It’s hard to say goodbye to the greatest American player that’s ever been without talking about why he’s so rare.
Neil W. Blackmon
When I think of Clint Dempsey, in my mind it is always raining.
Sure, he introduced himself to the world on a sun-splashed day in Germany, when for a moment, he appeared to save the United States from group stage failure by finishing a ruthless and perfectly-timed run (and divine DaMarcus Beasley pass) against Ghana at the 2006 World Cup.
In that moment, the small cadre of American reporters and fans who cautiously and optimistically believed this kid who came out of nowhere to shine at Furman University and shortly after with the New England Revolution could be truly great, felt redeemed, hopeful, sunny- a respite from the long list of next big thing disappointments that preceded him. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Dempsey, whose run to Beasley’s ball had been all furrowed brow and steely focus, exploded, and in perhaps a perfect act of sublimation, danced with them.
That Dempsey’s marvelous career happened at all was, in the clouded, expensive, complicated morass that was and is the US developmental landscape, almost entirely an accident.
By now most of us know the backstory.
Dempsey grew up in a trailer park in Nacogdoches, Texas. He mostly cultivated his skills playing against grown El Salvadorian, Honduran and Mexican immigrants in informal weekend games contested on East Texas dirt playgrounds, picking up their creativity and affinity for the ball and flair. By the time he was a teenager, Dempsey was starring in the weekend games, fooling defenders with his silky touches and trying ball tricks he learned from both the adults he played with and old highlight videos of legends such as Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff and even the ultimate Brazilian Malandro, Garrincha.
Dipsy-dos, nutmegs, Cruyff turns, stepovers, self-flicks—name it and Dempsey had everything, except a local youth club to call his own.
He was good enough eventually to play for a club team within a formal structure, but his family couldn’t afford the four-hour round-trip commutes to and from practice and support the burgeoning tennis career of his older sister, Jennifer, so Dempsey volunteered to quit. Had his sister not tragically succumbed to a brain aneurysm when she was only sixteen, Dempsey may have simply been a weekend game/playground legend from East Texas.
Instead, Dempsey kept playing, went onto college at Furman and ultimately stumbled onto the US Soccer scene like ancient ships lost at sea used to emerge from the mist to find new land; a confluence of tragedy, willpower and skill that saw a kid nicknamed “The Little Rooster” leave Texas and prove himself at every level of the game.
USA’s Clint Dempsey (R) celebrates after scoring against Ecuador during their Copa America Centenario football tournament quarterfinal match, in Seattle, Washington, United States, on June 16, 2016. / AFP / Omar Torres (Photo credit should read OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images)
He leaves the sport this week with a resume that among Americans is peerless: 57 Premier League goals for Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur, 57 goals for the United States National Team in 141 caps, tying him for most all-time with Landon Donovan, who achieved the feat with 16 more caps and also benefitted from taking the bulk of the American penalty kicks. Dempsey is the only US player to lead the country in scoring at both a World Cup and a Copa America and the only American to score a goal in three consecutive World Cups. He leaves the game fourth all-time in assists, and he did it all, remarkably, without a true position, having played as a winger, pure nine, tip-of-the-spear target forward, number ten, and attacking central midfielder throughout his fifteen-year career.
Not bad for a guy who just wanted to have fun with the soccer ball and go fish.
It’s a story that deserves a Texas Forever sunset and yet to me, at least, whenever I think of Clint Dempsey, for my money the greatest American man to ever play soccer, I think of rain.
And not because he retired a Seattle Sounder, the club in one of the gloomiest, rainiest and achingly beautiful places in the United States and the place Dempsey called home and won big home after proving himself repeatedly in Europe.
Instead, it made perfect sense to me that Dempsey retired on a day when it was raining sheets in Miami, where I’m located. It was a perfect, somber Florida summer rain, the dull, gloomy and driving kind that changes the shapes of the buildings and trees, and I was walking to my office without an umbrella, dodging pools of standing water and fallen palm fronds when I received the phone notification Dempsey had called it quits in a simple, understated and wonderful Instagram post.
“That’s perfect,” I said aloud to myself, and feeling a bit old and a bit sad, I meant it.
Normally, I suppose, we associate rain with sadness and later, cleansing and renewal. Rain stops. Fog recedes. Hurt fades. Hope returns.
I associate Clint Dempsey with rain for entirely different reasons.
Mainly, almost every indelible memory I have of Clint Dempsey doing incredible things playing soccer occurred when it was raining.
A flooded soccer “field” near the US hotel in Natal, the morning of US-Ghana in 2014.
Take for example another goal against Ghana at a World Cup, this time in Natal, a city in northeastern Brazil the country’s Department of Tourism markets as the “City of Sunshine where it rains only ten days a year.”
The morning of the match, the first of the World Cup for the United States, the rain came down so hard in the swirling wind it appeared to fall sideways, (just down the street from the US team hotel) invading the leaky roof of our luxury hotel and forming puddles in the lobby that doubled as mosquito swimming pools.
The CDC would estimate, a year later, that Zika probably originated in the unusually rainy northeastern corridor of Brazil that summer.
By nightfall and kickoff, the rain had slowed from steady to sprinkle, but it had rained nine inches in three days and was still drizzling when Clint Dempsey put the Americans ahead after thirty seconds.
I’ll most remember the goal for the schoolteacher from Skokie, Illinois sitting two rows behind us who shouted “He’s going to score” as soon as Dempsey used a deft stepover to get past the first Ghanaian defender, John Boye.
That he did.
With Sulley Muntari chasing at full speed and Adam Kwarasey, the goalkeeper Ghanaian manager Kwesi Appiah started because of pressure back home, closing fast, Dempsey drilled the ball off the far inside right post.
Commence a slew of expletives and nonsensical language better suited for a Pentecostal church revival. The final tally on hugs received from people I’ll never see again? Eight.
June 8, 2012; Tampa FL, USA; USA forward Clint Dempsey (8) celebrates with midfielder Jose Torres (16) after scoring a goal against Antigua & Barbuda during the first half at Raymond James Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matt Stamey-US PRESSWIRE ORG XMIT: USPW-81016
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I had been covering the US Men’s National Team for a few years when I finally had an off-the-record conversation with Clint Dempsey in the tunnel of Raymond James Stadium on June 8, 2012.
It was the opening match of World Cup qualifying for the 2014 cycle, and the US had just defeated Antigua and Barbuda 3-1 in a game played in a tropical depression.
Dempsey scored his 26th goal for the United States in the match- on a rare penalty kick – and the US cruised to a 3-1 win over their overmatched Caribbean opponents.
Despite a chest cold, I had just wrapped up interviews in the bowels of Raymond James and having walked through the rain to get to the press area and then taken in the final few minutes of the game by the Buccaneers pirate ship outside, my clothes were damp and I was anxious to get back to the hotel, write, take a Tylenol and call it a day.
To this day, I cover US matches in a pressed dress shirt and a tie. It’s less an homage to the reporters of old days and more a reflection of my work as a lawyer, I suppose, but I guess it was something Dempsey always noticed, because as he strolled by on his way to the US bus, he stopped, took the headphones off and gave me a quick shout.
“Even in this weather, you come dressed fresh for work, pimp. That’s the word.”
Frozen and unsure how to respond, I mumbled something like “Just a southern thing- dress to impress.”
Dempsey nodded, said “You’re from the south? Word,” and then turned, put his headphones on again and was on the bus minutes later.
In a decade of covering the US National Team, it remains the one time I was starstruck and stunned, and in my years of covering a host of other sports and superstars, it remains my most unusual and yet earnest encounter with greatness, yet another evening spent watching Clint Dempsey play brilliant soccer in the rain.
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Maybe the most classic Dempsey moment occurred on March 18, 2010: a drizzling, gloomy night in London.
With ten minutes to play in the Europa League knockout rounds, tiny Fulham football club stood toe-to-toe with Juventus, one of the grand old clubs in Europe.
Having already completed a ferocious comeback, no one would have blinked if Fulham succumbed to the more talented, monied Italian side. Fulham’s fight was admirable; Fulham’s defeat was expected.
Dempsey, who had entered the game as a substitute late in the second half and spent most his soccer life defying what was acceptable and expected, didn’t care about the script.
Dempsey took a bouncing pass from midfielder Dickson Etuhu with a brilliant touch, peeked his head up ever slightly, and immediately noticing the Juventus goalkeeper, Antonio Chimenti, was cheating a bit off his line and the nearest Juventus defender had dropped off to help centrally, turned and deftly chipped the ball towards the goal.
Even on replay, the ball seemed to hang in the air forever, and there’s a tremendous photograph of Chimenti desperately turning to retrieve it. He couldn’t. It clipped the far-right post, giving Fulham a lead they wouldn’t relinquish and sending Fulham’s quaint and ancient home ground into raptures they’ll talk about for generations.
It was, as Nate Scott so eloquently wrote at SB Nation this week, a moment that changed the way people viewed American players and what they were capable of on a soccer field.
Until Clint Dempsey came along, American players were lauded for their grit, energy, physicality, athleticism and occasionally, in rare cases like Claudio Reyna or John Harkes or Alexi Lalas, for their soccer minds and technical and/or positional understanding.
Dempsey’s game possessed what Americans lacked.
He was creative and imaginative, highly technical on the ball, a swashbuckling, playground footballer with flair willing to experiment and unafraid to fail.
“Clint Dempsey tries shit,” is how Bruce Arena put it, in the most perfect Long Island way, but in truth, it was more than that.
“It isn’t just trying (shit),” Dempsey’s longtime US teammate Michael Bradley told me a year ago in Mexico City.
“It’s that Clint can try things and he’s technical enough and disciplined enough to do them. That’s what separates him.”
That combination of imaginative bravery and technical nous is what made the chip against Juventus vintage Dempsey, of course. It wasn’t that he saw a bit of space and a goalkeeper off his line and tried. It was that he was knew he was capable of floating that ball into the net.
It’s also that combination of bravery and imagination that so often pulled the US out of the fire in Dempsey’s national team career. Like the greatest players, he thrived when the moment seemed largest, and had a tenacity that went far beyond the iconic “Deuce Face” or the broken nose he suffered against Ghana in Natal.
Take his goal on a damp winter night in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 2009, when he simply outhustled the iconic Sergio Ramos to a loose ball, giving an American team defending its own goal as if it were the Alamo room to breathe in what remains the finest American soccer victory in an international competition.
This is who Dempsey was- and it is that incomparable combination of willpower, grit, resolve and technical ability that make him the player Americans hope their future stars will be.
Jun 16, 2014; Natal, BRAZIL; Blood comes from the nose of USA forward Clint Dempsey against Ghana during the 2014 World Cup at Estadio das Dunas. USA defeated Ghana 2-1. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
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The uniqueness of Clint Dempsey in the American soccer story can’t be discussed without a tinge of sadness, along with a larger conversation about why his story remains so rare in the US development landscape.
His exit stage left represents the final goodbye of a vital generation of American players who, collectively, won a World Cup group, escaped a Group of Death, nearly captured a Confederations Cup and last year, were central cogs in the most spectacular American sporting failure in decades.
But it is more complicated than that.
In Dempsey’s final national team match, played on a rain-soaked field in Couva, Trinidad and Tobago, I sat yards away and watched Clint Dempsey once again play soccer in the rain, desperately trying to rescue his team from the fire and World Cup qualification failure. When he broke through towards goal late, I thought he’d do it again. This time, his effort hit a post.
Fittingly, perhaps, as Dempsey and his teammates left the field in the aftermath, it began again to rain.
On that night in Trinidad, and throughout his fourth trip through a Hex, Clint Dempsey wasn’t quite what he once was. He had overcome a heart issue to rejoin his teammates for the vital portion of qualifying, but his role was diminished, delegated to “super sub” duty that set off bizarre debates about whether Dempsey would accept the role, debates that to me showed how little folks ever understood how much winning drove Clint Dempsey.
That a step-slower and aging Dempsey was, aside from the wunderkind Christian Pulisic, the one player the US still relied on to pull it out of the fire is instructive as to the dilemma that faces US soccer moving forward, one that Clint Dempsey himself has promised to tackle as he moves into the next chapter of his life, hopefully filled with his two favorite things: fatherhood and fishing.
As Kim McCauley wrote earlier this week, Dempsey was, more than any American player that came before or since, the signifier for the structural and socioeconomic gaps in American development. That he was ultimately discovered by Furman was all but a fluke of cruel fate; that Dempsey developed into the technical, imaginative playground player who earned global respect and scored 50+ Premier League goals had almost nothing to do with US development structures.
Because Dempsey was an ever-present outsider, he perpetually played with a chip on his shoulder, the “Deuce Face” and the laser beam stare all byproducts of being a player who wasn’t ever supposed to be there.
That Dempsey was uniquely American and changed minds about what American soccer players could be is unquestionably true.
That US Soccer had little if anything to do with why Dempsey accomplished all he did is also largely beyond reasonable debate.
Youth soccer is expensive.
In many instances, it is prohibitively so, whether in the pricing out of working class families like Dempsey’s to access club soccer or the absurd costs of coaching licenses that prices out valuable cultivators of organic talent.
As the US Soccer Federation continues to take inventory of itself and address the aftermath of last cycle’s World Cup qualification failure, the goal of increasing access to underserved communities, like the one Clint Dempsey grew up in on the dirt playgrounds of East Texas, should be priority number one.
In that regard, Dempsey hitting the post on a rain-logged field in Trinidad is the ultimate sporting irony.
To save the federation from the largest collective failure in its history, US Soccer needed Clint Dempsey, a player the federation only accidentally found.
In that sense, Sunil Gulati’s comments last year that the US was unlucky to qualify were even more tone deaf, especially when he noted that “the narrative changes if Clint Dempsey scores instead of hitting a post.”
Talk about not getting it.
That the federation has continued to do next to nothing to identify and improve access to underserved soccer communities since last October is more evidence of the disconnect between the Dempseys and the development system.
The narrative doesn’t change if Dempsey doesn’t hit the post in Trinidad and Tobago. To suggest that is myopic and ludicrous.
The narrative changes if your soccer culture allows you to find more Clint Dempseys.
The one from East Texas, who made it despite all the odds, gave you and all of us more than enough.
It’s time for him to come in out of the rain.
Neil W. Blackmon is co-founder of The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.