‘There’s nothing fixable.’ He brought life to a downtown Mayfield block. Now it’s gone.
An odd sight greeted visitors of Mayfield, Ky., on Monday morning at the corner of West Broadway and 10th Street.
With windows broken and exterior crunched from the front and back by twisted metal roof material, a Chevrolet sedan was draped in a wide sheet of artificial turf.
The world is now familiar with the damage wreaked by the tornadoes that ripped through much of Western Kentucky and surrounding states Friday and Saturday, with Mayfield among the hardest hit.
But only a local would know how the turf got on top of that car: Luis ‘Chili’ Pardo’s eclectic and meaningful mix of businesses in that pocket of downtown.
The turf from Mayfield businessman and soccer coach Pardo’s ‘Soccer Factory,’ an indoor facility, had flown 100 yards and landed on a sedan from his used car lot just down the road.
Three of the four buildings Pardo co-owns with his wife Maria Mercado -- a detail shop, the Soccer Factory and a storage space that used to be a South American restaurant -- have been decimated. The building from which he runs a small used car lot is also damaged, and every car in his lot has its windows broken or took an even worse beating.
Pardo is a 40-year-old man who immigrated to the United States from Chile in the late ‘90s and landed in Mayfield to play college soccer at the former Mid-Continent University. Since starting a local car detailing business in 2003, he helped grow these few city blocks into a space for commerce, recreation and community-building.
Now that almost everything is gone, Pardo doesn’t know where to start.
The damage
“Imagine what this place will look like when they clean it up,” Pardo said, overlooking the wreckage of his detail shop and storage building from the raised, flattened space that used to be the Soccer Factory. He gestured at much of the rest of downtown to his East, much of which is in a similar state.
“It’s going to be just nothing,” Pardo said. “There’s nothing fixable.”
All that’s left of the Soccer Factory are loose strips of turf, flooring, a few flat soccer balls and remnants of a small kitchen area. Other than that, there’s hardly a sign that a building was ever there.
“It took me about two years to build the Soccer Factory, little by little,” Pardo said. “We couldn’t hire any contractors or nothing because, you know, the money wasn’t there.”
All that remained of the detail shop, where Pardo would clean and perform minor repairs for dealerships around town, were two sturdy metal poles that held an SUV aloft between them -- Pardo’s last job.
Several cars from the lot, called ‘Chilis Motors,’ were tossed in the vortex onto the site of the detail shop.
“If you look left and right, it’s all the same,” Pardo said. “That’s why you don’t know where to start: trying to clean up or trying to salvage some stuff. But still, it’s just that everything’s gone.”
A portion of the building that used to house a lumber company but now provides space for both Pardo’s dealership and an occasional large event is somewhat intact but still suffered significant damage.
Pardo and his wife used to operate a South American restaurant out of a brick building behind the dealership, named Chili Motors, but closed it due to time commitments and later used it for storage. The restaurant blended cuisine from Pardo’s native Chile with some Mediterranean dishes -- a rare combination for Mayfield, Kentucky, said Pardo.
Some portions of the brick wall there are left, but virtually nothing else.
Aside from the cars on his lot, Pardo had no insurance on his downtown properties.
He had tried to get a more affordable policy on the cherished Soccer Factory since he couldn’t afford a $500,000 policy. Six weeks ago, he was working with an agent to get the price down, but hadn’t heard back before the storm.
Pardo also still has to repay the loans he took out for his projects as well.
Still, in a town that many have compared to a war zone, Pardo has reason to be thankful: he made the decision to stop scheduled games at Soccer Factory just after 7:00 p.m. as news began to filter in about the potential severity of the storms.
Colby Green, a seven-year-old from nearby Benton, scored the last goal at Soccer Factory. She and Pardo’s son Matias squared off in a one-on-one; Green juked Matias for a goal that repaid him for an easy breakaway he had just scored on her.
The moment was caught on camera with the help of Green’s mother, who found a way to angle a camera to capture the action from above the field.
Pardo thought that would be a good idea to implement for future training sessions, so players and parents can watch scrimmage tape. He even got excited about the prospect of streaming games live on Facebook that way.
Two hours later, the facility was gone.
‘A little itty bitty place’ with a lot of potential
Mickey McManus is a friend of Pardo’s who works with his detail shop in his capacity as a recon man for Perkins Motor Plex in town. He said that Pardo’s story was, and continues to be, the American Dream.
Their relationship began in ‘03, when Pardo started detailing.
“He started just washing cars,” McManus said. “He worked and worked, then he started tinting windows… He wanted the American Dream and he was working at it.”
McManus said that Pardo always follows through with a request for help. He recalled speedy detailing jobs as well as translation on the fly -- sometimes a necessity in Mayfield, where more than 14% of the population is Hispanic, which McManus said became a prominent group employed by a poultry processing plant in the ‘90s.
Pardo helped in a pinch.
“If someone couldn’t understand us, we’d call Chili,” McManus said. “I’d put him on speakerphone and he asked them what I want him to ask.
His prominence as a businessman helped the town’s Hispanic community, according to Mayfield Mayor Kathy Stewart O’Nan.
“We have a large Hispanic population, and to represent that population is wonderful -- to have him as such a strong Hispanic businessman in Mayfield,” O’Nan said.
McManus agreed. “He didn’t boast about himself or his businesses. He just worked, and he worked for everything he had.”
But most important for Pardo, according to McManus, is the game he grew up playing. He said Pardo was teaching kids the “right way,” the way he was taught in Chile, to play soccer.
A 10,000 square foot building with a field, viewing area, small gathering space and a mini-weightroom. Pardo said that they mostly played 5x5 games there -- ‘futbolito,’ as it’s known in Chile
Pardo told the Paducah Sun in an article about Soccer Factory’s opening in February that it was a “little itty bitty place,” that served a community with a boatload of potential.
‘He’ll be right back up there’
Despite his grim surroundings, Pardo lit up when talking about how much the kids of the surrounding area -- which he said isn’t unlike his own place of origin, the coastal city of San Antonio, Chile -- enjoyed the Soccer Factory.
“Kids they’d come through that door and they’d just fly,” Pardo said. “Sometimes they won’t even say hi to you, they just fly in because they’re just so ready to get in and start playing.”
For older kids, he said he’d often let them rent the facility out for cheap as late as midnight, thinking it better that they were at the Soccer Factory instead of out on the streets unsupervised.
As he surveyed the damage -- pointing out the one wooden bench they were able to salvage from the facility and an errant cleat waiting for match from the opposite foot -- Pardo wasn’t sure what would come next.
Since first coming to grips with the unimaginable damage starting at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning when he returned from his untouched home in nearby Sedalia, the same questions have been swimming in his head: What kind of help is available? Will the town try to rebuild itself as it was? How could the Soccer Factory get rebuilt?
It’s too early for answers, but he waxed hopeful that he’d once more get to help grow the region’s youth soccer ecosystem and build community in Mayfield.
“I just want to be able to, one day, come here and it’s like ‘boom, we’re back,’” Pardo said. “We’re back in the same place we were when we left Friday night.”
Pardo’s stepdaughter Monserrath Mercado recently started a GoFundMe account specifically for Pardo’s passion project, titled “Bring Soccer Factory Back,” with a goal of raising $60,000.
For her part, Mayor O’Nan is confident that vision will come true.
“I know him enough to say that if you come back in two or three years he’ll be right back up there where he was,” she said. “He’s a very enterprising gentleman.”
This story was originally published December 14, 2021 at 7:51 AM.
