Beef tongue taco—part uno.
Recently we found ourselves in the center of Mexico on Highway 57 just north of San Luis Potosi—two days after two American DEA agents were shot (one killed) on Highway 57 just south of San Luis Potosi. They were in a big black Chevy SUV with tinted windows. We were in a big black Ford SUV with tinted windows. We came to a roadblock, which looked improvised, and consisted of a couple of piles of tires in the road. Several serious-looking men in black stood by, making downward gestures with one hand while gripping automatic weapons with the other. Their dull gray rifles hung from straps like necklaces with very large pendants.
We—Dallas-area golf pros Gilbert Freeman and Dan Strimple, and me—were reprising a trip we’d made five years before. As a kid, Gilbert had spent his summers in Mexico’s vast, tropical interior, along for the ride in the station wagon as his father, a world class lepidopterologist, searched for new species of butterflies. Each year they headquartered in Ciudad Valles, at a little hotel with an attached nine-holer called Covadonga that was as much jungle as golf course. There little Gilbert learned the game. When he went back for the first time in 32 years—with his father’s ashes—he took Dan and me along.
That trip became a story in Sports Illustrated called “Back to the Mariposas,” a chapter in a book called Golf Dads, and a topic of conversation for us ever since. When someone bought the defunct hotel and overgrown golf course two years ago, Freeman was compelled to introduce himself to the new owner, the charismatic Juan-Ignacio Torres Landa. They became friends. Freeman got the old gang together to play mysterious Covadonga again, to meet Senor Landa, and to see some of his spectacular empire.
We flew from Dallas on American Eagle non-stop to San Luis Potosi’s little airport, a twin to the air field in Santa Fe. We laughed like fraternity boys at dinner at El Cielo Tinto. We toasted with Juan’s favorite drink: medium-dark local rum, cola, and mineral water. We discussed Huasteca Secreta, Juan’s adventure tourism business, and one of his other holdings, a bull fighting arena. After the tenth cocktail and fiftieth belly laugh, I looked up at the stars through the roofless restaurant and felt pleasantly adrift. The next morning, we teed it up.
San Luis Potosi is not a golf town. Its one million people make do with only two courses, both private. We played La Loma—which means “the hill”—which perches above the reddish brown smog hovering over the city below. Its glass and stucco clubhouse is huge and avante garde, and its very entertaining Jack Nicklaus golf course tumbles through a rock strewn desert.
After after-golf cervezas and tacos con lengua—beef tongue, delicious—we drove north toward the next adventure. Then we slowed for the roadblock. Ice formed on the back of my neck as we waited to discover if the guys at the roadblock were gangbangers, freelancers, or Federales.