'You Have Different Perspectives And That's Pretty Fascinating': Director Andrew Glazer On Showtime Documentary 'Bad Hombres' About Binational Baseball Team
(CBS Local)-- There has been plenty of discussion over the last four years about life near the U.S./Mexico border and the border wall, but there has been very little attention paid to the only professional sports team that plays on both sides of the border.
Director Andrew Glazer tells the story of the a binational baseball team from the Mexican Baseball League called the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos in his new Showtime Sports documentary "Bad Hombres," which premieres Sunday, October 16 at 9pm EST. The project took Glazer on the journey of a lifetime and he is excited for viewers to learn what life is actually like at the border.
"Most of the people trying to come into the U.S. are families and children trying to escape horrible violence in Central America," said Glazer, in an interview with CBS Local's DJ Sixsmith. "That story has been told, so what I wanted to do was show people in a way that I thought would be relatable to what life is like on the border. What life is like on those two sides and how interconnected they are. The thing that struck me to be honest is that initially in Laredo, Texas was how pervasive Spanish is spoken."
In his documentary, Glazer explores the lives of the players on the team and how their families deal with a schedule of over 120 games in the Mexican Baseball League. While Glazer's film dives into the political implications of having a baseball team in both Texas and Mexico, he says the players themselves largely ignored all of the emotionally-charged rhetoric about the border during the grind of the season.
"Even though my film has an overarching political message, the players are not covertly or overtly political in any way," said Glazer. "They are baseball players and they are living their lives and a lot of them are trying to make it to the majors and some of them were in the majors and are now finishing their careers. There wasn't a whole lot of political discussions. Inherently, what made the team fascinating is you had players from the U.S. who were Anglo-American players and Mexican American players who had a different perspective. Then you had Mexican players and some Dominican players and Cuban and people from everywhere else. There were different languages and different perspectives. Seeing how that developed over time was pretty fascinating."
Watch "Bad Hombres" on Showtime and the Showtime Anytime app.