Editor’s note: This essay was published in Howler issue 02, in February.

Hardly anyone held an opinion about Luis Suárez until the quarterfinals of the 2010 World Cup, when he blocked a last-minute winner by Ghana with his hand. Suárez was sent off, Ghana missed the penalty kick, and Uruguay eventually won the game. Suárez sat out the semifinal against Holland, to which Uruguay would not have advanced without his handiwork.


Was Ghana cheated? Did Suárez cheat? A lot of people thought so. The Guardian’s match report called Suárez a “villain” who had “cheated and prospered.” After the World Cup, he moved to Liverpool, where he has been accused of diving and was suspended eight matches for racism. I know this, and I enjoy him all the same. What Suárez did against Ghana wasn’t despicable or even dirty. His hand ball was—I’m searching for a more appropriate word and I can’t find one—brilliant. More than that, it was admirable.

By committing the handball, Suárez took his team from, let’s say, a 0 percent chance of winning to something closer to 2 percent. Asamoah Gyan missed the penalty, increasing Uruguay’s odds to somewhere around 35 percent (not quite level, because La Celeste still had to play overtime a man down), perhaps slightly more if you consider that the miss deflated the Ghanaians while encouraging the Uruguayans.

This was not a case of the rules getting jobbed but of the rules doing their job. Deliberately handling the ball gets you a red card. Do it in the box and the other team gets a penalty. Both of these things happened—the law was transgressed, the transgressor accordingly punished.

What Suárez did was both illegal and intelligent, punishable under the laws of the game and yet the correct decision given the circumstances. He made his bargain ina splinter of a second, and he couldn’t have known it would pay off, but it did.

Did Suárez malign the spirit of the game? Not by my definition. The earliest amateur soccer matches were played, we’re told, according to a gentlemanly, Corinthian code. And yet it was out of those matches that the practice of surreptitiously paying men to play soccer emerged, the first step toward the ultracompetitive game we have today, in which deceiving the referee is commonplace and money still wins. Forget “fair play”—that’s FIFA’s antidote for the true spirit of the game: winning at all costs.

The World Cup has been manipulated by gamesmanship since day one. Suárez’s tactical foul seems almost quaint compared to Mussolini’s pregame pep talks in the referees’ changing room in 1934, or Argentina’s suspicious scoreline against Peru in 1978 (and intimidation of the Dutch in the final), or Maradona’s Hand of God, or Materazzi’s baiting of Zidane, or Henry’s hand ball against Ireland.

Do I sound a little nostalgic here, a tad wistful maybe? Perhaps it’s time to reveal my little secret: those stories about Mussolini and Maradona and Materazzi make me happy, because I consume soccer for the same reason that I read novels and watch movies—to plumb the depths of human struggle and accomplishment. Sport is the last, best arena we have for this. The ancient Greeks told each other stories about their fallible gods; we get ours beamed to us each week in high definition. I choose to believe that the spirit of the game smiles on Luis Suárez because the spirit of the game is a mischievous fucker who rewards cunning and skill and desire over sportsmanship. Anyway, that’s the book I want to read.

You can call Suárez a rascal, a ragamuffin, a rapscallion; on the field and in literature, I’m drawn to such flawed but fascinating characters. They survive and sometimes win against long odds—as long as Uruguay’s in that instant before Suárez raised his hand against Ghana—by being smarter and braver than their foes.

And this is why I love Luis Suárez. His play is full of wit and audacity, his character as complicated and contradictory as anyone imagined for stage or page. That he is capable of beautiful skill, base ignorance, and lowly deceit within the bounds of a soccer field and one 90-minute match makes me treasure him as I do fictional scoundrels such as Tom Ripley and Alexander Portnoy and Harry Flashman. If he’s a cheat, then catch him cheating. If he’s a racist, then punish him for saying stupid shit. I won’t complain when Suárez falls. But please let me keep watching him play soccer.

Get a copy of Howler issue 02 or subscribe here.

NY2: MLS and Cosmos Continue Their Dance

At Wednesday night’s “March to Soccer” address, MLS Commissioner Don Garber covered a lot of territory: expansion plans, the Cascadia Cup, investing in the league and its players. He did not announce any substantive progress on NY2. Writer Howard Megdal, who wrote about the quest for a second NYC franchise in Howler issue two, was in attendance and got to ask The Don a few follow-ups to his reporting from late last year, including questions about the New York Cosmos, who unveiled more of their own stadium plans yesterday.

You can read Howard’s account of his back-and-forth with Garber here. And you can read Howard’s original story from the issue itself right here:

 

Red Bull Arena is a beautiful and inviting place, once you get there.

On this night, the excitable masses that typically pour out of the Harrison train station—wearing their Henry jerseys, along with those of scattered heroes of today (Kenny Cooper), yesterday (Juan Agudelo or Tim Ream), or, very occasionally, the days before that (Tab Ramos and Tim Howard)—are nowhere to be found. Instead, the quiet Harrison streets, bordered by graying snow, provide little indication that a playoff game is about to take place in the great silver arena within sight of much of the town.

The crowd of, let’s say, 5,000, present on this terribly cold Thursday night, have come out for a twice-rescheduled game, once due to Hurricane Sandy, once because of a nor’easter. Public transportation to the game has not yet been restored, meaning the shuffling mass of people arriving at the New York Red Bulls’ stadium have largely driven—either from the surrounding area in New Jersey or by bus from Washington, D.C., home to the Red Bulls’ opponents. Given the transportation constraints, it’s hard to tell how many of the people attending the match have actually come from the team’s namesake hometown. Maybe it’s the cold, but as they walk through the turnstiles, the fans’ body language is quiet, subdued. The playoff match against D.C. is a big one; the on-paper more talented Red Bulls have the chance not only to beat D.C. United at home and advance to the Eastern Conference finals but also to do so knowing that they’ll have home-field advantage in that final and, should they reach it, MLS Cup. But the crowd seems less prepared for a sporting event than a Broadway revival: it’s as if everybody already knows how this one’s going to end.

It was supposed to be different under Red Bull. A glorious new stadium. A raft of marquee signings. The franchise that began its history with a home loss at Giants Stadium (complete with Nicola Caricola’s own-goal), and has featured more than its share of gut-punching losses and coaching changes since, was supposed to be a success by now—a winner both on the field and off. But on this frosty Thursday night, it all proceeds in predictable fashion. The go-ahead penalty kick from Kenny Cooper is disallowed, thanks to an early break into the box by Henry and fellow designated player Tim Cahill. Cooper misses the retake. The small crowd, which has only reluctantly put full voices into rooting on their Red Bulls—after conquering all manners of transportation, precipitation, and scheduling problems to be here—seems unwilling to let their hearts be broken once again. Cooper’s miss just reminds them that in all of recorded history, a Red Bulls season ends only one way: painfully.

Shortly thereafter, Rafa Márquez, the third designated player, who has alternated between incomprehensibly poor decisions and an array of injuries, gets himself a second yel low card on a reckless tackle. Finally, in the 88th minute, D.C. United scores on one of the few chances it has had all night. The energy does not drain from Red Bull Arena. It had never shown up, not beyond the supporters’ end. I’ve covered no shortage of shocking collapses in sports, including a similar Red Bulls season demise back in 2010, against the San Jose Earthquakes. But what I found remarkable as the final whistle blew, 1–0 United, was that no one booed. No one even seemed especially surprised.

There was something antiseptic in the air that night, something not found in other MLS stadiums where the league has truly taken root in recent years—not in Portland, not in Seattle, not in Philadelphia. This year, Portland played to full crowd capacity in front of Jeld-Wen Field’s 22,000 seats. In Philadelphia, the Union played to 97.5 percent capacity despite having a dismal season on the field. And Seattle played to 111 percent of full capacity, something you’d think was mathematically impossible. Meanwhile, attendance at Red Bull Arena has been under 80 percent capacity since the stadium opened in 2010. And the trend line is down. Even as Major League Soccer overall saw attendance rise for the fourth consecutive season, the number dropped significantly for the Red Bulls in a playoff season.

There’s little doubt that the New York Red Bulls, formerly the MetroStars, have failed to fully capture the imagination of New York’s soccer-loving community. Of course, the empty stands for the rescheduled November playoff match were, in part, the result of a colossal streak of weather-related bad luck. And to be fair, the team reported an average of just over 18,000 for regular season games in 2012. But looking more broadly, it has to be disappointing for the franchise, and the league, that one of MLS’s founding teams, in the nation’s largest metro era, just can’t seem to catch fire in the way other recent expansion franchises have. At times, going to Red Bull Arena can feel like gaining admission into a secret club that very few of your friends and neighbors have ever heard of. Sports editors all over New York, which has multiple professional teams in every sport, have gotten into a nearly two-decade-long habit of not paying attention. Get in your car after the game and there’s no postgame. Drive around the region; there are few billboards. Listen, watch, and read—few in the media are talking. This despite a Red Bulls team with three straight playoff appearances, world-class stars, an absolute gem of a venue, and—for now, anyway—absolutely no live competition whatsoever in the metropolitan area for the attention of soccer fans.

By many measures, it was a banner year for MLS: new attendance records, thriving expansion franchises, a hero’s ending to Beckham’s career. But as the league, with fan bases both large and rabid throughout the country, matures beyond the basic questions of survival that hovered over it for years, professional soccer in America still faces one great unknown: What to do about New York?

 

Perhaps no area has been as rich and fertile a territory for American soccer—and simultaneously the site of more spectacular failures—as the city of New York. Sixteen club soccer matches in American history have drawn greater than 70,000 fans. Eight of them occurred in the New York City area, with fans primarily drawn to watch big names like the New York Cosmos’ Pelé, Johan Cruyff, and Franz Beckenbauer. The audience that greeted Pelé hasn’t gone anywhere; in 2009, 66,237 came out to Giants Stadium to watch David Beckham’s Los Angeles Galaxy take on the Red Bulls. Friendlies between touring national teams, such as last summer’s between Brazil and Argentina, can draw similar crowds. This is precisely why every time soccer in New York is discussed, the words are “when” and not “if,” “yet” instead of “perhaps.” It’s been that way ever since more than 43,000 fans filled the Polo Grounds to watch a match between American all-stars and Hakoah Vienna back in 1926.

So, then, when?

If MLS has its way, “when” is 2016, with the opening of a new 25,000-seat soccer-specific stadium near Citi Field in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens. Commissioner Don Garber, a Queens native himself, has long and often expressed the goal of having a second franchise in New York. The biggest obstacle to realizing this vision is finding a place for such a team to play. But, of course, it’s more complicated than that. No fewer than four separate entities—Red Bull, Major League Soccer, the New York Cosmos, and the City of New York—will have a direct say in whether soccer becomes a signature sport in New York City in the 21st century. All four entities have significant financial resources at their disposal, as well as much to gain and much to lose by how the next few years play out. Incredibly, scenarios exist where everybody wins and where nobody wins. But no one seems to believe that when things settle, New York won’t have embraced professional soccer in a vital, passionate way for decades to come.

There are other players in this high-stakes drama, of course. There are additional domestic and international ownership groups intent on running the second New York team in MLS, including rumored interest from the owners of Manchester City. (The group itself has denied such an interest.) The North American Soccer League, the American second-tier where the Cosmos will play in 2013, also stands to benefit from the Cosmos’ rebirth. Proposals for other sites, such as Belmont Park, lie in wait if the Queens stadium crashes and burns.

It’s not as if this hasn’t been tried before. There’s already the Mets and Yankees, Knicks and Nets, Giants and Jets, and Rangers, Devils, and Islanders. They’ve all found their constituencies. But the Mets didn’t always exist; in their early years, they actually outdrew the Yankees after taking over fertile territory that once belonged to the Dodgers and Giants. The Nets and Islanders are abandoning their current fan bases to find a new, more profitable set of fans at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. And the Giants and Jets have both found a home in New Jersey at MetLife Stadium, with the Giants, in particular, immensely successful, with a years-long waiting list for season tickets.

The popular sentiment is that if the Red Bulls could simply reverse their woes on the field and get their fans a title, then a lot more attention, and greater box office success, would follow. Another view is that having an in-market rival is just what the franchise needs to bring the spotlight to the Red Bulls. Or maybe neither is the case. A Red Bulls championship for their fans would certainly be a championship—for their fans. Would greater New York notice if the Red Bulls—whose exploits are often buried within the city’s newspapers, seldom mentioned on WFAN or ESPN Radio New York, and sometimes relegated to the MSG Network’s backup channel in favor of things like Summer Movie Night—won an extra game or two in November? Would they care much about a New York City derby? Is there room left in the inn for one soccer team, let alone two?

 

It is perhaps easy by now to imagine that building a professional-size arena is straightforward in New York City. After all, the Mets opened Citi Field in 2009 in Queens, the same year a new Yankee Stadium opened in the Bronx. Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, home to the Nets (and soon the Islanders) debuted in the fall of 2012. On a pre–MLS Cup conference call in late November, only a few months after having announced plans for the stadium, Commissioner Don Garber was certainly thinking so. “There’s a lot of work that needs to happen for us to finalize our agreement with New York City,” he said. “I do believe that we’ll resolve that shortly.… We’re at the finish line.”

Less than a week later, Garber stood before an audience at the Queens Theater, right next to the proposed stadium site, and struck a more cautious tone. With the help of outside consultants specializing in political campaigns, the league was hosting a launch event for an organization called MLStoQueens; it was something of an official coming-out party for MLS’s stadium push. The room was filled with a motley coalition of area constituents: local Hispanic groups who wanted nearby soccer fields restored, trade-union workers who wanted construction jobs in building the stadium, and a noisy contingent from the Borough Boys, the official New York Cosmos supporters club, who wanted their team in MLS. There was scarcely an attendee who seemed to object to the stadium, though the organizers had stopped short of ensuring everyone was a soccer fan. When Garber described soccer as “America’s sport of the future,” a group of union workers toward the back of the room snickered; later, when a local youth-soccer leader presented in Spanish, they killed the time by pulling up pornography on one of their phones.

Notably absent from the stage at the start of the gathering was City Council member Julissa Ferreras, whose district includes Flushing Meadows. (At one point, Garber thanked her for attending… or, rather, for maybe attending later. She eventually showed up toward the end.) The politically problematic aspect of building the new stadium is this: if built on the proposed spot in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, it will eliminate a substantial amount of parkland. That estimate was originally 10 acres of parkland, now up to 13 (though much of it is currently closed to the public). Some critics of the project have estimated it to be closer to 20 acres. Whatever is lost must be made up by the creation of parkland elsewhere, as per city and state laws. And the approach the city would take is likely similar to the one used when Yankee Stadium was built: to add parkland in bits and pieces across the city until it adds up to the total acreage. That would technically fulfill the requirement, but it leaves Ferreras’s district with a straight trade of parkland for stadium.

MLS has promised to spend millions of dollars restoring local playing fields. The league also needs to come to an agreement with the New York Mets so that fans can park in Citi Field lots. From a 2012 vantage point, that shouldn’t be a problem, with most of those spots empty even on game nights and the debt-riddled Mets looking for new revenue any place they can find it.

The broader city politics look more favorable for the stadium. Not only has Mayor Mike Bloomberg expressed his support but the New York Post reported in November that he views it as a legacy project. (Bloomberg’s term expires in 2013.) One of his allies, Christine C. Quinn, is the New York City Council speaker. And one of the two hurdles the project needs to clear is earning City Council approval. As for Quinn, a 2013 mayoral candidate herself, the chance to attach herself to a popular project should make supporting Bloomberg an easy call. If those hurdles are cleared, it’s hard to imagine Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been supportive of the idea, getting in the way. There’s no natural constituency for opposing it within the state legislature, and as Bloomberg put it back in August, “There’s a lot of sentiment in Albany that they would be willing to do it.”

But council member Ferreras has thus far managed to avoid taking a final position on the stadium. (She didn’t seem eager to speak about it, either, failing to follow through on a phone interview, then failing to respond to repeated requests to reschedule.) Generally, the council tends to defer to the wishes of a particular member on  projects in that member’s district, so Ferreras would ultimately hold a fair amount of sway over how the council votes. But if the stadium is anywhere close to as popular as it appears in a survey MLS provided to the New York Daily News in November—71 percent in Ferreras’s district were for it, though the source of the poll was hardly objective—Ferreras would likely climb on board. If she can’t make the sale with her constituents by pointing out the glory of the beautiful game, she can always cite the league’s projections of between 2,100 and 2,300 construction jobs to build the stadium and 160 full-time and 750 part-time jobs once it’s up and running.

For the time being, though, Ferreras continues to show up at rallies for stadium detractors as well as those for supporters. About a week after the MLStoQueens event, she marched with stadium opponents and managed to make two seemingly contradictory statements to the press: that while she was excited to bring MLS to Queens, she couldn’t also resist a little jab at Garber, saying, “I cannot be supportive of a project at the finish line when it has not even begun.”

 

The new York cosmos occupy the second floor of a nondescript commercial building on Greene Street in SoHo. You ring for them the way you’d ring for your friend to come down for dinner: “Cosmos” is written in hard-to-read ink on the doorbell. It is an entertaining thing to consider that the Cosmos was once the most significant soccer team in the United States, the employer of Pelé and Beckenbauer. As recently as two years ago, a man named Paul Kemsley was, in the words of Grant Wahl, “essentially [setting] $10 million on fire” as the owner of the Cosmos. Billboards in Times Square. Marketing materials everywhere. Hiring Éric Cantona as director of soccer. A match against Manchester United at Old Trafford in which the Cosmos fielded an ensemble cast of former stars. A PR machine savvy enough to coax FourFourTwo into a big story. In short, everything you could do to emphasize a team’s brand without, you know, creating an actual team. Then Kemsley went bankrupt.

You can understand why MLS never seemed to take Kemsley’s Cosmos seriously. But this is Seamus O’Brien’s team now, and he has a team to build, a league to compete in, a stadium to fill. Backed by Saudi-based Sela Sports, O’Brien, a straight-talking career sports-marketing exec, is out to rebuild the Cosmos from the ground up. The club will begin play in the new NASL in the fall of 2013. Home games will be held at Hofstra University, with a capacity of 13,000. They probably won’t employ Pelé, or his closest facsimile, just yet. Such pursuits don’t make sense for a team building a sound, sustainable structure.

“What we’re trying to do is manage expectations,” Jeremy Wilkins, a team board member, explains as we discuss the Cosmos around a conference table. “So when people do come to Hofstra for the first time, they’re not expecting the Pelés or the equivalents of them. The boys are dead right with what they’re doing in that they’re concentrating on things on a step-by-step basis.”

“The boys” are Cosmos general manager Erik Stover, the man who guided the Red Bulls through the process of building Red Bull Arena, and coach Giovanni Savarese, a legendary goalscorer for the MetroStars. Players—actual players—will be signed as this magazine goes to press.

“We are focused 100 percent on building the foundation of the club,” Stover tells me. “And that means getting ready to play meaningful soccer matches in 2013 in the NASL. There’s an enormous amount of work to do on that side of the project, to be successful at it.”

Throughout our conversation, the Cosmos representatives emphasize their ambition to play, in the words of O’Brien, “at the highest level and be the number-one side in North America.” But here’s the thing: there is no promotion/relegation in America. The path to MLS runs through Commissioner Garber’s office. No matter how popular the Cosmos become on Long Island, no matter how much money they manage to generate as the Manchester United of the NASL, the full resurrection of the New York Cosmos involves making a splash not just in MLS but beyond it, too.

And just as surely, a second MLS team in the New York area that fails to resonate in the larger sporting world, as is the case with the Red Bulls, is not what Garber has in mind. Worse still, he may never get another opportunity to do so if an MLS franchise doesn’t take off this time around. A turnkey operation, complete with glorious soccer history and the chance to start fresh with the New York media in a gleaming new stadium within the five boroughs—let’s just say that the Cosmos and MLS are the leads in this romantic comedy, even if it’s been more comedy than romance until now. If the New York Cosmos does not become the next New York team in MLS, then something went awry.

A four- to five-year timetable has been floated for the Queens stadium. “Five years, that’s a good amount of time, and probably a sensible guideline,” says Wilkins. “A year’s too short, three’s iffy, five is when you know where you’re at. So everybody could have a look at each other from a distance, and—we can flirt, right?”

 

And then: What becomes of the brokenhearted?

“We believe a second team in New York will help us to break through the clutter… of 12 professional sports teams in this city,” Garber said back at his November press conference. “Once Jérôme has a greater understanding of this project, he will be as supportive as the other GMs are.”

That would be just-hired Red Bull GM Jérôme de Bontin, who deviated from the longtime party line of the New York Red Bulls in November to express concerns about a second team in the area. “I don’t mean to be controversial,” De Bontin told Fox Sports, “because I’ve just arrived. I know MLS well. I’ve been supportive but critical of MLS. At times it fails to learn from its mistakes and is maybe misguided. Competition is good. Over time, a second team in New York would be a good thing, but today it’s probably premature.”

“For example, in L.A., clearly a second team didn’t work out,” De Bontin continued. “Rather than supporting the idea of a second team in New York tomorrow, I would question whether the league would be better served looking at Florida, Atlanta, Minnesota. Many parts of the country have no team, and we might find surprises like in the Pacific Northwest rather than forcing something too soon.”

An initial attempt to get additional clarification or comment from the Red Bulls was declined, with a spokesperson referring me back to the De Bontin comment specifically. But then, by mid-December, De Bontin had very much come around, telling Bloomberg TV, “Clearly there’s enough space in New York for two or three teams.” He did not discuss what had caused him to see the light. There is a certain irony to a Red Bull spokesperson expressing skepticism, as it has previously been reported by The New York Times’ Jack Bell that, in taking over the New York franchise, Red Bull gave away a clause the MetroStars had originally negotiated that established their right to block a competitor within 75 miles. If that’s correct, it means that when Garber says that the plan to add another New York team dates back to the very start of MLS, it is important to note that the league would have needed permission from the team already there.

An internal study of the geographical breakdown of Red Bulls fans showed 60 percent of them came from New Jersey, 40 percent from New York and surrounding areas. In August, before De Bontin’s arrival, this was supposed to be data in favor of the Red Bulls supporting a second team. There’s plenty of reason to believe that the New Jersey part of the New York metro is large enough to support its own franchise, and of course, Red Bull will be happy to fill its stadium with fans from wherever—so long as it’s filled. But such statistics raise a question that goes back to the team’s original founding, when the name “MetroStars” was selected over the original, New York–centric choice,  “Empire Soccer Club.” In an interesting development this fall that recalls the discussions from 1995, the blog MLS Rumors revealed that MLS had filed for trademark protection for both “Empire F.C.” and “City F.C.”

The City F.C. trademark caught the attention of those who believe that Manchester City may be actively seeking the new New York franchise rights. To be sure, there’s no guarantee that the New York Cosmos will be the second New York team. The smart money still seems to be on that option, but De Bontin’s casual reference to “three” New York teams (when he’d previously been skeptical of two) seemed to indicate a whole lot of machinations happening behind the scenes. There are, as Garber takes great pains to point out every time the subject comes up, multiple parties interested in owning the new franchise. And the Cosmos go to great lengths to argue that their resurrection can be successful without MLS, though it has been difficult to define exactly what that would look like.

If all goes right, MLS will open a gleaming new stadium within easy reach of  public transportation and highways in Queens. A signature franchise from the history of American soccer will occupy it, supplying a rivalry with the incumbent club and focusing a spotlight on the league in the media capital of the world. If this happens, it is nearly impossible to imagine New York City lacking a thriving professional soccer scene any longer. Then again, of those 46,000 who left the Polo Grounds back in 1926, it’s hard to imagine even one of them picturing that, nearly a century later, we would still be scheming, hoping, and dreaming for the moment when soccer finally arrives in New York.

 

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EVERYMAN A HERCULEZ

Photograph by Russell Monk

How did a washed-up, written-off, tossed-away journeyman named Herculez Gomez become one of the most beloved members of the U.S. Men’s National Team?

By Robert Andrew Powell

Editor’s Note: This profile will appear in the second issue of Howler, which will be out in February. Earlier on his trip to report the story, Robert Andrew Powell took in the US National Team’s historic win against Mexico at Azteca Stadium. Pre-order issue two here. You can hear his account of that game by checking out to Howler Radio in iTunes.

WHO SAW THIS COMING? Who bet he’d be training here, at Estadio Azteca, one day before a friendly between the U.S. men’s national team and the national team of Mexico? His American teammates circle midfield, stretching calves and hamstrings. Reporters throng four deep along a barricade behind the north goal—the same net Diego Maradona shook with his Hand of God—where they gather quotes from the two Americans presented for interviews. One of them, goalkeeper Tim Howard, is asked about playing in this stadium, what’s the vibe he gets from Mexican fans, and he says, “Contempt.” The other player facing the cameras is Herculez Gomez.

He speaks in measured clips, carefully avoiding incendiary statements. More than once, he repeats a question to make sure he’s feeding a story line he agrees with. There are reasons why Herc is taking questions. His parents are Mexican. He plays in Mexico for Santos Laguna, a championship-winning team, and he was once the top scorer in the Mexican league. He’s unusually articulate in both Spanish and English. And yet, he’s an unlikely spokesperson. He’s 30 years old. The longest he has stayed with any professional club is just two seasons. To this point, he has played in only 13 national team games, total. This will be his first game for the U.S. at the Azteca. So many other players on the roster have more international experience. Landon Donovan is over there stretching at midfield, but it’s Herc serving as the American ambassador.

Did anybody predict his rise? Herc wasn’t the most talented player on his youth team. Even now he starts irregularly for Santos. Over the years, coaches have advised him to quit the game. They’ve lowballed him in salary negotiations or traded him away after an injury. So many times Herc has proven his doubters wrong, so many times he’s persevered and ultimately triumphed, that I’ve learned to suppress my own niggling questions about just how good a player he is. Is he really the guy we want leading our attack? Can he help get us to Brazil? Watching Herc address the press thrills me, I must admit. He’s my favorite athlete on any team or, really, in any sport. His journey from obscurity to this intimidating stadium—as the face of the national team, at least for today—inspires me. Herc’s story has inspired me for a couple years by now, and helped me push through a particularly low moment in my life. When I watch Herc, I focus on the way he hustles and grinds and draws fouls and basically makes a pest of himself. Most often, though, the nuances of his play fall away. I dwell on the big picture, on his journey, and on how much energy I get back from him every time he takes the field.

    

IT WAS MAY 2007 when I discovered Herculez Gomez. He was playing for the Colorado Rapids, and I was having one of those how-in-the-world-did-I-end-up-here moments. I’d moved to Boulder, Colorado, about a year earlier, after my marriage had failed in Miami, and after my career, such as it ever was, stopped all forward progress. I’d planned to write a book about long-distance running but that project wasn’t showing much promise. Mostly I was lost. To cut into the debts piling up, I freelanced a few newspaper articles when I could, including one about the arrival in Major League Soccer of a certain midfielder named David Beckham.

He’d just signed with the Galaxy, the Rapids’ opponent that night. Though Beckham wasn’t in the lineup, and hadn’t even made the trip to Denver, I was asked to record whatever buzz might be floating around Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. It was my first Rapids game, and my first MLS experience since the Miami Fusion folded. There wasn’t all that much Beckham buzz, and the game, a Rapids win, wasn’t all that notable. I was in the press area afterward, sitting with the regular beat writers and trying to figure out my story, when the night’s lone goal scorer stepped forward for an interview. I wasn’t really paying attention.



“It’s no secret I want the finer things in life,” Herc said soon after he started speaking, “and if I keep playing well, I’ll get them.” That was it. That sentence—that casually volunteered ambition—caused me to look up from my notebook to see who this guy was. He was lean, with a narrow face, thick eyebrows, and jet-black hair inclined to curl. He referred to his time in L.A.—apparently he had played for the Galaxy—as an internship. It had been impossible for him to be the man in L.A. while playing alongside Donovan. Denver, he said, gave him a chance to stand out. He spoke clearly, and when the questions shifted into Spanish, he handled them in the same bright voice. He claimed to be a risk taker, a player who will try that bicycle kick anytime: down four, tied game, whenever.

Nothing here seems that remarkable, I recognize. In context, though, Herc stood out. He came across as introspective—which is so rare in sports—intelligent, and hungry. He wants the finer things in life! I cornered the Rapids’ press guy, who told me Herc was somebody worth getting to know.

Herc (his preferred name; “Herculez” is what his parents employed when they were punishing him) was born in East L.A. His father, Manuel, had immigrated to California from Jalisco, Mexico, intending to be a seminarian. That career choice didn’t stick, and when Manuel was introduced to the daughter of a colleague— she was also a Jalisco native—he fell in love, won her over, married her, and, as Herc says, they began cranking out kids. Herc, the firstborn of five, was supposed to be called Ivan.

“That was the name I wanted,” says Juanita Gomez, his mother. “That or Manuel, after his father. But when I was in labor, it was a struggle, just physically. The doctor says, ‘Oh, he’s strong, he’s a Hercules.’ And Herc’s father had been watching a movie about Hercules in the waiting room, which he saw as a sign. He said, ‘We’re going to name him Herculez, and with a “Z” so everyone will say “Herculezzzzzzzzzzzz.”’ I told him, ‘Are you joking? No way!’”

The nurses agreed with Juanita. Several times, over multiple days, they marched into her room to demand the Herculez name be changed. They confronted Manuel but he wouldn’t budge. “He laid a guilt trip on me,” Juanita recalls. “He said he’d spent three days in the waiting room, and it was his son, and so I let him have his way. The hospital waited eight days before they signed off on the paperwork!”

Manuel worked on Herc’s soccer development in the crib, bending and straightening the newborn’s legs. When Herc started walking, he encouraged him to dribble a soccer ball as he waddled around his grandmother’s living room. There’s a picture of Herc when he was two years old, striking a ball with technical perfection. Once when his grandmother returned home from an errand, all the photos and paintings were knocked off the apartment walls. Herc had started kicking the ball with real force, to this day his bread and butter.



Soccer gave Herc’s life some stability as his father hustled a string of hopeful ventures in Oxnard, the California farming community where the family relocated for a few years and where Herc started playing the game in earnest. Manuel sold sporting goods. He opened an auto body shop. He peddled couches and kitchen tables. If one enterprise showed success, Herc’s father would diversify into another arena, hoping that he could build a small empire, a gamble that went bust in the recession of the early 1990s. There hadn’t been a single spectacularly bad bet or anything, just small and incremental losses until there was no more money. Or even furniture in the apartment. With the family down to just clothes and an old Astro minivan, Manuel packed everyone up and drove 320 miles across the Mojave Desert, gambling again, on a new life in Las Vegas.

“We didn’t know we were moving,” recalls Ulysses Gomez, Herc’s brother. “He told us we were going on vacation to Vegas, and we ended up staying there.”

Herc didn’t like Nevada. It was too hot, the new apartment was too tiny, and kids at school, amused by Herc’s first name, kept asking him to prove his strength. He stuck with soccer, winning a spot on Neusport, a traveling team. “He showed up at an open tryout,” recalls his coach, Frank Lemmon. “We didn’t know who he was, but we had a policy that we’d look at anybody. The first time he shot on net, he cracked a bicycle kick. My assistant coach and I turned to the side and gave each other cheeky high fives and said, ‘Yeah, he’s on the team.’” Herc clearly had ability, though Lemmon says he wasn’t a standout. (“I’d say he was no more than the fourth or fifth best.”) He graduated from Las Vegas High with all-state honors, but no college expressed real interest. There probably wasn’t anyone who projected him to make it as a professional player. His father, Manuel, encouraged him to take the gamble anyway.

“It was his destiny to play professionally,” Manuel tells me. “I knew he could do it.”

Herc was only 25 years old when I found him on the Rapids, but by then he’d already traveled a long road. He
 first flew to Mexico, trying out with Pachuca, where he was 
cut after two weeks. He spent two months with Cruz Azul before being cut again. He signed with a low-level team in Puebla that paid him $30 a month and stacked him in a players-only dormitory. (“It was Lord of the Flies in there.”) Wanting to play for a better club, Herc moved to Durango, which turned out to be a dead end. Back to Las Vegas to play in a rec league, then a spell in San Diego with a semipro team called the Gauchos. The Galaxy noticed him in San Diego, signed him to a development deal, and gave him a ring when the team won the MLS Cup in 2002. Less gloriously, head coach Sigi Schmid shared a bit of career advice: Find another line of work, kid—soccer’s not in your future.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Herc recalls. “Soccer was kind of my ticket out, you know?”

On loan to the USL Seattle Sounders, Herc broke a metatarsal in his first scrimmage. A long rehab preceded a drop down to the San Diego Sockers, an indoor team that folded midseason. Herc moved back to Vegas to live at home—“that sucked”—until a friend encouraged him to try out again for the Galaxy. He rejoined the team, won another MLS Cup, and scored a championship-winning goal in the U.S. Open, earning a bronze gas mask trophy of appreciation from the supporters group known as the L.A. Riot Squad. Yet the Galaxy still shipped Herc and a couple other players to Colorado for goalkeeper Joe Cannon.

Soon after I discovered him at the Rapids’ stadium, he tore ligaments in his right knee. That basically was it for him in Colorado.
“Herc was playing well, no doubt about it,” says former U.S. national team defender Marcelo Balboa, who played for the Rapids and still lives outside Denver. “But then he tore his ACL. I don’t care what anybody says, nobody comes back from an ACL mentally for at least a year. Not in full form.”

A year lost. Before he could recover, the Rapids traded Herc to the Kansas City Wizards. I’d followed his move, but he seemed to be floundering in Kansas City. Last I’d seen, he’d left the Wizards altogether. By then I’d moved back to Miami. No publisher wanted my running book, which left me with virtually nothing to show for three years of work. We both seemed to be washed up.

       

THE DAY AFTER the Azteca friendly, I fly a few hours north to Torreón, home of Herc’s club team. I remain high from a historic American win, the first ever on Mexican soil. Herc started the match and played 78 exhausting minutes before being replaced by Brek Shea, the midfielder who promptly engineered the game’s only goal. On the bus back to their Mexico City hotel, teammates laughed as two kids in the Azteca parking lot threw up Herculez’s trademark goal celebration, arms raised to showcase their biceps.

Herc has more than 60,000 Twitter followers. U.S. Soccer named him a finalist for the 2012 men’s team athlete of the year, which is remarkable considering how few games he’s played for the national squad. At the most recent World Cup qualifier, against Guatemala in Kansas City, the American Outlaws carried a banner of Herc into Livestrong Park. His Facebook page overflows with posts from fans who thank him for leaving everything he has on the field and from others telling him he’s becoming their favorite player.

“I think it’s ’cause he didn’t give up,” says his brother Ulysses, an MMA fighter who wears Herc’s jerseys into the ring. “People appreciate that.”

Torreón is dusty and dry and so corrupted by narcotraficantes that Herc won’t let me catch a cab to his house. This is only the fourth time I’ve seen him in person, and just the second time we’ve really spoken. I never got to talk to him in Denver. I first interviewed him briefly outside the soccer stadium in Puebla, where he went in 2010 to restart his career— to “flip the tortilla,” as his father puts it. My flight from Mexico City arrived more than an hour late, a delay I wasn’t able to relay before I had to turn off my phone. Which means Herc, this national-team starter with whom I’ve talked only briefly, waited for me in the airport parking lot all that time. He tweeted, texted, played Words with Friends, and when I stepped into his car apologizing like crazy, he brushed off my shame like the delay was no big thing.

I’m talking to him now in his black Audi SUV as we motor through the somewhat apocalyptic landscape where he’s lived for the past seven months. He’s wearing a trucker hat that advertises the State of California, as does his T-shirt. The Audi’s leather seats and push-button ignition and Bang & Olufsen speakers are obvious upgrades from the Saturn ’on he drove in Colorado. (The “I” had fallen off years earlier, in California.) There’s also a shiny black Camaro parked at his house, where I’ll be staying for the next five days. Yeah. Five days. When I’d sent Herc an e-mail asking if I could come watch Santos Laguna play a game, he not only encouraged me to fly in, he also insisted I stay at his place. No big thing.

Herc rents in a gated subdivision near Torreón’s bullring, just off the main road to the Santos stadium. The house is large. Four bedrooms feature walkin closets and private bathrooms with showers. The kitchen is huge and modern. A restaurant-ready gas range stands next to a stainless-steel refrigerator holding mostly bottles of water and Gatorade. There are so many ways to illuminate the space—even the cabinets can be lit up from within—that Herc can’t remember which switches control what lights. The clock blinks on the microwave. “I’ll be out of here by December,” he tells me when I ask about his stability at Santos. (Not true, actually. Santos will remain his team into the new year.)

Santos is a rising club that, the season before I visited, rose all the way to a championship, making Herc one of few Americans to win a top division championship outside the U.S. Oribe Peralta, probably the most popular soccer player in Mexico right now—he scored the gold-medal-winning goal at last summer’s Olympics—also plays for Santos, and in Herc’s position. Oribe usually starts, leaving Herc to enter most games as a super sub. He scores remarkably frequently for the minutes he plays, but he doesn’t play as many minutes as he’d like. In the previous season’s championship final, Herc didn’t even see the field. “I sometimes feel like an expensive backup plan,” he tells me.

The house’s main hall, just off the dining room, serves as a rec room. Three vaguely Picassoesque oil paintings hang on one wall, adjacent to a whiteboard on which Herc and friends have scribbled inspirational maxims.

“Dream as if you will live forever, live as if you will die today.”

“The night is always darkest before the dawn.”

Like many athletes, Herc fuels on these phrases. (Eddie Johnson is also a particularly keen affirmation hoarder.) Herc changes phrases on the board almost daily and tweets them out to his followers. “If you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to reflect.” Is that self-help? Not everything on the board is. “Don’t bro me if you don’t even know me!” is also up there.

Two black leather couches frame a corner, facing a TV hanging from the ceiling. A cable box beams in soccer games from around the world, though Herc often uses iTunes to keep up with his favorite American shows: The Bachelor and Homeland. (“That show is crazy.”) A narrow bar hosts bottles of Johnnie Walker Red, Coca-Cola, and a local brand of mineral water. A dartboard—mandatory in a bachelor pad (“I do not want to be tied down right now”)—hangs on a wall behind the equally mandatory pool table, which lists to starboard. Closing out a wobbly game of eight ball when I walk in is Ugo Ihemelu, a longtime friend of Herc’s, his former teammate with the Galaxy and the Rapids, and currently the captain of F.C. Dallas. Ugo’s staying here all week—there is plenty of room—as he recovers from a concussion. We start the first night with pizza at a strip-mall restaurant where Herc knows the owner, sharing the pie with another friend of Herc’s, a stunning young woman who was a finalist for Miss Coahuila 2009. Playing well, it seems, has indeed won Herc some of the finer things in life.

The Azteca game was played on a Wednesday. I’ve arrived in Torreón on a Thursday, and Herc is scheduled to play for Santos on Saturday, which places him in serious relaxation mode most of the time I’m around. In season, as he recuperates between games, he usually chills at home, though he also likes to catch movies at the mall. We watch Total Recall when I’m there, and share tuna sashimi tostadas at this seafood place where the waitresses ask for his picture and he quietly points out to Ugo and me the narcos dining among us. (“You can always tell by the trucks they drive.”) He spends Friday night and Saturday afternoon sequestered in a Crowne Plaza hotel with his team. While he’s on lockdown, I drive around Torreón in the Audi. It’s a utilitarian city, to put it politely. Strip malls and stockyards and not much vegetation blocking the wind. Again: it’s hot. It’s dusty. I suspect Ugo is the only person ever to vacation here.

The game, on Saturday night, is at Estadio Santos Modelo, one of the most modern arenas in Mexico. It’s modeled after Pizza Hut Park in Dallas. The new stadium attracts a wealthier fan base, people more eager to be on the scene than to actually watch the game. In the twilight an hour before kickoff, cars have parked so far down the main road that Ugo and I watch women teeter for a half mile in stiletto heels, wobbling their way to the gates.



Tonight’s opponent is Pumas, a popular club. Pregame is all about Oribe Peralta, just back from London. The Olympic hero rides around the pitch on a John Deere maintenance cart, waving to the still-filling seats. At midfield he stands quietly as the scoreboard shows baby pictures and videotaped testimonials from his family. The theme song from Chariots of Fire animates the loudspeakers.

Oribe, naturally, gets the start. But so does Herc. He’d told me earlier that, for once, he actually didn’t want to start this game. The U.S. has a qualifier coming up in Jamaica. Herc, who is expecting a call-up—and he’ll get it—wants to be fresh for that game, which he feels is more important to his career. He lines up on the right side in a 4-2-3-1 formation, wide of the lone striker position he prefers, which goes to Mr. Gold Medal.

I sit in a green plastic seat next to Ugo, who helpfully explains all the ways the Pumas head coach is outfoxing Santos on the way to a oneand then a two-goal Pumas lead. (Santos eventually loses 2–1.) Flags of the countries where Santos’s players were born hang near the main scoreboard. In addition to the Mexican tricolor, there are flags for Panama and Colombia and Brazil and an American flag specifically raised to honor Herc. The setting sun reflects off the desert dust, giving the horizon an indigo glow. The air tastes like a communion wafer. I keep trying not to remember that this was the stadium where gunshots during a game prompted players to sprint to the locker room while fans dropped to the ground and pressed their children up against any available concrete surface.

Herc subs out early in the second half, Ugo convincing me he’d been misused tactically. That’s what it looked like to me, but I’m not the most qualified observer. I can’t always tell how good a player Herc is, really. I understand why a friend of mine who used to play professionally in Argentina says Herc “may be good enough for CONCACAF, but is he good enough for Brazil?” Herc works his ass off every outing. That’s obvious. But he’s not a standout talent. Following the 2010 World Cup, Herc waited so long for another call up to the national squad—almost two years—that he at one point changed his bio on Twitter to “former U.S. national team player.”

“Herc doesn’t have a lot of rope,” Frank Lemmon, his youth coach and still one of his best friends, tells me. “He’s not the kind of player who can play 20 caps, score four goals, and still make a roster. If he doesn’t produce every other game, he’s at risk of getting replaced.”

We postgame with teammates at a Torreón house party, an experience I’m not allowed to describe. (“Tonight the reporter’s hat comes off, Robert!”) There may have been streams of cerveza, whiskey, and tequila. A very attractive yoga instructor may have offered private lessons, inciting the jealousy of Miss Coahuila. Did we eat dozens of deliciously greasy tacos? Perhaps a full mariachi band wandered in at one point, and the sun may have been coming up when we got home, and Herc may have shouted out, “I work hard and I play hard!” I can’t say. I am free to share that sometime during the evening, when I asked Ugo about Herc’s appeal as a player, he told me this: “I think it’s where he came from. Everything Herc has he earned for himself.”

WHEN I GOT BACK TO MIAMI from Colorado in late 2009, only a couple thousand dollars remained in my bank account. As I priced apartments, I realized that for even modest, in-no-way-nice spaces, I didn’t have enough money to cover a deposit and the first month’s rent. As I considered my limited options, an idea that had once seemed pretty harebrained— move to Juárez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world—started to look not only more reasonable but, possibly, unavoidable. I didn’t have a book contract when I left Miami, or an agent or a proposal or any of that useful stuff. My relocation would be funded by Visa. But it was either go to Mexico or give up altogether. I went for it. My last shot.

I rented an apartment a couple miles south of the El Paso border and began building a life. I bought a cell phone. Workers hooked up my electricity and gas. Two men were shot dead outside my grocery store. I started hanging around the city’s soccer team, thinking the players and fans would reveal Juárez to me. I also thought, incorrectly, that I might be able to sell a magazine story or two about the team. “Soccer? Mexico? No thanks.” One month, even two months in, I couldn’t see how it was all going to work out. At night, when I lay in bed as sirens wailed up and down the streets around my apartment, I was often so worried—about my finances, about my future—that I couldn’t sleep. I was in deep.

I hadn’t followed Mexican soccer before I got down there. My exposure to La Primera was limited to what I’d caught while flipping through television channels back in the States. The quality of play surprised me. The team Chivas, for instance, had a guy named Javier Hernández, who sure looked to be world class. As I browsed the sports pages a couple months after my move, I saw that Hernández—Chicharito—shared the league lead in goals scored with… with… Herculez Gomez!



Just seeing the name gave me a jolt of adrenaline. I didn’t know he was down there. I thought he’d fallen out of the game, that his modest little career had ended. Yet there he was in Mexico, playing for the main team in Puebla and scoring so frequently he was in the running for the Golden Boot. I brought myself up to speed immediately.

Herc had seemed at home in Kansas City, at least initially. He started the final nine games of the 2008 season. Heading into 2009, management talked of a contract extension. But on the first day of physical testing for the new season, Herc tore his meniscus. Same right knee he’d injured in Colorado. Talk of a contract extension quieted down. Head coach Peter Vermes told Herc that even when he recovered, he’d be last on the totem pole of strikers, fifth or sixth in line for playing time. Vermes, Herc says, did not return his calls or the calls of his agent.

“It’s just one of those things where he didn’t see me as a viable option,” Herc explains. “Which would have been fine. I would have respected that. Not calling back a player? Not calling back an agent? Not giving a straight answer? I lost all respect.”

Into the off-season without a contract, Herc was left to exercise by himself at a 24 Hour Fitness. His savings dwindled. In late December of that year, 2009, Kansas City finally responded with an offer. It was less than half as much money as had been floated before the injury. Take it or leave it.

“He was crying after Kansas City,” his mother remembers. “He thought about giving up, but I told him that didn’t sound like him. He’s not a quitter. None of my kids are quitters.” Herc flew to Vegas for Christmas, then kept a promise to his girlfriend, flying on to San Francisco to join her for New Year’s Eve. Turning on his phone at the airport in California, he found messages about the only other professional option to develop: Puebla. Almost no money, and a short, one-season contract.

“My pride was hurt,” Herc recalls. “There was maybe $1,200 left to my name. I was like, this is a last-shot kind of deal.”

Not only did he play regularly for Puebla, but he was tied with Chicharito for the league lead in goals. It was thrilling to learn. It gave me energy. This was the spring of 2010. The buzz of his success had blown yet bigger by the time I made it to Puebla myself, toward the end of the season. The words “World Cup” started appearing in stories about him, which thrilled me, even just the speculation. He was hot—nine goals in nine games, not all of which he’d even started. When I approached him outside Puebla’s stadium, I tried to act professional, to disguise how excited I was at his success. I asked a few questions about soccer in Mexico before getting to the matter I really wanted to address: Had he heard from the national team?

“Not yet,” he replied. “But they know where to find me.”

That didn’t sound good. Hot as he was, Herc remained a very long shot. When the season ended, he flew to L.A. to train with Chivas USA, signaling to the national team that he was eager to keep playing. On television back in Juárez, I’d watch press conferences held after his practices, a growing number of reporters hovering around him, asking if he’d heard anything yet. He still hadn’t. “I’m just trying to stay in shape,” he’d say. When they named the 30-man roster for the initial camp, Herc made the provisional squad.

There would be one week in Princeton, New Jersey, then a friendly against the Czech Republic outside Hartford, the night before six final roster cuts. In the dressing room before the Czech game, Herc was handed jersey number 30—the last guy on the team. He didn’t start, but when he subbed on in the second half, he headed a corner kick past Petr Cech and into the net.

I lost it. And I had been trying not to. My hopes, prior to that header, had been in check. All game long—all week long, actually—I’d been telling myself what an accomplishment it had been for Herc just to make the initial squad, how far he’d climbed in only a few months. But that goal slipped me into an electric haze, a place where I was barely aware of my limbs, or of the dog I was obligated to walk around my block, or of the sirens screaming across my violent city. He’s going to make the team! He’s going… to make… the team! I repeated those words two more times, then maybe ten more times after that. I was even more elated when he did survive the final cut, and then when I saw him standing on the sidelines against England, about to sub into a World Cup match, and then again when he made the field in the Slovenia game and when—get out of here!— he started against Algeria. But that night after the Czech friendly, before I knew anything for certain, I’d already been moved enough to write this in the journal that I keep: “Herculez Gomez is my hero.”

Admitting that should make me blush. It’s over the top for sure, possibly even embarrassing. But I’ll own it. In sports, heroes don’t have to be superstars. It’s just as possible—in fact, even more so—for an uncelebrated, often-injured, lifelong journeyman to transfer onto a fan the strength to keep going. Hang in there. It’s always darkest before the dawn. All the hoary maxims Herc scribbles on his whiteboard suddenly had a human face. Keep trying, believe in yourself, commit to a goal, and you might just taste glory.

“I HEAR THAT ALL THE TIME,” Herc says just before I leave Torreón, after I tell him how he’s inspired me. “A lot of people share stories like that with me.”

When Herc made the World Cup team, Senator Harry Reid congratulated him on the floor of Congress: “Herculez exemplifies what can be accomplished with hard work, dedication, and passion.” Last spring, when Santos flew to Vegas for an exhibition against Real Madrid, hometown fans and the local media were more excited to talk to Herc than to Iker Casillas. There were newspaper profiles and TV features; a documentary cameraman followed him around. Mayor Oscar Goodman shook his hand. Another politician declared April 6 Herculez Gomez Day in Nevada.

“If you look at Herc’s career on paper now, you’d say, ‘Oh, that guy’s a blue-chip, pedigreed guy,’” says Frank Lemmon. “He was MVP of the Galaxy’s U.S. Open championship. He has two MLS championship rings. He played in the Club World Cup with Pachuca. He played in the FIFA World Cup in Africa. How many American players have their own foreign league championship? Or a Golden Boot?”

I caught Herc a couple more times in Miami, in camp with the U.S. team before the Jamaica series, and later again before the final two games that saw the Americans through to the Hex. Once more, Herc spoke with reporters, presented before even Clint Dempsey and Michael Bradley. It was Miami, yes, he speaks Spanish, yes, yes, but still. He’s the face of the U.S. men’s national team. After Herc addressed the press in general, he told me that everything in his life over the next two years is aimed at Brazil. His fitness, his plans in general—all are geared toward the World Cup.

“I’m making up for lost time at 30!” he said, his latest whiteboard mantra. When I asked if he feared being dropped from the national team before Brazil, he shook me off. Of course he’s concerned. He’s been dropped before, not that long ago. But by now he also has a record of pulling through, of pulling off the improbable.

“I’m like a fucking cockroach,” he said, laughing a little, using his hand to pantomime a steady climb. “I just keep going and going and going.”

I wouldn’t bet against him.

___________________________________________

Howler is a new quarterly magazine about soccer. Check out issue one at www.howlermagazine.com.

Note: Due to an editing mistake, an earlier version of this story incorrectly  stated that Gomez had been the first American to win a title outside the U.S. Thanks to @RealAlbertPerez for pointing out the error.

Howler Radio, episode one: An American at Azteca

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to take in a US-Mexico game at Estadio Azteca, this episode is for you. Howler contributor Robert Andrew Powell takes us behind the fencing and riot police to witness the USMNT’s historic win in August 2012.

You can also subscribe to and download Howler Radio in iTunes.

Howler Radio jingle

We’ll be releasing the first episode of Howler Radio, our new podcast, in about a week, but we thought we’d share the jingle with you now because we dig it so much.