Englishman in New Mexico: Sport and Recreation

In comparison to the adventurous trip up north to Utah, I have had a more subdued few weeks, but naturally, there have still been plenty of exciting international experiences that are worthy of mention!

I was keen to see a football match during my time here in order to see how it compared with football in the UK, and it's fair to say it was somewhat different! The men's and women's UNM teams often play on the same day and so I was able to watch the second half of the women's game against University of California Santa Barbara followed by the men's match against Drake University. I had relatively low expectations given that every other match I've watched finished 1-0 (Wolves v Ipswich, Mexico v Switzerland, Great Britain v Uruguay). Indeed, the UNM men managed to dominate play throughout the majority of their match but conceded a cheap goal due to some defensive errors late in the game, thus perpetuating my streak of 1-0 scorelines. The women had earlier gone down 2-0 but owing to my late arrival, I only saw the second goal, and thus treat it as a 1-0 result at least on my part!

UNM men (in red) take on the Drake team, from Des Moines, Iowa

What was most enlightening about the match was more to do with off-pitch factors than on. The quality of football was reasonably good, although this was unsurprising given how seriously American universities take their sport. However, two things that were unusual were the fact that the scoreboard counted down from 45:00 twice, rather than going up continuously to 90:00 and stopping partway. Secondly, some of the terminology used was distinctly dubious. I am hardly the ideal candidate for the next Match of the Day pundit, but I know enough about football to recognise that the phrase 'foul committed on UNM' would imply that UNM had been fouled and would receive a free-kick. Conversely, when the offending side committed an infraction, the foul was 'on them' whereas I would always have argued it was 'by them'. This blatant (and consistent) error as far as I was concerned did not really detract from the game and is merely an intriguing cultural observation.

As with the baseball match, the national anthem was played prior to the match, prompting raucous applause, and throughout the game the tannoy system was unused except to advertise various local businesses.

The following week, I had to go into the city in order to take a photograph for a class project comparing a historical image of Albuquerque with a present-day one. For this, I went into Downtown with a couple of friends and photographed the Occidental Life Building, a Venetian Revival building in the financial district, and compared its surroundings in 1941 to those found today.

Gold Avenue, 1941

Gold Avenue, 2013

I had decided that since I was going to be in town, it made sense to do something else before returning to UNM, and so my friends and I walked from Downtown to the Old Town with the specific intent of finding the American International Rattlesnake Museum, an emporium of all things ophidian. Though its name suggests it is a vast international museum, it is in fact little more than three rooms housed in an unassuming adobe building in the Old Town, but its small physical size is made up for by the fact that the collection uses up all available space from floor to ceiling in each room and as a result the museum is able to house no fewer than thirty-four species of rattlesnake, the most in one place anywhere in the world. Furthermore, there were also tortoises, two types of snapping turtle, a scorpion, a tarantula, a black widow spider and even a Gila Monster, one of only two species of venomous lizard in the world.

Having not come across any rattlesnakes on any of the outdoor adventures I'd had so far, the museum more than compensated as it offered close encounters with a variety of deadly reptiles (and some not so deadly), although it was also enlightening as to just how harmless rattlesnakes really are. I was aware of the fact that snakes only rattle to indicate fear or alert other creatures to their presence, and so any observant human should be easily able to avoid being bitten. Furthermore, rattlesnakes often contain too little venom to kill a human because their prey are usually far smaller than a person, so only a handful of species are truly dangerous. These factors, along with the availability of a range of anti-venoms, mean that only around 1 in 1,000 rattlesnake bites prove lethal, accounting for a total of eight deaths per year. Nevertheless, I would still rather encounter snakes in glass tanks than find one in the open, and when one Western Diamondback Rattlesnake began rattling at me, it was genuinely quite intimidating.

Two Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes

The superbly camouflaged Southwestern Speckled Rattlesnake

The bizarre Gila Monster

Gila Monster

After leaving the museum, the day still had time for another new activity, and so it was that I found myself that evening watching my first ever American football match. In both 2012 and 2013 I had attempted to watch the Super Bowl and both times had given up after about half an hour; the first time I watched merely out of curiosity and the second was to try and establish whether the first was just a bad game or whether I was allergic to the sport in general (it turns out I am!) Either way, I was not prepared to spend four months at a US university and not watch the country's biggest sport, so off I went to watch UNM play UNLV (University of Nevada Las Vegas). The event began with the national anthem and then a display on the pitch by the UNM marching band and a load of cheerleaders enthusiastically spelling out 'Go Lobos' (UNM's nickname is the Lobos and their mascot is a wolf; 'lobo' means wolf in Spanish). Coming from a school with its own naval marching band and being a fan of British pomp and circumstance, I thought the band was unnecessarily camp in its movements and attire; there was too much bobbing up and down and theatrical running around to be dignified, although maybe this is due to my familiarity with military marching bands instead of bands adorned with sequins and glitter!

The marching band

The sun sets over the red, UNM-supporting crowd

The actual match itself was unfortunately tedious and so I still can't say I particularly enjoy American football. It was a real shame because I really genuinely tried to embrace the occasion but the whole experience merely reinforced my belief that American football is one of the worst sports imaginable. Perhaps if I had never watched football or rugby before (the most relevant sports for comparison) or if I did not relish the thrilling tenseness of a tennis match, I might have had a different opinion. However, I stood in the stands for three hours to watch a sporting contest of sixty-minute duration, in which time the longest continuous spell of play was about fifteen seconds. I don't regret going by any means, but having actually witnessed a full match, I could comfortably write a treatise on why I don't like American football, although time and space are limited. I shall instead simply state that stopping play every time anything happens really detracts from the appeal of the sport, as does replacing the entire eleven-man onfield team whenever they are required to defend instead of attack - I genuinely counted at least 61 players on one team, compared with the three substitutes allowed in football and seven in rugby. It has been suggested that American football is more like chess played out on a field and that definitely came through in the tactical nature of the sport, but the constant interruptions to the game made for tiring viewing. I can only hope that the USA soon fully embraces a tactical sport involving constant, flowing play, a limited number of substitutes and players versatile enough to attack, defend, pass, tackle, kick and run: rugby!

UNM lost, by the way.

A ludicrous number of UNLV players return after half time

A rare moment during which the ball was actually in play

The following day, there was a small group going for a short hike in the Sandia mountains, and I went along too and was able to meet up with most of the people with whom I had climbed Wheeler Peak at the beginning of September. This time, we covered much less ground but it was still very good to get out and explore the mountains, especially as I had previously been to the Sandias but passed over them on the cable car rather than climbing up partway from the base of the mountains. This time, there were no chipmunks or other wildlife to be seen, but the view to Albuquerque was again impressive.

Downtown Albuquerque seen from the Sandia foothills

The view up from the trail towards the Sandia Crest

Outer parts of the city

The hiking group

I elected not to return to watch UNM play American football (at least, not for a few weeks), but the next fixture promised some excitement as it was the Rio Grande derby against New Mexico State University (NMSU), based three hours south in New Mexico's second city, Las Cruces. On Thursday evening the key part of the pre-match pandemonium was held, the traditional 'burning the Aggie'. In a rather pagan tradition, each year the students of UNM gather to ritually incinerate the mascot of NMSU, the Aggie. ('Aggie' is a nickname derived from the word 'agricultural', mocking NMSU's rural heritage). This event reminded me of Bonfire Night, although it was a slightly overdone Americanised version that played out to the soundtrack of dubsteb music at about a thousand decibels and instead of allowing the flames to slowly consume the unfortunate Aggie, it was seemingly soaked in petrol so that it went up almost the instant it was lit. Naturally, after such a defiant display of superiority over the rival university, UNM went on to take the match 66-17, although I for one was not among the crowd.

The Aggie, before...

...and after

Each year, the city plays host to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the largest hot air balloon festival in the world and, according to the event's website, both the largest annual international event in the USA and the most photographed event on the planet. I am not at all sure about this last claim but even if it is not the most photographed event, the balloon fiesta certainly deserves to be. My friend Alex and I were up before five o'clock on a Sunday morning and were standing outside in the cold waiting for the balloons to begin even before the sun came up. Just after seven, the balloons began rising one by one from the field to the north of Albuquerque to start the mass ascension, during which around five hundred balloons from 35 US states and 18 countries took to the New Mexican skies.

The first balloon flew the Star Spangled Banner and the national anthem was played over the tannoy system and once again it was applauded! There followed a colourful and humorous display of balloons of all shapes and sizes for the ensuing two hours, and we only left to return to UNM once the last stragglers were leaving the field.