The rest of his family rooted for America. Krauze’s first memory is the Cruz Azul game his father took him to in 1979. “Do we need to declassify UFO videos to understand this?” “It was beyond the explainable,” he said. But he doesn’t know how else to account for the team’s bad karma. Leon Krauze, a Mexican historian and lead anchor at KMEX, Univision’s station in Los Angeles, said he knows there is no such thing as a curse. The team’s terrible luck has drawn comparisons to the Boston Red Sox, who were supposedly cursed for decades after the club traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees, and the Chicago Cubs, who according to legend were damned to lose by a tavern owner angry that his pet goat was not welcome at Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series. Then came a pair of swift goals from America, including an unfathomable header from the team’s goalie that ricocheted off the cleat of a Cruz Azul defender before sailing into the net. With five minutes left, Cruz Azul led by two. Typical was the 2013 finals, when the team faced off against its rival, Club America. The score was tied in the final minutes of the second half when Leon’s goalkeeper, Ángel Comizzo, kicked Cruz Azul’s striker, Carlos Hermosillo, in the face.Ī referee asked Hermosillo to tend to the blood streaming from his temple before he took a penalty kick, but he refused and then proceeded to score and win the game.īut from that point on, the team would repeatedly perform well during the regular season and come close to winning a championship, only to lose in a gut-punch. Its origins, according to lore, date to a league final held in 1997, which paired Cruz Azul against Club Leon. “I can’t believe it,” he says over and over.Ĭruz Azul wasn’t always synonymous with failure.įounded in 1927 by the Cruz Azul cement company, the team steamrolled its way to six league championships in the 1970s, earning its nickname: “The Locomotive.” Eugenio Derbez, a Cruz Azul devotee and actor who played a long-suffering supporter of the team on a popular television series, uploaded a video after the victory Sunday night in which he appears dazed.