Read Online This Love Is Not for Cowards by Robert Andrew Powell - Free Book Online Page A

He diversified from there into television. Francisco anchored sports highlights on the Channel 6 nightly news. He also hosted a weekly sports roundup, then added a show on social issues, Nuestra Gente —Our People. Remarkably soon, he found himself managing all of Chihuahua for Televisa, one of the country’s big networks. He was encouraged to rise higher, maybe move to Mexico City. He turned the offers down. He had found success in a field for which he had never trained, and had pursued on instinct. He saw no reason not to follow his latest instinct, to bring soccer back to the border.
    It wasn’t really a business decision, he tells me. Buying a soccer team, like broadcasting, was just something he wanted to do. It was to be his gift to his hometown, which was ready to take the next step in its maturation. Largely because of NAFTA, Juárez had rapidly grown into the fifth-most-populous city in Mexico, yet Juarenses still had to travel all the way to Monterrey to watch the national sport played at its highest level. When Francisco asked his father for money to buy the minor league team that would become the Indios, his father saw no reason not to give it to him. Francisco had a track record of entrepreneurial success. A soccer team looked like a solid investment. Neither man imagined the team might fail.
    Everything about the Indios was to be new. Modern. Francisco knew that in a city of migrants, with loyalties forged in other towns, the Indios would start out as everyone’s second-favorite team. To create new bonds, he wanted his team to sport a contemporary look. His logo would not feature medieval shields or Olde English lettering. The cartoonish image he chose, in a nod to the native Tarahumara who first inhabited Juárez, was a red bandanna wrapped like a sash around a soccer ball. He really likes the way it looks. Keeping one hand on the wheel as he drives, Francisco points a finger at the patch on his guayabera, showing me how the logo’s soccer ball is angled so it looks as if the ball’s black squares are the eyes and mouth of a fan screaming support. Below the ball, the Indios’ name is spelled out in all caps, the letters slanted, shaded, and futuristic.
    â€œIt’s fresh, it’s new, it’s a new positive image even for kids,” he tells me. “It works on so many levels.”
    Success on the field didn’t arrive immediately. The new team played its first season down in Pachuca, waiting for Ibarra to green Olympic Stadium with new grass imported from Phoenix. The owner replaced aluminum bleachers with individual bucket seats. The upgrades cost serious money, yet Francisco viewed the improvements as mere stopgaps. Only two years after buying the team, as reporters continued to mock his ambitions of rising to the Primera, Francisco announced plans for an entirely new Indios home field. A modern stadium, one of the finest in the country. At a press conference, flanked by the mayor of Ciudad Juárez and the governor of Chihuahua, Francisco circulated digital renderings of the new facility. The reporters gawked at a perfect rectangle of natural grass striped with horizontal lines. Some forty thousand individual seats climbing skyward in three tiers. A huge electronic scoreboard to replay game highlights. Two levels of luxury skyboxes provided the truest big-league touch, each box furnished with red leather couches and ottomans, glass coffee tables, flat-screen televisions, and white vases sprouting decorative tufts of green grass. Everything was a go, Francisco announced as the politicians nodded their heads. Blueprints approved. Land acquired, permits issued, funding obtained.
    It was February 2008. By the end of the year, some sixteen hundred people in Juárez would be killed, more than five times the murder rate two years before. The economy tanked as well, worldwide. What businesses were left to rent those skyboxes? Who would dare visit Juárez with all