Partisans

I’m sitting on an overstuffed couch in the Mexican home of a big Alabaman named Chuck, drinking Dos Equis and watching college football via pirated satellite. My wife, Kate, is leaning against the kitchen counter, knitting a wool cap, smiling politely at Chuck’s friend, a Texan who calls himself The Mayor. His Honor—wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, his hair gringo-in-Mexico long—could be Matthew McConaughey’s less handsome, less famous older brother. From my spot on the couch, it sounds like he’s giving Kate the full and complete accounting of how fan-damn-tastic his life down here in the Yucatán is, but I can’t say for sure because I’m staring at the TV, a fat-backed, low-def model on which the Ohio State Buckeyes are about to take the field against the Texas Longhorns. Kate and I are from Columbus, and we’re both in grad school at OSU, so this is a must-see game for us—for me, I should say. Kate thinks football is boring and overvalued, hence the knitting needles and the self-banishment to the kitchen with The Mayor, who would apparently rather chat up a pretty Brit Lit scholar than watch the most anticipated contest of the 2005 season. Number 4 Ohio State versus Number 2 Texas. The first-ever meeting of these two powerhouse programs. The Horseshoe all lit up for the prime-time slot on ABC. Yep, I’m talking about a football game. An important one. The sole reason Kate and I are here on the dirt-road-and-roaming-dog outskirts of Valladolid, Mexico, with two men we don’t know.

In a week and a half, we’ll be back on campus for the start of fall quarter, but right now Kate and I are still putting a celebratory cap on the summer, thanks to the credit card miles we exchanged for flights to Cancún. After a few beach days on Isla Mujeres, we hopped a bus and rode two hours inland to Valladolid, which, as we’d read in Lonely Planet, is a convenient base for a visit to the ancient city of Chichén Itzá. We spent most of yesterday on the grounds of that UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Temple of Kukulkan and the Wall of Skulls were just as spectacular as advertised. Once we got back to the hotel, however, with Mayan Ruins now crossed off the list of sights to see, my priority became tracking down a place to watch the OSU/Texas game.

So I told Kate we needed to do some reconnaissance work that night. Find out who, if anyone, in this part of Mexico had the proper satellite configuration to beam down some good ol’ NCAA football the next day. I knew that if we’d still been near Cancún, we’d be able to find the game in any number of tourist bars, but out here in the provinces there weren’t any tourist bars. Hopefully, though, with the University of Texas—the flagship school in a state that was once part of Mexico—being half the equation, we’d get lucky.

The desk clerk at our hotel suggested we ask at a bar down the street, across from Parque Francisco Cantón, the town square. The place was full of locals, everybody but us speaking Spanish, and the steak tampiqueña was delicious. The tequila, equally so. But the presence of just one TV mounted in the corner—tuned on a Friday night to a Latin-American version of the Home Shopping Network—suggested that this establishment wasn’t exactly College Football HQ.

By this point I had resigned myself to missing the game, and I was suddenly okay with it. Kate and I were full of food and booze and mystic Mayan history. We were laughing and having a great time. We were living, man. Grad students loose in the world, doing stuff. Not sitting in front of the tube, watching other people do stuff.

Then, from out of the barroom white...