Credit Photograph by MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty
For weeks, a certain stench had been hanging over this past Saturday night’s highly anticipated soccer match between the U.S. and Mexican national teams. It was impossible to ignore, even if most public commentators, including the athletes themselves, as if out good taste or denial or respect for the sport itself, tried not to mention it. That stench, of course, originated with the comments of Donald Trump, who has notoriously denigrated Mexican immigrants in the United States as criminals and rapists. It was the stench of overt racism, and of the demagogic politics of stigmatization and fear embodied by Trump’s threats of mass deportations and walls on the border that Mexico should be forced to pay for itself.
If Mexico lost the game, would that prove or justify Trump’s insults and threats? Of course not, but to many Mexican fans, it felt that way. That the Mexican national team had been unable to defeat the U.S. in seven straight meetings only added to the unease. The foreboding wasn’t quite apocalyptic, but there was no doubt about it: this time, a Mexican loss would be especially depressing. Throughout Mexico, the U.S., and the world, there couldn’t have been many fans of El Tri, the national team, who didn’t find themselves at least fleetingly imagining the jingoistic jeers of The Donald and his supporters should the U.S. win, though, realistically, of course, Trump, like most U.S. sports fans, may even have been unaware that the U.S. soccer team was playing Mexico that night, fixated instead on that day’s college football scores, or the M.L.B. playoffs, or looking ahead to Sunday’s N.F.L. games.
The Mexican media itself was as responsible as anybody else for this conflation of the U.S. team with Donald Trump. TV Azteca was running an exuberant, clever, Trump-mocking commercial for the match that it seemed like everyone in Mexico was delighting in and sharing over social media. Opening with a shot of the Stars and Stripes and the screeching chords of Jimi Hendrix’s national anthem, the screen then filled with Trump against a backdrop of U.S. flags in the middle of his most infamous anti-Mexican screed, the one where he says, “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you.” (This is the speech in which he goes on to say, “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”) Cut to two of those not “best”: the rough and rude and iconic Mexican star, Cuauhtémoc Blanco, who, late in his glorious career, played for the Chicago Fire, leaning forward at a press conference with clenched fist to make a defiantly provocative gesture; and Giovani Dos Santos, a gifted and perpetually underachieving young player with a party-boy reputation, at his recent signing, with the Los Angeles Galaxy. Trump returns, lamenting “Our country is in serious trouble,” followed by a volley of images of Mexicans scoring goals and American players in various postures of defeat and confusion, fans in the stands, draped in Stars-and-Stripes regalia, looking dumbfounded and dour, and back to Trump again as he bemoans, “We don’t have victories anymore”—as if it was the U.S.A. that had gone seven straight matches against their archrivals without winning —and images of Mexican national team glory, euphoric goal celebrations by Dos Santos and others, players hoisting a trophy and jumping up and down in a thick rain of confetti and adoring cheers. “The American dream is dead,” Trump intones in his Charles Bronson-channeling tough-guy voice; the commercial ends with that voice echoing in deep zombie reverb, “It’s dead.”
Soon thereafter, Fox Sports answered with a rather labored Trump commercial of its own: the leading Republican presidential candidate bombastically shouting, “Bigger, better, stronger,” and “We will make American great,” with imagery that is a like a mirror image of the TV Azteca ad’s throughout, though it does include a bizarre image of U.S. fullback DaMarcus Beasley appearing to drop a Mexican player with a dirty kick to the ankle; or maybe it’s a perfectly executed Mexican flop.
In the days leading up to the match, the U.S. sports media reported on the high stakes of the match. The U.S. coach, Juergen Klinsmann, told the L.A. Times, “This will be a game that, for the next two or three years to come, is probably the biggest game because it decides who goes to Russia in 2017 [for the Confederations Cup] and it gives you a CONCACAF title. So it’s difficult to beat the importance of that one.” The Confederations Cup is an eight-team tournament played in the same country as the one hosting the World Cup a year later. The former U.S. star and Mexican bête noir, Landon Donavan, declared that Klinsmann’s job, following a recent series of disappointing performances by the U.S. team, should be on the line in the match against Mexico. The U.S. team captain, Michael Bradley, spoke more emotionally when he said, “Games against Mexico are just different. There’s no other way to put it. The passion. The colors. The respect. The hate.” The reliably thoughtful Javier “Chicharito” Hernández, currently the most internationally recognized Mexican player, despite what has so far been an up-and-down career with some of the European leagues’ most élite teams, came closest to acknowledging the game’s fraught subtext when he reflected in the New York Times, “For the most part, I think, the Mexicans in America have had hard lives, [and] have pushed so hard to reach America that when they have a chance to celebrate the Mexican national team, it is like for a day, they are back in their country.”
“Mexican soccer has lots of problems, and one of those is that we don’t associate our faith in the sport or in our team with results,” Mexico’s most brilliant philosopher of fut, the celebrated novelist and writer Juan Villoro, has observed. “What’s important to the Mexican fan is the opportunity that fútbol provides for a great party.” The match was played in the Rose Bowl, in Pasadena, California, and in the hours before, the parking lots outside filled with already celebrating and predictably optimistic Mexican fans, with their sombreros and flags and ubiquitous Donald Trump piñatas. After smashing the piñata torsos to bits, tailgaters carried the disembodied heads into the stadium.
The Mexican national team has just hired its seventeenth coach in fifteen years. The good feelings created by the team’s stirring and energetic performance at the 2014 World Cup—falling just short of the coveted and elusive fifth game in a late collapse against the Netherlands, exacerbated by a controversial last-minute penalty against Mexico—had evaporated as its histrionic coach, Miguel “Piojo” (The Louse) Herrera, led the team back into dysfunction. There was a summer of dismal tournament play made worse because Herrera actually managed to make the team seem like yet another expression of Mexican corruption and of its currently reviled PRI government, lowlighted by outlandishly unfair refereeing that propelled the team forward into the Gold Cup finals. Worse, there was the news that Herrera and some players had allegedly participated in the violation of Mexican electoral laws by taking money to send out election-day tweets on behalf of a PRI satellite party. (Herrera denies the allegations.) Herrera’s final implosion came when he punched a Mexican reporter at the Philadelphia airport following his team’s tainted Gold Cup championship, which finally cost him his job.
Yet under the veteran leadership of the Mexico’s interim coach, Ricardo Ferretti–who had insisted he didn’t want the job permanently–Mexican fútbol had recently seemed to be on the upswing again. The team is chock-full of talented young players who for years have been winning trophies for Mexico in international youth tournaments; at the 2012 London Olympics, a team drawn mostly from Mexico’s twenty-three-and-under squad won the gold medal. On the same Saturday of the Rose Bowl match, Mexico’s twenty-one-and-under team had qualified for the 2016 Rio Olympics by defeating Canada. Meanwhile, several of the promising young Mexicans playing in Europe were now starting and flourishing for their teams.
Saturday night’s Rose Bowl match, of course, turned out to be epic and gruelling. Mexico scored first, in the tenth minute, when a scintillating sequence of passes set up Chicharito for an easy goal on the right side. But the U.S. soon answered with a forceful Geoff Cameron header off a free kick. A majority of the crowd was obviously pro-Mexican, but large contingents of U.S. fans were visible and effusive. Observing those festively red-, white- and blue-clad fans, it felt warped to want to associate them with Trump. Indeed, probably the least likely of U.S. sports fans to be Trump supporters are those who follow soccer. Blessedly, as the match ground on through the rest of the first half and for the length of the second half without producing another goal, political passions and fears seemed to drop away, as if out of exhaustion. There was just the pitch, and the relentless match itself, incredibly tense but also exasperating, as each team displayed strengths but also the weaknesses that have kept them confined to the second tier of world soccer powers, and, year after year, driven their fans crazy. Mexico controlled possession of the ball, mounting wave after wave of promising attacks, but seemed unable to score. Its attackers lacked decisiveness, or a killer instinct, at the crucial moments–Chicharito, in an all too typical performance, flubbed two clear chances to score. The U.S. players seemed to give up on trying to run with their swifter Mexican opponents, packing their own goal zone with defenders as if playing for a tie, though more likely lying in wait for a chance to launch swift counterattacks. When the match moved into overtime, Mexico finally scored again, and its fans, sensing victory, were euphoric. But the Mexican side displayed another of its characteristic flaws, unable to hold a late lead as if it, too, had already begun to celebrate. After the U.S. grittily tied the score at 2—2, the match seemed headed to a dismal resolution by penalty kicks. At the hundred-and-eighteenth minute, Raul Jiménez toed a high lob backward over his own head which descended into the path of a streaking Paul Aguilar, who—with sublime decisiveness and killer instinct—fired a low streak into the net. It was “a goal,” Villoro e-mailed me, “that Paul Aguilar won’t be able to repeat in his life.” Pandemonium.
“The ‘Trump’ climate was very present,” Villoro added. “You could feel it in the happiness of the crowd that stayed for two hours singing ‘Cielito Lindo.’ ” Propelled by those voices singing proudly and jubilantly in the stadium, and by the vocal celebrations and relieved sighs of millions throughout Mexico and the U.S., a certain noxious cloud and its stench was propelled, at least for the rest of this night, far out into the Pacific. It will surely be back, but probably it will never be able to loom over a Mexico-U.S.A. soccer match the way it had over this one.
