Memo

By Ed Piper

I noticed the Costco checker's name on his badge and it was Guillermo, so I asked, "Are you Memo?" and we got to talking about Mexico.

Memo, my Spanish tutor while I lived a year in Mexico City after college, has nothing to do with sports. But I will tie him in with the basketball I played there while I was teaching English at a private secondary school, then ESL to adults in corporations around Mexico City.

Memo, by the way, is the normal nickname for Guillermo, if you're wondering. Just as my nickname in Spanish, Lalo, is a common nickname for Eduardo (though I'm an Edwin--but nobody recognized that, nor Eduviges, which is the Spanish counterpart for Edwin and can be male or female--so everyone would laugh when I tried that).

He was an engineer who taught at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico City, the brother of my boss when I taught adult ESL. A real nice guy, he would come to my room (I'd say apartment, but it wasn't) every Tuesday and Thursday morning after I returned from teaching a 7 a.m. ESL class at a corporation (KFC, or Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, or GTE Sylvania, etc.).

Memo, a short guy who remarked on my then-startling appearance (a long beard and hair, when I had hair, on my 6'5" height), picked out a grammar book in Spanish at my request and that became our textbook for our one-hour tutoring sessions. I love grammar, got good at it in English (taught it later in high school), then learned quite a bit from Memo and the grammar book about Spanish grammar.

We would speak in Spanish the entire hour, so I was getting a ton of Spanish--including technical terms I would use--in a short time.

Meanwhile, I was playing basketball for an adult club team, unaffiliated with any school or college. We were Los Brujos (the Wizards, long before the Washington Wizards were named), and we were the only men's team coached by a woman. Her name was Yula Moguel Viveros, and unfortunately she already had a boy friend, Marco, who was a reserve guard on the team. (They never did get married, from what I can tell.) This is 20 years before I met my wife.

Yula had played on the national junior basketball team for Mexico, and she was a strict taskmaster who, though she didn't speak a word of English, had the latest offenses and defenses from the U.S. by looking at the diagrams in books and translating the words one-by-one: "wing" is ala, "forward" is delantero, stuff like that.

What was pretty funny was her pressing me into duty as translator early in my year in Mexico City when I still didn't know much Spanish (I took a class and practiced and memorized quite a bit) when she invited two American coaches for a chat after a clinic. She kept saying Dile, Dile, which means "Tell him" whatever she wanted to communicate to one of them--I didn't know this, so I would just ignore the Dile and try to get the rest of what she told me to tell the two gringos.

I don't know if they were college coaches or what in the U.S., but I would imagine. They were astounded at her employing the latest patterns during a segment she taught at the coaches clinic that they had met her at. (I wasn't invited to the clinic.)

I think what happened is that she invited them to a Sunday evening practice we had--she worked us hard--and they observed what she was running with us.

So they told me to ask her how she knew these patterns. She said she just took a book by a U.S. coach and translated ala for "wing", etc. They were quite impressed.

Yula drilled us. Like I said, she was a taskmaster. Our practices, since we were all adults in our early 20's who worked during the day, were from 9 to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday. She would run us, too, during most of the practice--we were in far better condition than our opponents. We employed a full-court press. She put me on the ball so that the inbounder had trouble seeing past me. Then our guards would scamper about and steal the ball quite frequently.

We won a lot of games off conditioning and the press. Other teams got flustered, and tired, and turned the ball over.

One time I met my match in a 6'5" center who was a captain in the Mexican army. I don't remember his name. He was good, and he had me in foul trouble early on. We got blown out. But another thing I learned was that he owned the refs. I learned that if you make comments but the refs don't understand you (as I was doing in English), it has no psychological effect on the refs. So I learned some key words in Spanish to use when needed.

One Sunday morning, after I had spent Friday night and all day Saturday in bed in agony with la turista (the trots), Yula sent Marco (who was Marco Antonio, Mark Anthony, a common male name) into my room to get me up and go to El Desierto de los Leones ("The Desert of the Lions"), a sprawling park outside Mexico City. I had never been there.

She ran all of us on the team, me included, over rock formations, down dirt paths, in a winding route in the park. Later she told me that because I was willing to run hard and take part in these workouts, she could push the other members of our team: "Look at Edwin (she's about the only person that called me Edwin), he's doing it. So should you."

The dream came to an end when, after the Mexican peso was devalued twice in two months, a friend of the family who was the editor of a small newspaper in Goleta, next to Santa Barbara, asked my mother for my contact number and called next door to my neighbor in Mexico City.

Bob Lauffer, who I had done an internship for during my senior year at Chico State, offered me the job of being his sports editor. I said, "No, I can't do it," but by the next morning I had planned my exit to the Goleta Today (the name of the now-defunct newspaper). I just could not keep living in Mexico City with my ESL income halved in value, then halved again. This was in the election year of 1976, when Jose Lopez Portillo became president. Corruption was rampant, and inflation was in the triple or quadruple digits--something we never experience here (other than during the Great Depression).

I crushed my coach Yula's basketball heart by waiting till after practice on a Friday night, near the end of October in 1976, asking Marco to drop off the other team members before me. Then, in his car, I told her I was leaving to go back to California. That meant the end of our team, which didn't win another game, I believe, since the press and our offense centered around a big 6'5" gringo who, though not great, was effective in that league. She started crying and never stopped. I had to go take the Metro (subway) on foot.

Yula did forgive me, later visiting Southern California with her mother, Lucila. We had a good visit. She even got to attend a girls basketball game at Westlake High School in Westlake Village, where I substitute-taught and announced the girls games. She sat next to me, and we conversed (in Spanish) in between times when I had to announce a foul or substitution (in English). I lost my voice as a result.

That is the story of Memo, my tutor, and Los Brujos, my basketball team.