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

the bullets flying? At the proposed stadium site, not a single shovel ever pierced the sandy ground. And yet right then, right when the violence went baroque, that’s when the Indios played their way into the Primera. That’s when they defeated León and when la gente took to the streets to serenade their heroes.
    Francisco’s advisers encouraged him to sell, immediately. With promotion to the Primera, the club, on paper, was suddenly worth more than $25 million. Ibarra had spent only about $2 million on the Indios to that point, and operationally, day to day, the club was losing money, a cash-flow hemorrhage that would only get worse. The team would start flying to games as far away as the Guatemalan border. Francisco also needed to start paying his players major league salaries. Sell the team, he was told, pocket a once-in-a-lifetime return on investment, and move on. Yet Ibarra refused to sell. As the violence in his hometown grew worse—much worse—he came to see his team less as a professional sports franchise than as a vital social program, the one bright spot in a city growing impossibly dangerous.
    â€œI got in for the soccer,” Ibarra tells me as we crest a hill and the state capital comes into view, “but stayed in for the city, for the people.”
    The best teams in Mexican soccer are backed by wealthy companies. Monterrey pays its players with brewery money. Club América and Chivas and Monarcas and Santos are basically flagships for their owners, the big television networks. Most of the smaller teams get by on government aid. Chiapas. San Luis. Atlante used to play in Mexico City until the state of Quintana Roo paid them to relocate to Cancún. Juárez’s Mayor Reyes Ferriz believes the Indios deserve public support, too. He’s diverted thousands of tax dollars to Francisco’s team and has promised to donate thousands more. “Are they a charity?” Reyes Ferriz asked me when I met him in his office overlooking El Paso. “Absolutely. They do more good for this city than almost anyone else.” The governor of Chihuahua, though, sees things differently. “The Indios are not a charity,” the governor has stated, denying repeated requests for financial aid. “They’re a business.”
    Francisco is driving to Chihuahua city to argue that the team is a charity. In interviews, he always calls the Indios a social project. He’s hung banners at the stadium—Olympic Stadium, the team’s home indefinitely—stating that the Indios are “more than a club.” It’s a slogan cribbed from FC Barcelona, the most famous team in the world, a club that cedes the valuable space on the fronts of their jerseys to the charity UNICEF. (Or did for years. The team recently sold out to Qatar.) Francisco doesn’t talk about all the money he left on the table when the Indios rose to the Primera—I found that out from someone else in Grupo Yvasa. It’s not public knowledge that his father, frustrated by the fiscal bleeding, has withdrawn all of his financial support, leaving Francisco to save the Indios by himself. The owner talks only about why he continues to fight for the team in the face of all economic reason. Indios games, he points out, are the only time Juárez is mentioned on the national news without preceding the word “murder” or “execution” or “bloody.”
    â€œI hear thousands of daily stories about how the Indios have helped someone out,” Francisco tells me as we roll toward the capital. “These stories are very dramatic. It puts a huge pressure on me.” As he speaks, a motor coach slips past our SUV, the bus wrapped in an advertisement for a gubernatorial candidate. There will be a major election on July 4. The governor who won’t fund the Indios will leave office soon thereafter, a victim of term limits. Francisco’s headed to the capital to lobby