A Gringo's Game
He blends Latino creativity with European discipline—and even more important, Clint Dempsey "tries s---." Could the hard-edged, risk-taking Texan come to embody (finally) the American way to play?
The man wore crocodile boots, a white cowboy hat and a belt buckle the size of a license plate. Clint Dempsey doesn't remember his full name—hell, nobody in Nacogdoches, Texas, does—but you couldn't miss him on the sidelines of Nac-town's Mexican League games, amid the cigar smoke and the fajita carts and the horchata peddlers. He was the guy betting cash money on the ****y 15-year-old gringo to beat men more than twice his age, proud men from Mexico and El Salvador who'd throw you to the East Texas dirt for trying a fancy move on them. Sixty, eighty, one hundred dollars! The man kept wagering, and Dempsey's team, Zamora, kept winning. "He called me," says Dempsey, "his Little Rooster."
Years before he would score in the World Cup for the U.S., the Little Rooster swallowed his fear, unleashing all the tricks he'd seen in his Diego Maradona highlight videos and noodled on in his grandma's backyard with his older brother, Ryan. Stepovers, nutmegs, dipsy-dos: The Little Rooster had everything, even moves without names, moves nobody had seen before. Childhood friend Frankie Rivera recalls one Mexican League game when Dempsey "did some kind of weird trick—it was so awesome—and the guy got mad and spit in his face. Clint just went at him. He had three guys trying to fight him, but he did good. He did good."
And when the Little Rooster scored goals, he wouldn't hold back on his foes. "He'd run around to the faces of all of them," says Dempsey's mother, Debbie.
"They'd be so mad," says his father, Aubrey. "They'd scream and holler."
Says Dempsey, "I'm surprised I didn't get stabbed out there."
