The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (20 page)

Now it was my turn.

President Obama finished speaking: “We are incredibly proud of what you’ve done already, and we are going to be proud of what you do when you get to South Africa.”

The camera shutters clicked as sweat trickled down my neck. Bill Clinton was so close to me that I could have reached over and patted him on the back.

In the photograph that was published later that day, I’m beaming like a little kid.

B
ack when we were training in Princeton, I’d managed to get away a couple of times. I’d seen my brother, some of my friends. One night, my old basketball teammate Steve Senior organized a steak dinner, complete with players and coaches alike. We’d talked about the good old days, all those trips to away games on school buses, the hundreds of pounds of pizza we’d devoured afterward.

We hadn’t been all together like this since high school; it simultaneously felt like no time had passed, and like three whole lifetimes had gone by.
New Jersey will always be inside of me
, I thought.

Laura called after dinner that night. I knew the kids must be asleep in their beds, that it would be just Laura on the other end. For some reason I hadn’t picked it up. Instead I texted her back.

Heading to bed. Tired.

I don’t know. Maybe I was already thinking about the next morning’s training. Maybe I was nervous about what was coming up—the most important competition I’d ever been in. Maybe it was that I’d spent several hours with the guys who had known me long before I was anybody’s husband, and I wasn’t quite ready to be a husband again.

But somehow, in that moment, there wasn’t room for Laura.

L
andon had come on loan to Everton earlier that year. He’d stayed in a hotel near my house, and every day I picked him up, and we drove to training together. I loved having him there, loved introducing him to everyone—and I mean everyone: players, the youth academy players, the office workers, the physios. I wanted all of them to know Landon.

“Listen,” I said to him on his first game day. “If there’s one thing you need to know to be successful here, it’s this: leave the bathroom door open when you go.”

“What? That’s crazy!”

“Trust me, Landon.”

He did, even though he didn’t understand why. Until one day, someone new entered the stall and shut the door. The guys got a giant bucket of water and doused him while he was going.

Landon fit right in. He was lighthearted enough to leave the bathroom stall door open, and he could dump buckets of ice over guys who were getting rehab in the hot and cold tubs like the rest of us. But he was also a straight-up professional, who played great for us. The fans sensed a real Evertonian. They took to him instantly.

In the evenings he came to the house, and hung out with Laura and the kids. Sometimes we watched American football together. Nothing with Landon was ever forced. We had been friends and teammates for a long time. Things went unspoken between us now, the way they once had with my mom. I could sense how relaxed he was with the Everton guys, how much he liked Laura and the kids. It was just easy.

Now we were headed to South Africa together—it would be Landon’s third World Cup, and my first as a starter. I was so psyched we were going to get to share this together.

W
e flew through night and day, 17 hours in all, then climbed aboard a bus and rode for hours more. By the time the bus rolled to a stop at the lodge where we’d be spending the next month, I had no idea how long we’d been traveling, or even what time zone we were in. As the bus doors opened, we heard the sounds of a
traditional South African choir rising up into the night sky. They sang in a language I didn’t understand, but their tone said
Welcome
.
Welcome to our home at the far southern tip of this continent. Welcome to everything that is about to happen.

When I woke up in the morning, I stepped out onto the balcony. Wow, this place was lush, built around a grand lake. Across the water I could see Clint Dempsey sitting perfectly still, fishing rod in his hand. The guy might have traveled the world as a member of the national team, but he was the perennial Texas country boy at heart.

We were isolated there—far from the rest of the world, lots of time on our hands. Everything was taken care of for us—our meals, our lodging, our schedule. Our sole responsibilities were to show up to practice, train until we had nothing left, then rest so we could do it again.

Something happens when you’re in that kind of setting—you fall into a kind of suspended reality.

We retreated back into a kind of grade school mentality. On the bus rides to and from the gym, guys threw gum wrappers at each other, mocked each other about their haircuts. We laughed often, ribbed each other endlessly. Jay DeMerit and Stuart Holden belted out Justin Bieber songs at the top of their lungs. Brad Guzan was an easy target. The guy was a lovable teddy bear. He had a missing front tooth and size 14 shoes and always looked like a kid dressed up in his dad’s clothes. But Brad gave as good as he got.

“Well,” he’d say when I teased him, eyeballing my backward baseball cap, “at least I’m not a grown man dressed as a sixteen-year-old.”

We didn’t see much of Bob Bradley during our downtime. Every so often, though, we’d glimpse him walking around with a
portable DVD player—the kind that parents might hand to kids for a long car trip. It didn’t matter where we were—on the bus, in our hotel rooms, eating dinner—we’d see Bob hauling that thing around, and we’d know he had something new to show us.

“Uh-oh,” Carlos might say when he saw Bob coming. “Better hide in the bushes. Bob’s got his DVD player out again.”

“Shh. Don’t make eye contact,” I’d respond.

But Bob would walk up, grab one of us, and press play.

“You see where you are here,” he might say, pointing at a clip from a recent game. “Next time, I want you to get five yards over so their winger can’t make that pass.” Whomever he was talking to would agree . . . because of course Bob was right.

Once, Bob tried to bring the action to the big screen. He called us all into a conference room to show us highlights from a recent game against Turkey.

“See, here, the way their striker veers to the left . . .”

He picked up the remote control and pressed a button. It didn’t work. He tried a few more times.

“But you’re closing him down a little too quickly,” Bob continued. He adjusted his angle, holding his thumb down. The television blanked out completely. “Shit,” he muttered. Then he stood there, pressing it again and again, until finally the screen popped back to life.

“Anyhow, if you watch that play again, you’ll see . . .”

He held the rewind button and it didn’t work. He moved closer to the television, then attempted to hit the rewind button a few more times. The television kicked in at too high a gear, rewinding too quickly, to a different moment in the game altogether.

“Come on,” he muttered to the television. He hit fast-forward, but again, nothing happened.

It went on for a while, this battle with the remote. He changed position, then pressed. Nothing. He moved closer to the television. We sat there quietly waiting, when suddenly Bob slammed the remote on the conference table.

“Fuck you!” he screamed at the remote. “Fuck you, you fucking piece-of-shit garbage!” Then he banged the remote down with every word: “Why-Won’t-You-Fucking-Work?”

I had known Bob since I was a kid in New Jersey. Had played for him in some very high-pressure games. In all that time, I had literally never seen him lose it like this. Bob was Mr. Control. He was the guy who took ten minutes to answer a single question from a reporter, because he never, ever wanted to say anything he hadn’t carefully thought through.

Bob snapped off the television. He closed his eyes, took a long, deep breath. Then he turned to us.

We sat perfectly upright. We didn’t dare move a muscle.

His eyes flicked from me to Jay to Carlos to Steve Cherundolo, and on around the room.

“Damn it,” he finally said. “Can’t one of you crack a joke right now or something?”

And just like that, we burst out laughing.

Bob was howling, too.

I
’d seen my brother in New Jersey. Over the years, he’d gotten deeply involved with martial arts training. He loved how it blended the physical and the mental.

The last time I saw him before leaving for South Africa, he’d given me a book,
A Fighter’s Heart
, by Sam Sheridan.

On the inside flap, Chris had written a quote from Heraclitus, along with a note of his own.

Good luck in WC 2010!!

You will bring them back.

I
spent a lot of time alone in South Africa. During those moments, I wanted to stay focused on my game, but other thoughts kept creeping in—thoughts I didn’t want to have. I thought about Jack Reyna a lot, fighting for his life.

I thought about how quickly everything could disappear.

And I thought about Laura. I thought about all those times I’d headed off to games, and Laura had come toward me smiling. All those times she wrapped her arms around
me, when the only thing I wanted to think about was the game.

What was wrong with me in those moments? Wasn’t she supposed to be the one who would save me from my single-minded focus on winning and losing?

When my kids hugged me, I felt so much warmth, so much love.

When Laura did the same, I felt like a fake.

In the evenings I called home to speak to the kids. I made kissing noises into the phone and heard their sweet voices. They were still so little they didn’t have much patience for the telephone, even to talk to their daddy, who was at the bottom of the world. They’d quickly hand the phone back to their mom.

Laura asked me questions, and I tried to answer them, tried to be a good sport, a communicative husband.

And when she talked, I listened. I listened to her tell me about how Jacob had mastered the backstroke in the pool. How Ali fell asleep facedown on the living room floor, as if her batteries had, in a single instant, run out.

I loved those stories about the kids.

And I told Laura that I loved her, too. That I missed her and couldn’t wait to see her.

But then after hung up, I’d have to pray.

Because I knew that what I’d just said was a lie.

I didn’t miss her. Not the way I should.

Y
ou’d think that spending that much time with the same group of guys, in one location that’s nearly 10,000 miles from home, might present some challenges. You’d think, for example, we might start getting on each other’s nerves. But that was the
thing about this team. We dined together and played together, and in the afternoons we’d get together to talk about nothing whatsoever, or everything. Music would waft across campus—John Mellencamp or Guns N’ Roses, or classic Springsteen or Eminem. Once in a while, some jokester might throw water on another player while he sat out on his balcony reading.

We were like a bunch of rowdy puppies—we’d tumble all over each other, roughhouse together, always playful. Then we’d retreat to our separate rooms and wake up ready to start all over again.

Maybe there’s something about soccer being a team sport, the fact that we had to work together and trust each other to accomplish anything meaningful on the field.

Maybe it’s something about the fact that we weren’t just soccer players, we were
American
soccer players—mostly unknown to our nation, fighting for respect both home and abroad.

Maybe it was something about this group of guys in particular. It’s hard to imagine that any other collection of pro athletes would ever be so easy to be around for so long. So relaxed, so humble. So damned much fun.

T
he closer we got to our first game, the more I could feel myself turning inward, trying to get mentally to that place where I felt ready. We’d be playing England, then upstart Slovenia, then Algeria.

When the England match was a few days away, I sat on the bus on the way to training jiggling my leg nervously. Stuart and Jay were two rows ahead of me. Naturally, those clowns were singing again.

Baby, baby, baby, oh . . .

Landon threw half a granola bar at them. The bar landed on the seat; Jay leaned over, picked it up, and popped it in his mouth, still singing, now with crumbs falling out of his mouth.

Like, baby, baby, baby no . . .

I watched them, but my mind kept drifting toward the game.

It wasn’t enough to be here. I wanted to advance. I wanted to go as far as we possibly could. Something big was in our grasp. I could feel it, and I wanted to reach out and grab it.

O
ur game against England proved that no one should write this team off. Ever.

England was the clear favorite, and they took control of the game almost immediately. With vuvuzelas in the stands buzzing like bees, England’s Emile Heskey sent a reverse pass to Steven Gerrard, who slotted it past me with ease.

Four minutes in, we were down by one.

And then it got worse.

Twenty-nine minutes into my World Cup debut, I was injured.

I made a diving save, parrying the ball at exactly the moment Heskey came sliding toward it. His foot was extended, studs up. He was stretching to slam the ball into the net, not to meet flesh and bone.