JOHANNESBURG – Halfway around the world from here, a father sat before a television peering through the shadowy picture of an African night. This was last Saturday afternoon where he was. He looked for his son, Robbie, the quiet one, the driven one, the one he knew would be destined for fantastic things. The night before they had talked on the phone and Rawle Findley wouldn’t ask his boy the most important question – the one he had been dying to know in the days before the United nfl jerseys States played England in their World Cup opener. Will you start?
The night before they had talked on the telephone, Robbie Findley said nothing. The father who lives for soccer, who loves soccer, sat at the television with his other son and his daughter, staring, looking. He would like to have been here in South Africa, but Robbie was named to the U.S. team too late for him to make arrangements. Plus there was work. He would have to settle for television with his other children in Phoenix.
He watched Robbie racing down the field at Rustenburg’s Royal Bafokeng Stadium, past some of the best players in the world. His boy. His Robbie. Never had Rawle felt so proud.
“It was just disbelief that I had,” Rawle said over the telephone this week from Las Vegas, where he lives.
Nineteen years he has watched his child play soccer. He could remember them all last Saturday as he watched Robbie play against England. How could he forget the Paradise Valley Soccer Club in Phoenix where he first took his son as a child. What was he? Five? Even back then it was so obvious the boy could be great. It was in the way he moved with the ball on his foot, accelerating past the other kids, dribbling, dribbling. Everything so perfect. So natural. How did he do it?
The father laughs as he recalls his son jittering down the field.
“It was instinctive,” he says.
For six years he coached his sons, teaching them the game he grew up playing on the streets back home in Trinidad and Tobago. It was a game they played, the way kids never do in the U.S. – in open fields and empty roads kicking a ball all afternoon until the sun went down and the day turned cold.
But when Robbie turned 11, Rawle stepped away. He would not coach his son anymore. It was time for the boy to learn the game from someone else, lest a father’s impulses destroy his son’s instincts. Fathers push. Fathers demand. Fathers envision a level that maybe their children aren’t ready to reach. No, Rawle decided, Robbie would have to learn the game from somebody else.
Plus Robbie had his cousins. He had Mike Bibby who was then a point guard for the Sacramento Kings. Together, the two played basketball at local gyms with Robbie’s other cousin Shaun McDonald, who was about to burst into the NFL as a wide receiver for the St. Louis Rams, and the New York Knicks’ Eddie House, a cousin by marriage. They could push Robbie farther than a father could.
Even though Rawle loved soccer, he wondered if perhaps his son would be happier playing another sport. He suggested basketball. Would Robbie want to be like Mike Bibby? Robbie did not. Nor did he like baseball despite the fact he had a terrific arm. He wanted to play soccer. He wanted to go to Europe and someday play for one of the top club teams.
Secretly, Rawle was delighted. He wanted his son to play soccer, too.
As Robbie grew up it was obvious he was fast. Faster than everybody he played against. It made him valuable. At family get-togethers people were always saying Robbie and Shaun McDonald should race – the teenager and the NFL wide receiver. Who would win? None of nfl throwback jerseythem knew.
But Robbie was a quiet kid, a religious kid. When he grew into manhood he tattooed the words “humility” and “loyalty” onto his hands. These would be values, he’d come to say, “just the way I was brought up.” He never thought of himself as faster than everyone else, even though it was obvious again and again he was the quickest player on whatever soccer fields he played on.
“I still don’t think he realizes how fast he is,” Rawle says.
Shyly, Robbie says people tell him this all the time.
Still by high school it was clear to Rawle that his son was different. McDonald was a great soccer player himself. And before Robbie went to Shadow Mountain High School, McDonald was the best player they ever had, its all-time leader in goals scored. He used to tease Robbie, telling him he would never beat the record. Rawle laughed at the thought. Robbie had grown so well, had gotten so fast, he would break McDonald’s record.
In college, at Oregon State, Robbie became one of the school’s best players ever. But when he went to Major League Soccer he wasn’t considered an elite prospect, one who would be considered a real candidate for the national team. In fact, he never saw himself as a player in the World Cup. His goal was always Europe.
Then, after being traded from the Los Angeles Galaxy to Real Salt Lake, he blossomed. Rawle still can remember that night last year when RSL won the MLS Cup and Robbie scored a goal and held the trophy aloft. He had 12 goals in a breakthrough season. That got him on the radar for the national team. Then, the injury to Charlie Davies, USA’s fastest forward, got Robbie an invitation to the U.S. camp.
Despite not being in the same goal-scoring form as last season, he went to the U.S.’s pre-World Cup camp in Princeton unsure if he’d be picked. But speed is hard to ignore and last Saturday Rawle watched his son roaring through the English defenders. He almost had to stop and imagine if what he was seeing could be true. His child. His Robbie.
“Can you believe this is Robert?” he said that day.
Thinking about this a few days later, he laughed.
“This is the highest you can get. There is no higher level you can go as far as soccer.”
Later that night, Rawle saw McDonald who had watched the game too. They talked about that race everyone wants Robbie and McDonald to have. The football player shook his head.
“Maybe once I could beat him, but not anymore,” McDonald told Rawle. “He’s faster than me.”
On Friday another World Cup match will come. Rawle will have to work that day. He is a software consultant in Las Vegas. He will be in his office. No time to slip away to watch at home or a sports bar. The father will sit at his desk, staring at another scene from halfway around the world. Maybe Robbie won’t start this time, what with Slovenia and its nfl jerseys authentic bigger, stronger defenders. Perhaps the Americans will want a taller player up front.
Rawle understands enough about soccer to know this can be true. But there is little doubt Robbie Findley will play at some point in the game. And Rawle Findley will feel the same magic he did last Saturday night when his son sprinted onto the field and past the best English players and into the most wonderful dream a father could ever have.
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