Did you miss it? The best sports day of the year?
The events on March 29, 2025, are what make life good
As with most things in the Western world, the British get it started.
The FA Cup quarter-final kicks off while some New Yorkers are making coffee. Californians will only wake to the full-time result: a 3-0 Crystal Palace win over Fulham, a thrashing made more impressive by Palace playing away, at the venerable Craven Cottage, and by the club having never won a major trophy in its 154-year history. It is the dawn of the best sports day of the year.
Regrettably, I miss the next game on the docket, the NWSL tie between the San Diego Wave and the Orlando Pride, because of modern hygiene and housekeeping standards. I have to shower, do the dishes, and make my bed everyday? For the rest of my life? Sounds terrible. Forward Chiamaka Okwuchukwu scores within 90 seconds of coming onto the pitch, giving her the second-fastest debut goal in league history. I wish I could witness Okwuchukwu’s jubilant celebration as it happens.
I refuse to miss the other FA Cup match, the quarter-final between Nottingham Forest and Brighton & Hove Albion, so I march to the nearest British-themed pub. The game is possibly the most boring ever played. Defensive, counter-attacking football is fine except when both teams employ it. But three pints and a pile of chips never killed anyone.
As Forest and Brighton players stare at each other, my father, a Bronx native, and my friends, Neanderthals from Long Island, text me about the Yankees. Aaron Judge! Cody Bellinger! Jazz Chisholm! They and others hit a bunch of home runs—off of disgraced former teammate Nestor Cortes, no less—thanks to deformed baseball bats. Yankees Nation wouldn’t be this excited if Russia unconditionally surrendered its land grabs in Ukraine and restored peace in Europe.
It's nap time, so I head back to the Airbnb, pull up MLB.TV, and put on the commentary of Tom McCarthy and John Kruk, who call the Phillies’ second game of the season. I wake up to a reliever I’ve never heard of closing out an 11-6 Philadelphia win. Apparently, starting pitcher Jesus Luzardo had an excellent team debut, and Kyle Schwarber continued to be the unlikeliest and most entertaining leadoff hitter in baseball. There is typically nothing relaxing about the Philadelphia Phillies. It’s a welcome reprieve.
I switch to the game back home in San Diego, where the Padres host the Atlanta Braves, but that’s not really where my attention lies. I pay Google $83 a month for YouTube TV, but its satellite beams don’t or are not allowed to reach Mexico. Yet another idiotic barrier between the two countries. So I “watch” the men’s Elite Eight through gamecast and texts.
My pick of Florida to win it all thrusted me to the top of my bracket pool, and in the group chat I receive broadsides from all angles after they trail Texas Tech by ten in the second half. The chat goes quiet after Florida completes the comeback and punches its ticket to the Final Four. Duke later beats Alabama to advance, and on the women’s side USC somehow advances to the Elite Eight without an injured Juju Watkins, and Paige Bueckers scores 40 for UConn in a dominant win.
The sun sets and it’s my turn to play something. On three Sundays a month, Mexico City shuts down major roads to cars and opens them to humans. Sometimes, like when I’m here, the city does so on Saturday nights in an event billed as Paseo Nocturno. I rent an Ecobici and merge into “traffic” on the Paseo de la Reforma. I know next-to-no Spanish, but I don’t need to on a bike. Hand gestures and smiles and nods are universal. Across town, Club América, Mexico’s most successful football club, beats the brakes of Tigres UANL. I wanted to go that game, but the bikes won out.
My ass is sore after a couple hours on the plastic seat, so I shove my bike into a dock and get tacos and a beer. Dinner costs me $6 American. For dessert I stop at an Oxxo for helado, and back at the rental I pray to the Apple TV+ gods and consequently I’m able to get the San Diego FC-LAFC stream.
The Generic Team Name Derby is set to become a premier rivalry in the MLS, and the first edition lives up to the hype. Four yellow cards are shown before the 25th minute. The first half features five goals. A fifth yellow card in the second half disqualifies LAFC’s Igor Jesus from the game. Despite playing down a man, LAFC threatens several times to even the score at three apiece, but SDFC walks off the pitch with its first home victory ever. I go to sleep.
The night before, at a bar that spills onto the sidewalk, like they seemingly all do in Mexico City, I make conversation with a local and we trade travel stories.
“On what trip did you feel most alive, most like yourself?” I ask. She cites her last trip, to Brazil, and she asks me the same and I tell her one of my trips to London and she asks why and I tell her because all I did for a week is walk around and watch football.
There are many world-renowned cultural institutions in Mexico City, and friends, family, and colleagues suggested many of them—Museo Nacional de Antropologia, the Frida Kahlo Museum, and Teotihuacán, to name a few. I’ll get to them, if not on this, then a future trip. But sports are culture, too, and we don’t look at sports reverently and retrospectively from a distance. We participate in them as they’re happening.
Love Oxxos. Love CDMX. When I was there, I got super drunk on a Xoximilco boat, came home, tried to sleep it off, woke up in the evening still drunk, and went to Oxxo for a donut. Probably looked like hell. On my walk back, eating the donut, some guy was like "Provecho" and it made my night/life.