This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

PART 3

Lance Dempsey now coaches soccer in North Carolina. Seeing the game from the other side of the sidelines gave him a new respect for the work his older brother put in. “My parents sacrificed a lot,” he tells me. “But I don’t want it to sound like something crazy, like we were homeless, like Clint was the focus of the family. My parents did what any good parents would do. They helped all of us. Clint put in a lot of work.”

That work began as is typical among siblings, with the younger brother trying to keep up with his older brother. Ryan, now 30, has five years on Clint, whose feet were firmly placed in the elder’s footprints at a very young age. The boys took to the free form and constant flow of soccer over the traditional family favorites, football and baseball. The Dempseys weren’t initially a soccer family and Nacogdoches didn’t have anything similar to a club team. The boys played pick-up games in their largely Hispanic neighborhood, learning from their peers without coaching or structure. They ran through the house and school hallways with their favorite soccer jerseys on.

“Football was popular,” Clint says of his hometown. “But our high school was like the a team you see getting beat in Friday Night Lights. We played all the sports when we were little, but as we got older and had to chose, we were all about soccer.” The passion really hit its stride when the 1994 World Cup came to the United States. “We didn’t even know there was international soccer until then,” Ryan says. “There was just so much personality on the field. The international flavor of that tournament just made us crazy for the game. And they talked about this guy named Maradona. We had to learn more so we ordered one of those Eurosport videos of his highlights from the 1986 World Cup. From then on we would try to duplicate his moves in the yard. It wasn’t practice, but it served as the best practice.”

The front yard was the real testing ground even as the boys grew and joined recreational teams. Ryan’s earliest memories date back before there was even a soccer ball to kick. “When Clint was small, we lived in Drewery Trailer Park off the south loop in Nacogdoches,” Ryan remembers. “It was privately owned so the roads were always terrible, getting back there was hard. That land backed up to our grandparents’ house with a fence running in between. They had an old basketball goal and ball. We would use the basketball as a soccer ball and the fence as a goal. We were barefoot and dirty as hell. The ball came up to Clint’s hip—he would kick it as little guys do and chase it, fall down, and get up and do it again.” Games went on all day; friends stayed overnight, sometimes multiple nights in a row. When Lance came of age (he’s 2 years younger than Clint), it became 2-verus-1, the two younger boys against the dominate elder. Game on. By the time they were teenagers, the competition was fierce, rarely just ‘lets go out and kick the ball around.’ Someone won, someone lost. The tight-knit brothers were sparing partners, teammates and opponents.

With soccer it was always Ryan before Clint, the oldest child testing the waters that would inevitably make it easier for the younger one. Not to say Clint had it easy, but the experience of not just playing with Ryan and older kids, but watching them develop through the winding roads of American soccer is an enormous benefit if a young player pays attention. And Clint did. Ryan helped mold his little brother’s game—as did a healthy dose of the Maradona video “Hero”—but more importantly, probably, considering the largely off-the-map existence the kids had in Nacogdoches, Ryan provided priceless advice through experience.

After that fateful first club try-out, Clint’s coach helped find Ryan a team, where he impressed and progressed in just three years to the point of having several colleges recruiting him (even with his starting in the club system as a teenager. Clint on the other hand began when he was 9). With little to no guidance, Ryan went to the school that offered him the most money, Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, and ended up unsatisfied (poor grades and test scores also kept Ryan from several bigger schools such as Northwestern and Cincinnati). Clint never made the same missteps, essentially becoming Ryan’s second chance. “I didn’t attract any good division 1 schools to really lay it on me,” Ryan says. “I didn’t have anyone really to guide me about my grades. I was the ignorant kid who thought that if I was good enough at sports, if they want me, they will figure out a way. And my parents didn’t know any better until I went through it.” Ryan left Northeastern Illinois after one year, spending time training with Mexican club Cruz Azul, who asked him to stay. But Ryan took some advice he now questions and went back to college instead of a pursuing a career in professional soccer. Ryan earned a degree from East Texas Baptist and helped the school win a national championship in the NCCAA, a Christian conference. He now works in the energy business in Beaumont, Texas, plays semi-professionally for the Professional Development League’s Houston Leones and in Houston’s Football Association.

Clint was initially behind the pack in high school in terms of physical maturity. “He was young-looking and slow,” Ryan says. But Clint hit a growth spurt between 9th and 10th grade. The boys’ grandfather was a former marathon runner and believed puberty was the time to start training the body. So Clint joined the cross country team and went through agility training, Ryan making Clint do everything he was doing. “I knew what was making me better,” Ryan says. “And what I wished I had done when I was younger. After that summer, Clint was at my level. He was a sophomore then, I was playing at Cruz Azul. We saw guys like Bobby Convey playing professional at 16. We would push each other and be like, man lets make these pros.”

“They virtually invented themselves,” Frank Dell’apa tells me. As the Revolution beat writer for the Boston Globe, Dell’apa covered Dempsey extensively after his arrival to professional soccer and the New England Revolution of M.L.S. Dell’apa was particularly struck by the influence of Ryan on Clint. “Everybody wanted to talk about the story about this poor kid from East Texas, and that stuff surely shaped him, but as a soccer player Ryan had these ideas about how the game should be played. And a lot of it was nonconforming to the system. Coaches didn’t influence them, really. Ryan was very adamant that players like him and especially Clint were going to find their own way. And they were going to be team players, but they were going to be uninhibited out there and figure out problems on their own.”

—-

They may not have known where to put him, but as he approached college age, coaches knew they wanted Clint. Passing on offers from Southern Methodist University (he wanted out of Texas for awhile) and Notre Dame (they didn’t offer enough money), Clint went to Furman University on a full athletic scholarship. The relatively sleepy school in the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina is not exactly a soccer powerhouse but neither is it a slouch. Furman supplied a competitive environment in which Clint’s game could grow. It was also the place where Clint experienced two serious car accidents, one he was in and one he should have been in.

As one of the coaches that selected the regional soccer team that includes Texas, Furman soccer coach Doug Allison got an early look at Dempsey as a teenager at a tournament in Alabama. “I remember talking to a guy named Charlie DeLong who is a region coach and a good friend of mine,” Allison tells me. “I said ‘Charlie, come look at this boy. Is it me or does he have this much time on the ball?’ We went over to the other side of the field and just watched him—we were trying to choose the region team at the time. He doesn’t have this blazing speed and at that point he wasn’t going to physically out-muscle some of the other kids his age, but his footwork was terrific and his awareness was amazing. His passing was very good. His intelligence was good and his timing off the ball was brilliant. He anticipates so much. He has a really good soccer brain. But what has got him to where he is, is competitiveness. It’s unbelievable. Truly different than most. He does not want to lose anything.”

Everybody seems to see the intense competitiveness, but Allison also saw something else. “Clint just wanted to be wanted,” Allison tells me about the recruiting process. Notre Dame was at Clint’s door on July 1, the first day of the recruiting season while Furman didn’t have the funds for staff to travel. After a few phone calls, however, and without a visit, Clint committed to Furman.

Dempsey helped propel a Furman team that produced several pros including Clint’s US MNT teammate Ricardo Clark to two Southern Conference championships and a pair of NCAA Tournament appearances in his three seasons. But he was having a hard time cracking the national team. Allison remembers a conversation he had with Thomas Rongen, who was the U20 national team coach at that time. “The first time he was taken with the Under 20’s,” Allison says. “Rongen called me and said, ‘yeah it would be great if Clint could just play and not try to nutmeg Cobi Jones’—that was the thing he wanted to do the most (laughing). It’s like he has a point to prove, but that’s what makes him Clint. He has his own personal battles and he has his own personal goals.”

One of those goals found strange foreshadowing during Clint’s freshman year at Furman when the team did a tour of the UK. Allison secured last minute tickets from friends for a game at Fulham’s Craven Cottage against Liverpool, Clint and his teammates huddled behind the goal (that area of the stadium is now seats) watching the likes of Michael Owen and Louis Saha warming up. Just a few years later Dempsey would net his $60 million goal against Liverpool right there, on the other side of the fence, cementing his place in Fulham lore.

College found Dempsey again lurking in the shadows of widespread respect. He was an All-Southern Conference selection every year at Furman, but was only named to the NSCAA Second Team All-America squad in 2002. He made the 2003 FIFA World Youth Championship roster, but made only one appearance as a substitute in the team’s final group match. For a kid with an all-American story, his game was apparently anything but to American coaches. They didn’t know where to put him, but Clint knew where he wanted to go.

A point often mentioned in Clint’s career is that FC Dallas passed on the cagey college player not once but twice in the first round of the 2004 MLS draft. Still he was the eighth overall selection, taken by New England Revolution. “They figured it out quickly,” Dell’apa remembers about the Revolution’s selection. “Clint was a bit of a live wire, I guess, because he was thought to have this hard edge and not be coach-able. He immediately made you think that if you took a swing he might swing back. You certainly weren’t getting some docile kid. Not to say he didn’t need to mature out there, because he needed to, and he did, but they knew from the beginning they had some serious talent. They just needed to figure out how to use him. They first thought he’d be a defensive midfielder but soon they realized he was more than that and had him at striker, which isn’t his best position, but they just had to get him forward.”

Revolution Coach Steve Nicol’s first call when considering Dempsey was to Thomas Rongen. “While he wasn’t a regular in the U20’s at the time,” Nicol tells me, “Thomas felt that Clint still had a lot of developing to do and could, in the right place with the right team, go on and do well.” The second time Dempsey came up for Nicol was at the combine. “Right off the bat,” Nicol recalls, “he had a huge physical presence with a nice touch. He seemed to have that streak in him that made him want to win all the time, which I liked. Those three things really swung it. He just had that look about him that he didn’t like losing.”

Dempsey came into professional soccer just like the barefooted toddler entered his older brother’s pick-up games, with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. “It’s all depends on how you view it,” Nicol says. “One thing we were told before the draft was that he had a bit of an attitude. But you can use that attitude to your advantage. You have a guy who doesn’t like losing and so you channel that aggression and maybe that short fuse into your opponent. And I think that is what he has done.”

Allison also remembers the moniker. “He was [at Furman] for three years,” Allison says. “And those were kind of his growing up years. It’s funny though. Everybody is like ‘he’s competitive. He has this bad boy image. He’s this and that.’ He’s such a down to earth guy. People don’t realize how soft spoken he is off the field. Although he is fun when he is rapping and doing all that stuff—he’s the life of the party at that point—he is also this guy who will just sit in the corner and hang out. It’s very strange that people don’t see that but you could tell that here. You know one of these little ball boys came back during the preseason after Clint decided to go pro [after his junior year]—he was maybe 10, 12 years old—and the boy said “I really miss Clint at church.” And I’m like ‘Clint went to your church?’ You just didn’t know some of the stuff he did off the field. He volunteered for a lot of stuff. He wasn’t always the angel, but you don’t expect athletes that are so competitive to always be angels anyway.”

Almost immediately the Revolution looked to feature Dempsey, altering their line-up to fit the free form of Clint’s game. “Within a couple weeks of him being here,” Nicol says, “I called [assistant coach] Paul [Mariner] and said we need to find a place for this guy on our team.” Like so many things in life, it was right place, right time. “Playing three in the back given our players could suit us,” Nicol says. “It really made it simple to find a place for Clint. We really felt that on the field of play he was a guy who was going to make a difference.” Living with a host family outside of Boston (“It was kind of weird but whatever,” he says), Clint collected the 2004 Rookie of the Year award and was third on his team with seven goals. He missed several games that season after playing in two games with a broken jaw.

From the host family, Clint moved into an apartment in Mansfield, MA, with Ryan, basically telling his older brother whose life was in a professional and personal rut at the time, that he had no choice but to come live with him. It was a move of brotherly love, but the competition was not far behind. It never is with Clint. They were sleeping on the floor in the bare rental; they didn’t have a TV or futon. “One day he decided he wanted to make a comment about my chest,” Ryan says offering up one of his favorite stories. “Calling me bird chest or something like that. I was like I bet I can do more push-ups than you. He’s like ‘All right let’s go.’ He just jumps on the floor and starts doing push-ups. I’m like, this guy’s for real. So we counted his push-ups and I got down there and did push-ups and beat him. I was like haha there you go motherf+*#er, and he gets up, jumps at me going ‘Bitch get out of my face bitch right now before I knock you the f+*# out.’ And I’m like Daaaaamn dawg, we’re just doing a friendly push-up game. And your doing some shit talking.”

At this point Ryan is roaring in laughter retelling the story over the phone. “Clint’s like ‘Yeah, but I’m not trying to really hear right now am I, so why don’t you get the f+*# out of my face.’ Allright dawg, I told him. I just went into the back room and let him cool down. He was angry. This is just a couple of years ago. I’m like all right pimp. That’s Clint Dempsey for you.”

When they purchased some furniture and a TV, the battles turned to video games. Neighbors called and complained because Clint and his friends would be making too much noise, screaming and throwing the controllers against the wall.

Dempsey did what Nicol said and funneled that aggression onto the field. Clint’s goal tally rose to 10 in 2005, a season in which he started in the All-Star game, made the MLS best XI, and helped New England reach the MLS Cup finals while playing 13 times for the men’s national team. Sounds like he finally made it: all-star, World Cup qualifiers. Was he satisfied? “After 2005 I wanted the World Cup, and I wanted to go to Europe,” Clint says. Do you remember it being a fun time? “Yeah, but I remember a lot of work too. I had things I wanted to do.”

—-

check back in the coming days for Parts 4 and 5

And follow TIAS on Twitter for all the essential soccer news and notes and few ramblings as they happen

banner photo and side-by-side photos courtesy of ISI Photos

portrait of an young MLSer found at revolutionsoccer.net

youtube video filmed by Nike Soccer. TIAS and Clint Dempsey are sponsored by Nike.