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PART 2

A talented tennis player, Jennifer Dempsey ranked in the top two at Nacogdoches High School. Her athletic pursuits begged for more attention, and being a family of limited means, younger brother Clint, 13 at the time, was forced to put his soccer development on the backburner after three years of family sacrifice supported his pay-to-play club needs. It was only fair; Clint is one of five children (younger than Ryan, Jennifer, and Crystal; and older than Lance) and was by no means the only child in the family with sporting aspirations.

The bargaining for shares started when the Dempsey boys heard about soccer tryouts for select teams in Dallas in 1993. “We didn’t even know what a select team meant,” Clint’s mom, Debbie, tells me over the phone. (I can hear Clint’s dad, Aubrey, agreeing in the background). “We got this flyer and took Ryan, our eldest, for a tryout. Clint came along just for fun.” The flyer came from a newsletter called The Pitch that Ryan had picked up at a tournament with his recreational team. There was one more day of tryouts for the Longhorns club in Dallas, but it was the next day. “And as the story goes,” Debbie says, “it turns out to be a mistake. It was a girl’s tryout. It seemed really unusual; I knew it had to be fate, because it was for the Longhorn club. They don’t need to search for players because they’ve got thousands of them in Dallas trying desperately to get on the teams. A young lady approached us and said if we left our name and number the boy’s coach would call us. Later I find out that the tryout is nothing. They already know who they want on the team and just have an official day of tryouts to say they did. Which is, again, why looking back, putting all the pieces together, I think it had to be fate.”

The woman at the girl’s practice told the Dempseys that Ryan’s age group was full but they were still looking for kids for the 1983 team, which just so happened to be Clint’s age group. The Under-11 coach calls some days later and wants to see Clint, intrigued about a family who would drive 3 hours for a tryout that didn’t exist. If the coach liked him, the Dempseys had many a 3-hour trip to consider. “I didn’t know how we’d be able to do anything like that, even one time a week,” Debbie says. “But the coach was persistent that we go. I was trying to talk ourselves out of it. So my husband, Aubrey, takes him up there. Clint walks onto the field and starts kicking the ball and the coach says he wants him.”

Just starts kicking the ball around. Sounds like something a mother would say, exaggerating a child’s talent, but the story holds true. “I just sort of juggled the ball around,” Clint remembers. “I didn’t really do much of anything, and [the coach] was saying that he wanted me. My dad was like ‘wait a second. Don’t you want to watch him for a while to make sure he is what you want?’ I don’t know if my dad really wanted us to [play on this level] or not. He wanted us to go up there and have the experience, but I don’t think he was ready to make that type of commitment yet.”

But Aubrey signed him up, without even asking Debbie. At 9 Clint could juggle a ball and that was all coach needed to know. “He’s telling me they signed a contract,” Debbie recalls. “I mean, this is so foreign—they signed a contract. Now here Clint was going two or three times a week to practice three hours away. The kid is 10. Plus there’s the cost of uniforms and bags and coaching expenses. I don’t know why we did it. But we just did.”

To get back and forth from Dallas, they planned on using a neighbor’s motor home. The kids could study on the way up and back. With five kids, as far as eight years apart, the parents didn’t see any other way. But the motor home became obsolete when the parents of Clint’s teammates opened their houses to the Dempseys. The generosity, Debbie recalls, was amazing, however, there was an underlying motive. They made some incredible friendships, Debbie remembers, but the team wanted Clint to stay in Dallas, no bones about it. If the game was on a Saturday, they wanted him in Dallas the night before. “It was amazing how serious and competitive it was,” Debbie says. “That was under-11.”

Even with the help, Aubrey and Debbie realized they were going to have to cut back to do this. Working as much as they could—he as a carpenter and construction engineer, she a nurse—was not enough to keep up. Thanks to soccer, the family now had thousands of dollars in new expenses every new season. Thanks to soccer, though, there wasn’t time for hunting trips anymore. So Aubrey could sell his guns. Much-loved family activities, like camping, boating, and fishing, were given up. The family was now always at a soccer field. Entertainment was soccer. Family time was soccer. “There just wasn’t any time anymore,” Debbie says “There was the rare trip to Six Flags, maybe, but if I wasn’t at a soccer field I was trying to work as much as I could.”

They worried and sacrificed and worried that maybe they were sacrificing too much. Jennifer was getting more competitive at tennis, and the parents couldn’t be in all the different places at the same time. So after a few years of giving so much time to Dallas and soccer, they decided to stop. Clint had to give up playing for the Longhorns. All the kids, the parents admit, were very good at obliging each other. With five of them, they didn’t have much choice. But after reading some of the interviews Clint has given since finding notoriety—almost all of which focus on his novel past—Debbie says she learned just how let down he really was to have to give it up. “I would read these articles,” she tells me, “And see how deeply disappointed he was to not be able to compete at that level. He is just so competitive. He’s gonna play until he wins and then, OK, game’s over. When they were kids, I couldn’t even sit out by the pool because they had to race and swim laps, and I had to time them. We’d keep doing it until Clint won. Nobody could just relax and splash around.”

Not yet a teenager, Clint admits today that at the time he begrudgingly traded the regular six-hour round trips to play on the reigning regional champion team for a recreational league closer to home. “But it was a blessing in disguise,” he says looking back. “We all got to spend more time with Jennifer.”

It was not long after the re-purposing of the family finances that Jennifer passed away from a sudden brain aneurism. The long story is you never get over a loss like that and words can’t describe it (a post-goal point to the heavens does just about say it all). The short reality of it found Clint back on a club team—this time the Dallas Texans—and again three hours away. Toward the end of his tenure with the Longhorns, other parents started complaining that Clint wasn’t showing up to all the practices—due to the excessive commute—but he was still playing entire games. He was subsequently consigned to play just half of each game. But the Texans coach said missing practices wouldn’t be a problem on his team. “With the gas prices being what they are today,” Clint figures, “we probably wouldn’t have been able to do any of that.”

Back in Dallas the teenaged Dempsey had a new coach, one who didn’t know anything about the kid who was supposed to be so good. So he started from the bottom, just as he did on the Under-11 team, and just as he is doing now at Fulham. “He’s had to prove himself again and again in England,” Debbie says. “He’ll call sometimes frustrated and I say, Clint, this is nothing different than what you’ve done your entire life. Which just cements the fact that if he puts his mind to it, it’s going to happen.”

Those years Clint played on club teams were a financially extreme existence. Everyone, including their banker, was telling them that they were crazy, that it wasn’t worth it, the sports, the sacrifice. They said the kids wouldn’t go on to be professional athletes. But Aubrey and Debbie saw young stars on TV saying, ‘My parents always believed in me and said that I could do it. And to go for it.’ In the face of sacrifice the parents plainly stuck by the basics, telling the kids, “We’ll do our part if you do yours.”

And that’s basically how it went. Aubrey sold the family boat. That paid for a fall season. They figured something else out to come up with the January fees and so on. Multiple kids, multiple teams. “We’d look back,” Debbie recalls, “and say, ‘we’ve been doing this for four years,’ and then it was nine years. I have no idea how we did it. People would take them to tournaments. We couldn’t afford to fly to Colorado for a tournament, but there was a mother of one of Clint’s teammates who worked for an airline and got him standby tickets. There was always somebody offering to help us cut corners and save money or make payment plans. If it were not for all the people working with us, it would not have happened. And if gas cost then what it costs now, it would not have happened.”

High gas prices alone could have killed Clint’s soccer career, but somehow I think the family still would have found a way. “Just a lot of encouragement, reminders, and really strong faith is what got us all through it,” Debbie says. (Again, as throughout our conversation, I hear Aubrey agree in the background, but this time I hear a loud cheer). “And we know that’s what Jennifer would have wanted for him. I still have a little sign at the house that says ‘Go Clint’ that she colored. She glued a quarter in the middle of it and it says Kick Butt. That’s kind of how we always have been. Just go out there and kick butt.”

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check back in the coming days for Parts 3, 4, and 5

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banner photo courtesy of ISI Photos

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