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Mark Bieter. It’s a professional soccer game in a college football town played in a U.S. stadium by two non-U.S. teams who have never faced each other and might never face each other again. It was practically an impossible dream. For example, one basic requirement was trucking in  85,000 square feet of Kentucky bluegrass to be placed over plastic decking and two layers of tarp to cover the Boise State  field, which is artificial turf colored blue and trademarked so no other university can copy it. When the game is over, all that grass will be rolled up, shipped away and planted in a park.

The original cocktail napkin plan hadn’t anticipated all that. The only idea then was to bring Athletic Bilbao to Boise for a game during Jaialdi, the massive international festival Idaho’s Basque community holds every five years. Athletic is an iconic team, founded in the 1890s in Bilbao, the Basque Country’s largest city. It’s ranked among the top 30 soccer teams in the world. Athletic plays in 53,000-seat San Mamés stadium, which was built in 1913, remodeled a century later, and is now one of the premier soccer venues in Europe. They’ve been champions of La Liga, Spain’s top professional division, eight times, and winners of Spain’s most prestigious cup competition, the Copa del Rey, 23 times, the most of any team besides FC Barcelona.

What really makes Athletic unique is its policy from the beginning to take only players born in the Basque Country (including the three French provinces) or brought up in the club’s farm teams, the cantera system. No other club in Europe has such a policy, but Athletic has stuck to it with few exceptions, through civil war and the Franco dictatorship.

“The players who wear Athletic’s jersey could make up a Basque national team,” said Beñat Zarrabeitia, a Basque journalist who covers the club. “There are a lot of other teams that are just as Basque as Athletic, that have Basque players and that represent the Basque Country well. But without a doubt Athletic is the best known because of its [Basque-only] philosophy.”

Club Tijuana has a different, shorter history. It was founded in 2007 and didn’t reach Mexico’s top division until 2011. But it’s done well in that short time, winning the Liga MX championship in 2012. “They will be very good adversaries” for Bilbao, said Father Jesús Camacho, a priest at Saint Mary’s Catholic church in Boise and a chaplain for the friendly. Father Camacho is a native of Guadalajara, a lifelong soccer fan who at age 71 still plays in pickup games every Sunday. “European teams usually play more physically. Latin American soccer is more about player’s [individual] ability. There’s more dribbling.”

TRIANGULATING THE BILBAO-TIJUANA-BOISE CONNECTION

It’s not the only contrast surrounding the game. The unusual turn of events that brought these two teams together created another pairing that wasn’t anticipated: A matchup of two of the most significant immigrant groups in the American West whose experiences over more than a century in Idaho share many parallels, yet tell different stories about where they came from and how they live now.

For Athletic Bilbao, the friendly is as close to a home game as they could get, 5,155 miles from San Mamés stadium. They’ll be supported by many Basque descendants, Idahoans and others from the Basque diaspora who made the same trip decades earlier. (As an example and a disclosure, I have roots in the town of Lezama, the location of Athletic’s training facility.) Basques first went to Idaho in the late 1800s and thousands followed over the years, most as itinerant sheep herders, a job few Americans were willing to do — “rock bottom,” as one historian wrote.

They didn’t do it because they loved it. Many had left a hand-to-mouth existence in the Basque Country. About half of the Basques who went to Idaho couldn’t read or write. If their family’s owned property, it was generally passed to the oldest child, and the choices for the others were limited: stay at home, work for the older sibling and remain celibate for life; join the seminary or convent; or work for low pay in one of the suffocating plants in Bilbao. That was about it. In that context, it wasn’t so farfetched to move to the other side of the Earth and work alone in the hills with 2,000 sheep, especially since they could earn as much in a few years here as they could in a lifetime back home.

With that motivation, Basques did well in Idaho. Hundreds were hired by sheep outfits strictly on the recommendation of relatives or friends who had come before them. By 1910, there were about 1,000 Basques in Idaho. But just because the sheep industry wanted them didn’t mean all Idahoans did. At first, Basques were sometimes perceived as suspicious drifters who spoke a strange language and were just looking to turn a quick buck.

The Caldwell, Idaho Tribune complained in 1909 that the “sheepmen of Owyhee county [Idaho] are sorely beset by Biscayans [Bizkaia is the province where Bilbao is located]… and trouble may result most any time.” That was because the business practices and culture of “the Bascos are on par with those of the Chinaman.” Basques were “filthy, treacherous and meddlesome… clannish and undesirable,” and unless something was done they would “make life impossible for the white man.”

That view dissipated once Basque immigrants ended up staying and marrying (albeit, often to other Basques). The same Caldwell newspaper wrote in the 1930s that the U.S. was “the land of [Basques’] adoption, and they make good citizens.” Idaho tourism brochures began to feature photos of Basque dancers. And even though large-scale Basque immigration has stopped, the Basques’ sense of identity has continued and multiplied as U.S.-born spouses and Basque-American children have been brought into the mix. One second-generation Basque said that “when you know somebody is Basque, you just have a different relationship with them. You have something in common by virtue of your blood. It really doesn’t matter if that’s the only thing you share.” It’s part of the reason Athletic is wearing their home uniforms at the friendly.

HOME TEAM VS HOME TEAM AT BRONCO STADIUM

For Tijuana, the friendly  might also be as close to a home game as they could get, 1,000 miles from Estadio Caliente. Mexicans are by far the largest ethnic group in Idaho: About one of every 10 Idahoans is Mexican or of Mexican descent. Like Basques, Mexicans entered Idaho before it became a state in 1890 and, like Basques, they made a significant impact in specific industries, principally with railroads and agriculture. But around the 1960s, at a point when Basque immigration into the state had essentially ended, Mexican immigration took off. Between 1980 and 2010, the Hispanic community (which is about 85 percent Mexican) grew by almost five times in Idaho. The 2010 U.S. census recorded about 149,000 Mexicans in the state, 9.5 percent of Idaho’s total population...(to be followed)

(read the whole article in The Blue Review)