A Spanish soccer game is 6 times bigger than the Super Bowl

Luis Suarez scores for Barcelona in Saturday night's clásico. ESPN photo. 

Cindy and I went to the closest neighborhood bar on Saturday night to do what most of the rest of Spain was doing, which was watching the two best soccer teams in Spain duke it out.

Barcelona whomped Real Madrid, 4-0, in what was supposed to be a close match, but that was almost beside the point.

Ronaldo and Real Madrid had a rough night. Getty Images via BBC

Barcelona and Real Madrid were playing a regular season game--they play twice, home and home--so it was not a playoff or final or anything special.

But their matches--which have so much history and drama that they are referred to as clásicos--regularly draw hundreds of millions of TV viewers.

First, the teams are rich and successful. Forbes ranks Barcelona and Real Madrid as the two most valuable sports franchises in the world. The BBC last year recounted the history of the 200-plus clásicos, and gave a sense of why they deserve the designation as classics. Similar to the Patriots-Giants or Red Sox-Yankees rivalries, but bigger.

The Chivas, Mexico´s soccer gods

Guadalajara has three professional soccer teams, the best known of which is the Chivas, the female goats. I don´t know why they´re not the Chivos (the billygoats) except that the word Chivas has connotations of extravagant behavior in certain expressions. A bit of a backstory is certainly there, but I haven´t seen it yet. It´s probably something involved like why Georgetown is the Hoyas (a Greek exclamation).


Friday night we went to see the mighty Chivas play their crosstown rivals, the hapless Tecos (Chivas are in red stripes, photo of the match above is from the site sportsya.com). The Chivas are supposed to be like the Yankees of Mexican football. Six of their players were recently named to the Mexican national team for World Cup and international play. Supposedly they´re as good as any of the European teams.

The game with the Tecos (technology boys), was an entertaining, hard-played match. Although it was on the Tecos home turf, the crowd of some 40,000 was lopsidedly Chivas fans in their team shirts, which have the name of their principal sponsor, Bimbo, a baked goods company, on the front.

We got an education in how to rag the opposing team. Every time the Teco goalie made a goal kick, the Chivas fans shouted, “PUto-oooo.“ Which is like saying, You wimp (actually worse). They also freely used the words cabrón (English equivalent refers to an orifice) and pendejo (needs help from Viagra) to describe either the opposing team or their own player when he made a bad play. And they urged players to do something unspeakable to their mothers (chingar), as any inebriated sporting fan might.

Both teams had four or five great chances to score and blew them because of a bad finish or missed cross. The Tecos played more than half the game a man down after an ejection for dirty play. Still the Chivas couldn´t take advantage, and the Tecos scored the game´s only goal on a little chip shot that caught the Chivas goalie a little too far out. It just cleared the goalie´s desperate leaping attempt.

Lots of beer was sold in the stands. Chivas fans threw smokebombs and batteries at the Tecos goalie, who held up the game at one point to complain to the ref, who told the guy to get back in his goal.

The stadium, built in the early ´70s, has cement bench seats, very narrow aisles and terrible circulation patterns. The lights didn´t come on for the 8 p.m. game until the sun was down and dusk threatened visibility. We bought two general admission tickets at face value from a scalper, $25 each. Don´t look for an usher. There were actually lots of families with kids in the stands.

News update: A few days after this game, Barcelona, one of Europe´s best teams, thrashed the Chivas, 5-2, in a friendly (exhibition) played in Chicago. The Chivas are now at the bottom of their league table.

Soccer players and taxi drivers

This photo was shot from the train and is a typical country scene, with kids playing soccer and a horse grazing behind the opposite goal. Kids are always kicking a ball around on the street. On cable TV it seems as if there are at least three or four soccer games on at all hours of the day and night. The president, Evo Morales, regularly gets into pickup games. A few weeks ago, he put together a team with four ringers who once played for the national team for a match with the press corps. The president's team whomped the journalists, 11-1, which must have been sweet, since Morales has called the press his No. 1 enemy.
Venezuela seems to be the only South American country that has baseball. You have to get up to Central America, specifically Panama, before you see much.

*****
The cab that didn't make it.


Cabs in Santa Cruz range from comfortable to rattletraps. Today was the first time that one actually conked out, although a dozen or so have seemed as though they wouldn't make it to their next stop. This driver was using a pair of pliers to adjust some of the electronic connections and stalled out twice before he admitted defeat and radioed his dispatcher for a relief driver. Clearly almost no one uses seatbelts in this city because they're always covered with dust and show other signs of neglect and disuse. Cabs are cheap. You can ride five or six miles, from one end of town to the other, for about $1.75. Most rides are less than $1. People use them to move all kinds of stuff, such as what seems to be a radio antenna in the photo below.



I spend a lot of time in cabs and get lots of language practice with the drivers, whose Spanish ranges from eloquent to impenetrable to these ears. One driver launched into an eloquent critique of TV stations that he said were guilty of "tergiversacion," a lovely word for manipulation. Given his mastery of the spoken word, he seemed a good person to ask about the local newspapers. He confessed that he doesn't read them. Turns out he's illiterate. Then there is a driver named Richard, who has picked me up twice, an unlikely occurrence given the number of cabs and the disparate locations where we hooked up. Today an older driver gave a dissertation on the meaning of the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated Nov. 2. Other drivers have provided background on news events that to a foreigner seemed strange.
You can always tell when a news reporter or sportswriter is desperate for material. The story starts with a quote from a cab driver. Guilty. More times than I would like to admit. Still, some of them are really poets at heart.