Previously: The Story 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008.

4/31/2022 – Independiente De Medellin 0, Atletico National 0

He introduces himself as "Davey." He's wearing a hat that says DO IT IN A VAN, mysteriously, and the first thing he says is that he is very sorry but he is still drunk from last night because it was an American friend's last night in the country. Then he says his girlfriend is going to drive us, and that his girlfriend is not very happy with him. Then he apologizes again because he does not know that these are the three best facts I can learn about the guide of a food tour I'm going on. Tranquilo.

It is immediately apparent that Davey doesn't know anything about food, but this is fine. He says he speaks three languages, "Spanish, English, and bullshit." He takes us to Medellin's main market, where men you must avoid arm-wresting at all costs lug a seemingly infinite variety of products, mostly fruits. Many of these fruits are strange to gringo eyes, and Davey wanders through the market asking for various items and a knife so he can cut them and hand them to us.

These fruits are… unrefined. When you go to an American megamart the things that line the shelves have been relentlessly iterated to strip out things which interfere with the flavor. The Colombian oddities have not gone through this process and can be eye-wateringly tart or mostly seeds or one giant pit with a thin layer of fruit-type substance around it. The usual thing to do is to rhapsodize about the pure untrammeled authenticity of such things, but they're not actually better. We're sampling a smoothie-type thing made from a hard, luridly orangish fruit; Davey's girlfriend questions us about whether we like it, in the way of people who are almost but not quite mutually unintelligible. She makes a face and a sort of money gesture with her hands—she doesn't like the texture. She has a point.

Davey suggests that about half the things he hands to me are aphrodisiacs. He uses his arm to demonstrate their purported effects. He flops his forearm down from the elbow and looks at me, cocking an eyebrow. I nod. There doesn't seem to be anything else I can do.

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I never catch the name of the guide for the Pablo Escobar tour, but she does not wear a hat that says DO IT IN A VAN. She went to college in the US and has hung her own shingle out as the person who takes you on a tour that is not really a Pablo Escobar tour but a tour about the kind of things that have to happen to give rise to a Pablo Escobar.

The first place she takes us is a local sports complex. The city has stuck these things all over. There's a soccer field ringed by high fences and a faintly ludicrous gym setup—at one point I will actually see some buff dudes use one of these, lifting the concrete blocks attached to the bar over and over. She sits us down and starts talking about Colombia, how it was, how it is now. She comes from money so her family was a target. An uncle of hers refused to pay and was killed. She points out a tiny little baggie sitting at our feet, and says that never used to happen. Drugs were for export. Like coffee.

I am paying attention, mostly, but my eyes are drawn to the soccer practice that's ongoing. Kids go to school in shifts, it turns out, and a chunk of them just play soccer the rest of their day.

This is not pickup. There are coaches, and drills, and it is immediately clear that this rag-tag assemblage of preteens would give that work to anyone who doesn't do this all day. They're all skilled, but my eye is drawn to one kid in particular wearing #25. He's tall, gangly, and possessed of a near supernatural grace. I think about Stanley Okumu.

Stanley Okumu is Kenyan. He is currently playing for KAA Gent in Belgium. For the privilege of employing him, Gent paid a Swedish club 3.5 million Euros last year. He has nine caps for his national team. He played for AFC Ann Arbor in 2018, when it was in the NPSL.

Here is a lengthy aside about the NPSL for the 99.9% of readers who have no idea what the hell that is. The NPSL is nominally the fourth tier of American soccer. It is mostly an amateur summer league for college players who want to remain sharp in the lengthy offseason. There are a hundred and twenty-some NPSL clubs, divided into local regions where it's feasible to drive.  NPSL clubs are almost without exception podunk enterprises; with a minimal entry fee teams come and go willy-nilly. For a brief and glorious period of time the Michigan-centric division had both AFC Ann Arbor and Detroit City FC.

When a guy who will go on to start Africa Cup of Nations matches for his country strides onto the field at an NPSL game, your first thought is "who is that?" and your second thought is "why is he here?"

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The guide who takes us on the hike clearly knows everything about hiking. He can hike anyone under the table, especially Americans from flat, low-altitude parts of the country.

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Medellin is sick of talking about Pablo Escobar, who is merely the most grandiose aspect of a 70-year conflict that will bear no descriptor less generic than that. Is it a war? Not really. Is it a rebellion? Not anymore. Is it complicated? God, yes. Folks have given up tracing the particular letters that any group adopts after FARC dissolved some ten years ago and have given the successor groups a generic term (PDOs). While we are in the country a high-ranking member of the military admits at a tribunal that the Colombian army killed random teenagers in the countryside and then planted guns on them, so it would look like they were doing something about the other criminals.

So it is annoying for people to come in and ask about the drug lord that created a reign of terror that touched everyone in this city. Medellin is so many other things. Occasionally—very occasionally—one of the merchants that spring up anywhere a tourist might wander will be selling an Escobar t-shirt, and I cannot imagine the levels of 1) chutzpah and 2) sociopathy that could cause someone to actually purchase one under the watchful eye of everyone on the street.

Medellin also cannot stop talking about Pablo Escobar. There is of course the woman we hired to talk about Pablo Escobar.

Davey brings him up apropos of nothing. First he gives him a Bronx cheer and a thumbs down, indicating that he disapproves of the guy who turned Medellin into the most dangerous city in the world for a hot minute. Later he expresses some admiration for Escobar's business sense, since he is a paisa and Escobar was a paisa and one thing paisas believe about paisas is that they could "sell ice to an Eskimo," in Davey's formulation.

We ask the hiking guide to take us to Comuna 13, a formerly notorious area of the city that has been transformed into a sort of tourist trap. Murals line the walls, and the world's longest series of outdoor escalators eases passage to and from the city. Our guide is perfectly happy to take us there because that's where he lives, and as he's showing us around he talks about a gun battle that happened right where we are standing. In 2018. It seems unbelievable. This is the only portion of the city I've been in that feels crafted for outsiders. Four years ago it was briefly a warzone again.

Part of an excursion to a big rock nearby is a boat ride on an artificial lake. Our tour guide points out various houses. That one's owned by a reggaeton star. That one is James Rodriguez's. Have you seen Narcos? That one used to be owned by the guy who got blown up by a bazooka. That one was Pablo Escobar's lieutenant. And then you round a bend and there's a burned-out husk.

A guarded burned-out husk. A guarded burned-out husk that three people are currently leaving, because they bribed the guard to check it out. We're asked if we want to bribe the guard and politely demur. The inside of Pablo Escobar's former residence is probably just as burned as the outside. This guide is weirdly excited by all of it. She's almost a little bloodthirsty.

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The only guide who does not bring up Escobar is the one taking us to the soccer game. There is a Medellin Clasico while we are in town between Atletico Nacional and Independiente De Medellin, but of course Pablo Escobar bankrolled Nacional in the 80s and 90s. So Escobar looms here, inevitably.

They've moved the game from Medellin's main stadium, which seats 40,000 and the clubs share, because of a reggaeton concert. I find this boggling—move the date! do something!—and am initially disappointed that the replacement option is a 10k band-box in the south of the city that only Medellin fans are allowed at. Arriving at the stadium is a literally incredible thing, because the concrete edifice with stands only on one side and in the endzones is reminiscent of nothing so much as watching an NPSL match. I cannot believe Rene Higuita's club is playing here.

Ok, though, I can get on board with this. When AFCAA and DCFC were briefly rivals both teams were good, and I had occasion to go to Keyworth Stadium for some playoff games. Keyworth Stadium is 100 years old and still extravagantly dilapidated even after Detroit City refurbished the place. One game is aborted because it rains and the grounds crew cannot squeegee enough of it off the astroturf to make it playable. It hosts about 6000 people and has a bunch of industrial wasteland as a backdrop. And it is more or less a dead ringer for this Colombian stadium (built in the 1990s!)  that's hosting the Clasico, give or take the background scenery.

We're cutting it somewhat close because some folks had issues getting to the staging area a short walk from the stadium, and the line is not moving. People are getting antsy. Their signing develops a harder edge, and then suddenly we surge forward. The ticket-takers withdraw. We walk by cops who aren't getting paid enough to deal with this, and lurch into the stadium. It turns out we're in with the ultras.

Giant banners hang down from the top of the stadium, allowing the folks in the front row to use them as support while they climb the railing and stand atop it. For 45 minutes I wonder if these people are all mountain goats, and then someone falls 15 feet to the concrete below just before halftime. He walks off after the medics attend to him, holding his arm as if it's broken.

The rest of the ultras mount the railing again as if nothing has happened. It rains a bit. They don't care. Also they are absurdly loud.

You cannot believe how loud they are. The video doesn't even begin to assert how loud they are. It feels like there are 2000 people screaming at the top of their lungs for 90 minutes. DCFC does some cosplay of this, but that's what it is: cosplay.

I am here, and they are loud, and I am happy. I do not understand why but I am filled with a profound gratitude.

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Atletico has a gameplan to haul down anyone who looks like they might be off on a dangerous counter, racking up four yellow cards by halftime. They score in the first half but it's called back by VAR. They endure a rain of abuse and garbage as they go back to the locker room, flanked by an honor guard of riot cops in Judge Dredd uniforms with riot shields that mostly protect themselves from whatever's being hurled.

Nothing makes contact and nothing looks like it would do much even if it did. This is more ritual than threat.

The first half is strange. There's the ultras screaming—one song constantly repeats a line that starts "vamos a matar". There's the overall level of play, which I know cannot be NPSL level but really feels like it, probably because of the environs. And then there's the backdrop. I'm having a hard time processing it. What is going on with the backdrop? I'm at the NPSL game. But something is… off. I am also somewhere else.

Fifteen minutes into the game the pieces fall into place: the mountains in the background. I am also at the Rose Bowl. I'm at the combination NPSL game-Rose Bowl. The whole damn United States has one place where the mountains perfectly frame the background in a legendary stadium. Medellin can't build a concrete box without incidentally making it also the Rose Bowl.

Atletico begins to come undone in the second half due to the liberal card accumulation in the first. A bad tackle is a second yellow ten minutes into the second half, and if the halftime hooting and throwing of items was a merry middle finger the sent off player's reception is a little more menacing. Ten minutes later another Nacional player is sent off for a violent foul that sees the victim substituted, and now here it is: an opponent down to nine men, VAR keeping you level in the first half, twenty-five minutes to put one past the opposition and vault yourself into contention for the title.

Medellin just cannot.

Atletico has decided to let the right back do whatever he wants. Because this is "cross ineffectually" it is working out great for them. Five minutes tick by, and then ten. The ultras start turning sour. Whistling increases. The songs get sporadic. It is no quieter. Eventually the right back does a couple things right, and one of the strikers gets on the end of a cross just outside the six yard box, but he puts it directly off the keeper. Whistling. Crosses. Time ticks up. At some point a switch flips and the red cards are more burden than opportunity. Medellin is desperate, rushing through patterns of play too fast to generate anything. Whistling. Crosses.

Eventually, the ref's whistle goes. 0-0. Medellin didn't even get to lose.

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NOW YOU MAY BE ASKING YOURSELF, what does any of this have to do with Michigan football's 2022 season? The most truthful answer is not much at all. I went to a place and did some things and came back and now here's my slide show.

The second most truthful answer is that I loved Medellin in ways I did not expect to and maybe that means a little something. I went to Miami for the playoff game; we stayed in the Wynwood neighborhood. There's a bunch of graffiti around that feels like corporate cooptation of something real. Meanwhile I found this guy in Medellin, interspersed around the art on the walls:

Medellin feels like a real place. A place to grab onto. I couldn't wait to get out of Miami. I miss Medellin. Everyone in Medellin is trying so hard their skin wobbles. It radiates off of them.

The Escobar guide took us on one of the city's gondolas, which have sprouted like mushrooms over the last 15 years. She shows up a map of the public transportation system and somewhat sheepishly calls it "our baby metro." I'm stunned. In the amount of time it takes an American city to revise its comprehensive plan, Medellin has installed two tram lines running the length of the city and several different gondolas that have given the people in the hills the ability to get to and from their jobs in wealthier environs without spending several hours a day trudging up and down a mountain.

This is a twisted sort of privilege that comes from murdered uncles and gun battles you hide from and moments when you don't know if you're going to continue existing. Davey drops his bravura façade once and only once, to tell us about the time where he wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time when he was 12 and had a gun pointed at his head.

Nobody in Medellin has any illusions about the good old days. Nobody wants to preserve a sainted past. That is power. What they have now is hard-earned, and so much better, and never enough. So they do a thing. You do a thing. You recover from the nadir, and plant a flag in the ground. Then you have to keep going. Every day. Now is the time to build.

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As we're leaving the sports complex I get one last glimpse of 25 taking a shot from outside the box with his left foot. It curls beautifully, headed for the upper 90, until it slams off the crossbar and ricochets away. 25 raises his despairing hands as he must, and then disappears over the horizon.