The view is obstructed. Whenever the ball crosses midfield, I’m going to have to turn to the television to see the rest of the play. Still, there’s a buffet of chips and sodas and even beers, though I’m not going to drink alone, and Gil gave up alcohol during his religious conversion. I take a seat just as the referee blows his whistle to start the game. I’m flipping open my notebook when Atlas scores.
This is a record. In a bad way. Not even thirty seconds have ticked off the clock. I turn to the television for a replay. The kickoff soared over to King Kong. Instead of clearing it forward, he headed it backwards and onto the feet of an Atlas striker. A quick pass, a quick shot, and a one-goal deficit for the Indios to climb out of. The television shows Edwin throwing up his hands in disgust. Gil and I are still digesting this disaster when Atlas scores again. Not much later, Atlas scores a third goal. Christian, the Indios’ regular starting keeper, strained a hamstring in the game against San Luis. His backup got the start tonight. I’ve never seen worse play at any position at any level of the game.
“This goalie stinks,” Gil spits. “We’ve known it for four or five years, but Treviño likes him.” A more talented backup goalie quit the team last year, fleeing Juárez with his family after receiving an extortion attempt.
Reserve players who did not dress step into the skybox. They’d gotten lost, and they haven’t seen any of the action on the field. The score shocks them. There’s a momentary lift when Jair nets the first intentional Indios goal of the season, off a corner kick: 3–1. That’s the way it stays for only nine minutes, until Atlas scores yet again, off a very stoppable shot. The home team somehow adds one more after that to make it an amazing 5–1 at halftime. God wants Atlas to win. This is far worse than the Monterrey beat-down. And there’s still forty-five minutes left. Gil runs down to address the team in the locker room. I stay up in the box, smart enough not to step into that scene. I prepare for the postgame by flipping through my Spanish dictionary for the word “condolences.” Condolencias. Gil comes back, the second half starts, and Atlas scores again. I open a beer. Fuck it.
Will the Indios win? That narrative died at kickoff. Now the question is just how bad it’s going to be. Can Juárez stop the bleeding? Can the Indios retain some dignity, perhaps net a few more shots to make the margin less embarrassing? The referee calls a foul on our number 3, Juan de la Barrera, a central defender and the Indios’ team captain. The foul is harsh enough to merit the formal warning of a yellow card. The call also wins Atlas a penalty kick, a gimme they easily convert to make the score 7–1. The crowd starts chanting “Ocho!” I open another beer. The carnage stops only with the final whistle. It’s the worst defeat in Indios history. It’s the worst loss for any team in the Primera this season. Stretching back to last season, the Indios have now gone twenty-three straight games without a win. That’s a record, too. Again in a bad way. The Indios are officially the most pathetic team in the history of the Mexican major league.
“The Indios have fallen within a foot of the second division,” declares one Guadalajara-based sportswriter as he waits for Atlas players to sit for interviews. Another writer suggests maybe the Indios should skip the second division and drop straight down to the third. The insults stop only when the Atlas players emerge from their locker room. They address the reporters, then drive off with their girlfriends or wives and in some cases also their small children. Marco and the visitors stay in their locker room for another hour and a half. I wait outside with the Indios’ goalkeeper coach, who has reason to feel ashamed. We sit silently, listening to accusations from player to player, from player to coach, from coach back at player. The venom bleeds through the closed door, the message easy to translate: It’s over. Not technically—the Indios remain statistically alive. But for all practical purposes, the locker room confrontation is a heated progression through all five stages of grief. The Indios needed two wins this road trip. They got none. Atlas’s record is almost as sad as the Indios’, yet Atlas just pasted Juárez by an embarrassingly high score. Seven goals! When the players and coaches finally emerge, nobody has anything left to say. Treviño still wears that black smudge on his forehead.
On the bus back to the hotel, there is no music. Just throat clearing, heavy sighs, and the bump of tires on an unforgiving road. The only thing to look forward to is a return flight to the most dangerous city in the world.
Chapter 8
The Devil
There’s a woman in juárez who has turned her house into an Indios shrine. She started outside, painting the team logo across her front facade. The image stretches from one side of the house to the other, INDIOS and the soccer ball with the red bandanna covering the wall and the front door and climbing up onto the roof. Her tribute continues inside. Posters and newspaper clippings and team scarves blanket the interior. Every itineration of the team jersey is on display. There’s the uniform from back when the team’s main sponsor was a cement company. There are last year’s Joma-branded uniforms and also this year’s jerseys, which look similar but are sewn by the Italian sportswear company Kappa. She reads Vamos Indios, the monthly Indios fan magazine, while sitting in a custom-made Indios reclining chair. She sleeps under an Indios bedspread colored red, white, and black. Her head rests on pillows shaped like soccer balls. Logo carpets pad her tile floor, and red Indios curtains drape her windows.
Players visit the house to pay their respects. The woman asks each player to sign one of her interior walls with a black permanent marker, leaving space for a friend of hers to airbrush in the player’s portrait. Edwin, Marco, former star striker Sebastián Maz—they’re all up on her wall. Maleno Frías is up there, of course. Francisco Ibarra’s up there, too.
“I just love this city and this team,” the woman says. “I can’t really explain it.”
I’ve begun assembling my own shrine inside my new apartment. I moved into a better unit in my complex. It’s on the second and top floor. From the front door I can now see El Paso’s Franklin Mountain. A small porch in the bac
k overlooks a cement courtyard. Air whooshes through my living room and kitchen when I open the windows. Sun flows through those windows all day long, immediately curing my seasonal affective disorder. At no time does the apartment smell like sewage. I’m papering one wall of my new place with all the team paraphernalia I’ve collected so far. My press passes from the away games against San Luis and Atlas. Gil Cantú’s red business card. The Kappa tag from a jersey I bought, and the jersey itself, which I also tacked up on the wall. There’s a photo of Marco hoisting the trophy in León after the Indios won their way into the Primera. That snapshot cozies up to the cover of a game program from the last home match against Morelia. I’ve got the season schedule taped up, too. I planned to highlight every win with a yellow marker. Six games have been played so far, one-third of the season. I haven’t used the marker yet.
Some of the blank spots on my Indios wall have been filled in with pictures clipped out of newspaper sports sections. Mostly fan shots of El Kartel. There’s Juvie from Las Cruces, who got arrested in Monterrey. And capos Mike and Don Roberto showing off their Indios tattoos. The biggest clip on the wall is of a guy in El Kartel named Arson Loskush. There’s no special reason his photo takes up so much space. The newspaper happened to have printed the photo large, most likely because it’s a pretty sweet shot. Arson’s at a game, crying out in support. His round scalp is shaved smooth. He looks a little menacing, to be honest. Like it’s a good thing he’s rooting for our guys and not for the other team.
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