Some of you may have heard me tell the story of back in the day I wore homemade cardboard shin guards. In the days of yester-year growing up with 6 siblings was expensive for my family. This meant a lot of homemade clothes and make shifting things to fit our needs. Well I grew up an amazing soccer play. We took first place in first grade. Fitting, right? Sad that my soccer skills peaked in the first grade but I never let that get me down. Well there were some days when Niels and I had games that would overlap. This was always my worst nightmare because Niels and I shared shin guards because we could not afford a pair for each of us. So when games overlapped Niels always got to use the shin guards and I was stuck with making my own for that game. This scared me to death because many times before the game started the refs would come and make us show them that we were wearing the guards or we could not play. Lucky for me they either didn't check on that day or I was "using the bathroom" during that time. Well oh how times have changed. I must say that as embarrassing as it was at the time I learned a lot from that experience and I am very grateful for all the sacrifices my parents have made over the years and that they were willing to spend their hard earned money to get me involved in sports at a young age and teach me to be resourceful.
Friday just after I got to work I was told that the boss had some extra tickets to the World Cup qualifier match between Mexico and Guyana. Seeing a soccer game was high on my list of things to do while here but the Mexico league ended just as I got here so I didn't think it would happen. But thanks to the upcoming Wold Cup I got my chance. So after work me and a few of my coworkers headed to the game. We took the Metro (subway) which will get its own blog entry at a later point. We got to Aztec Stadium which is freakishly huge. Over 105,000 people there screaming on "El Tri" or Mexico. The game was a ton of fun. We had VIP booth seats and a great view. Towards the end of the game some of the fans started going crazy. Mexico had the game in the bag and people began to loose interest in the game and started to fight each other. I have never see so much food and drinks thrown in a game. People in the upper deck kept throwing stuff at the people below. It was crazy. I thought there was going to be a riot. Soon the cops flooded the area and the game ended and people calmed down. All and all it was easily in my top 3 sporting events I have ever been to.
Me and some nino.
Mexico's Aztec mascot
We must have switched off or something because my memory is that you got the shin guards if our games overlapped. The worst was when the cardboard fell out of my sock and I had to pretend it wasn't mine.
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