The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (6 page)

He was my guide to the physical.
Feet closer together. Drop down faster. Now get up, that ball is coming right back.

He was my guide to the mental.
Let that ball come to you, Tim. Don’t rush toward it.

He was my guide to the practical.
Ball goes over the post? Don’t go get it right away. First, take a minute, talk to your defenders, use the moment as a mini-time-out.

While some keepers are tempted to punt the ball down the field, particularly in the final minutes of the game—do anything to send it as far away as possible—Mulch taught me to think.
Throw the ball if you can. When you throw it, you have control over where it goes. Send it right to your teammate’s feet.

If I didn’t get it exactly right—if, say, I threw it to a player and he gained control with his chest, or his thigh—Mulch made me do it all over again.

“That was a crap throw, Tim. Get it to his feet this time.”

M
ajor League Soccer began its play in 1996, the year I turned seventeen.

In those frenzied, heady start-up days, the MLS was part professional league, part three-ring circus. Plenty of aspects were made up on the fly, like some of the goofy-sounding team names—the Dallas Burn and the San Jose Clash, or the clunky New York/New Jersey MetroStars. There were some bizarre rules meant to appeal to American audiences. Official time was kept on a clock that counted backward, not forward. No game could end in a tie; there was a shootout to determine the winner. Salaries for most players were hardly what you would think of as major league. The minimum salary, $24,000, didn’t go a long way in a city like New York.

But to a soccer-loving kid with big dreams, MLS gave me a tangible goal.

ESPN and ABC agreed to televise games and a few of the earliest matches drew large audiences at the Rose Bowl and Giants
Stadium. All the big names from the U.S. team at the 1994 World Cup signed on, and a few international stars from the World Cup, like Carlos Valderrama, Jorge Campos, and Marco Etcheverry did too. My old hero, Roberto Donadoni, joined the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, as did Tab Ramos and Tony Meola.

Then Mulch was hired as their goalkeeping coach—as well as for the New Jersey Imperials, which was like a minor-league team associated with the MLS club.

I felt my own world colliding with the one I’d only dared imagine.

We were getting to the end of high school, and I had some decisions to make. I’d had some interest from colleges, local powerhouses like Rutgers and St. John’s. Some dangled promises of basketball or soccer scholarships. College was the obvious way to go, the path that everyone around me hoped to follow. My friends from the soccer and basketball teams were taking their SATs and applying to schools all over the country. My youth World Cup buddies Nick Rimando and Carlos Bocanegra were both heading to UCLA to play soccer.

Shouldn’t I be considering that route, too?

But I could barely sit through my high school classes. How could I possibly keep up with college studies while devoting myself to the soccer team? Why would I even want to try?

Why subject myself to four years of being distracted from the one thing I truly cared about?

One night, Mulch sat down with me and my mom.

“Listen,” he said. “Tim can get started professionally by playing for the New Jersey Imperials.”

He made sure my mom understood: the Imperials weren’t the MLS—they were more like the soccer equivalent of the Durham Bulls.

“He’ll get to play a lot, and if all goes well, he can move up to the MetroStars next season. But it means skipping college . . . Mrs. Howard, you’ve got to be okay with that.”

I already knew what Mom would say.

“Tim,” she said, “I want you to have a complete life. That means you’ve got to make your own decisions.”

I didn’t even hesitate. I wanted to give soccer everything I had.

I turned to Mulch. “Let’s go pro.”

So that was the plan. But even if I could make it to the MLS after a year, there was no established career path for an American soccer player. It wasn’t like the NBA or the NFL.

I’d probably never earn more than my grandfather did at Johnson & Johnson. It was possible I’d never even come close.

This was a total leap of faith.

I
played so many games during those years, I couldn’t count them if I tried.

But there’s one that goes down in local folklore, and it wasn’t even a soccer game.

North Brunswick’s biggest basketball rival is St. Joseph’s High School. My senior year, St. Joe’s had this big-time player, a sophomore that everyone kept talking about: Jay Williams. Later, Jay would play for Duke and be selected the number two pick in the NBA draft by the Chicago Bulls. My North Brunswick basketball team had a good run that year—good enough that we were heading to the county championships. Our opponents? St. Joe’s.

I would guard Jay.

Today there’s some mythology about what happened that night. If you ask my old coaches or any of the guys who were rooting for me, they’ll tell you all about how I shut down the great
Jay Williams. They’ll swear by it, saying things like
Tim owned Jay
. . .
that game is proof that Tim could have played in the NBA
.

But I was there. I know what the reality was.

I had some strong defensive plays, including one critical block during the final minutes. And it’s true we won the championship that year.

I’m telling you, though: Jay was breathtaking. I was accustomed to being the strongest athlete around. But Jay was a perfect blend of agility, grace, and power. He had explosive ability on both ends of the court. He was simply the best I’d ever seen.

That feeling I had playing against him was one I wouldn’t have again for six years. That next time, I’d be standing on a field in Lisbon, watching a teenager named Cristiano Ronaldo.

I
signed with the New Jersey Imperials, and I started playing games three months before I graduated from high school.

I was 18 years old. I had a Superman tattoo, and someone was paying me to play a sport I loved.

My senior quote, in the yearbook that would come out after I’d already started playing professionally, was based on a lyric from Public Enemy:
It will take a nation of millions to hold me back.

Y
ou remember everything I taught you about taking your leadership seriously?” Mulch asked.

“Yeah.”

“It won’t be fun and games anymore. Now that you’re a pro, you’ll be responsible for other people’s livelihood,” he said.

He narrowed his eyes. “You’d damn well better not forget what I’ve taught you.”

I
made $250 a week playing for the Imperials—the equivalent of a $13,000-a-year salary—and I felt flush. We trained at the Fairleigh Dickinson University campus, in Teaneck, nearly an hour’s drive along the New Jersey Turnpike. I got an $800 1984 Nissan Sentra—a stick shift, spots of rust above the exhaust. To this day, that little Sentra is still my favorite of all the cars I’ve ever had. That funny little box on wheels gave me freedom.

The Imperials had some local legends, college stars like Rutgers University’s Dave Masur. But we also had players with day jobs, who worked long hours as plumbers and pipefitters in the Bronx and Long Island City, then commuted to New Jersey to train with us. Many were in their thirties with family obligations and bills to pay. These guys seemed almost prehistoric to me, a carefree 18-year-old.

The Fairleigh Dickinson campus flanks the Hackensack River. Each day, we arrived for practice to find the field covered with Canadian geese. We had to start doing ball drills to shoo the birds away. However, they never failed to leave reminders of their presence on the grass.

Our locker room was comparable to the one at my high school,
and our “uniforms” were basic, 1950s-style cotton gray T-shirts. There was no money for airfare, so we rode a bus up and down the East Coast, from Vermont to Myrtle Beach. After each game, we’d load the two front seats with refreshments—pizza boxes stacked in one, beer in the other—and dig in. The Irish players led us in drinking tunes and the rest of us sang along.

Occasionally, the league pulled some publicity stunt to draw larger crowds. At my first away game, against the Myrtle Beach SeaDawgs, they fielded a guest player, Laura Davies, the English professional golfer. It was after the second round of an LPGA event in Myrtle Beach. To be eligible to play in the game, she’d signed a four-year contract with the SeaDawgs, worth $1. The SeaDawgs offered $500 to any player who assisted on a Laura Davies goal. The stunt worked; the game attracted over 2,220 fans—far more than our usual audience of family members and friends. And I’ve got to hand it to Laura Davies: she had some nice touches on the ball.

We were a ragtag team in an unglamorous league. But playing for the Imperials afforded me the comfort of knowing that I could make mistakes—even some of the same stupid ones I made in rec league—and there would never be more than a couple hundred people to witness them.

One time, we scored a great goal. I ran to midfield to congratulate my teammates, and while I stood there, the other team executed a quick kickoff and launched the ball into my empty net.

Thank goodness that game wasn’t on television . . . and that it happened in the days before YouTube.

I
made enough of an impression as the Imperials’ goalie to be called up to the big leagues; I joined the MetroStars for their 1998 season as a backup to Tony Meola.

When the MLS was formed, everyone expected the MetroStars to dominate. After all, they had Tab Ramos, the creative linchpin of the U.S. team in the 1994 World Cup. Tab had just returned to the States from playing in Spain. There he’d earned the kind of money the rest of us could only dream about. The Metros had signed other big names, too, including the great (albeit aging for a soccer player—he was 34 years old now) Roberto Donadoni.

That year, they also acquired Alexi Lalas. Famous for his mountain-man look, featuring a wild mop of fiery red hair and a matching beard worthy of ZZ Top, Lalas had been the first American ever to play in the venerated Italian Serie A and he had emerged as one of the more colorful personalities at the 1994 World Cup.

But somehow, bringing together all those marquee players didn’t stop the MetroStars from losing in every way imaginable. The tone was set in the team’s home opener before a boisterous crowd of 46,000 that watched, slack-jawed, as an Italian defender named Nicola Caricola scored the only goal of the game in the 89th minute. Unfortunately his shot went into his own net.

Now, almost two decades later, people still talk about the “Caricola Curse”—as of this writing, the team (now the New York Red Bulls) has still never won an MLS Cup.

Whatever their struggles, I was thrilled to be playing soccer for a living. My salary had jumped when I moved to the MetroStars—I earned the minimum salary, $24,000 a year. It might not be enough to move out of my mom’s apartment, but it felt like real wages: the income of a grown-up.

T
he team was a hodgepodge of alpha males. First of all, there was Tab, a guy who could instantly cool whatever room he might
enter. Guys might be horsing around, loosening up with a game of “soccer tennis”—they’d tape a line down the center of the locker room, knocking the soccer ball back and forth with their heads. But when Tab walked in, or decided things were too relaxed, he’d cut that game short with one word:
enough
.

All of us obeyed.

Then there was Alexi Lalas. Alexi was like the anti-Tab, an extrovert who liked cranking heavy metal in the shower. Alexi would turn on Ratt or Guns N’ Roses, blasting it loudly, singing along from behind the shower curtain. Tab would walk over and snap off the radio without speaking. Then Alexi would step out of the shower dripping wet. He’d turn it up louder, and Tab’s face would burn red.

And then there was Tony Meola. Man, I was terrified of Tony. He was a hulking presence, with shirt-stretching biceps and a chest as broad as a Hyundai. After the 1994 World Cup, he’d tried out for the New York Jets, nearly nabbing a spot as a placekicker. And his personality was equally big and brash—he was unafraid to let everyone know that he was the best. Tony could do anything; briefly, he’d even played the lead role in the Off-Broadway hit show
Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding.

And when Tony was ticked off—which was often—he could make guys cower.

Keepers train together, one guy standing in goal while the others fire shots at him. When Tony sent balls toward me, they either flew past my head or skidded past me on the ground. I dove all over the box in a futile attempt to stop them. Tony rolled his eyes.

And when I kicked balls at him, Tony would grow exasperated.

“What the hell is that?” he shouted, flinging up his massive arms as another of my shots ballooned over the net. “That ball sucked.”

Or worse, he might remind me that I shouldn’t be there, sneering, “This isn’t high school, you know.”

Once, he turned to Mulch in frustration, throwing a hand in my direction. “I’ve gotta train with this guy? No wonder my performance is dropping off.”

Later that practice, Mulch said quietly to me, “Just do what you do, Timmy. You keep your head. Be a good teammate. Be yourself. He’ll come around.”

Maybe
, I thought.
But I’m not so sure.

I tried to be friendly.

“Good luck, Tony,” I might say before a game.

“Have a good game,” I’d offer.

If he responded at all, it was always a quick
thanks
muttered in a low voice. More often than not, though, I got no response at all. Not a word, not a glance, not a nod. Just Tony, slapping on his gloves and walking away as if I hadn’t said a thing.

A
good attacking player will gladly hit a hundred shots in a row at you if you let them. So Tab Ramos and I stayed on the field as everyone else headed to the locker room. At first, many of his balls whizzed past my head.

After a while, I got better at stopping his shots.