re: Landon Donovan Appreciation Thread

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Landon Donovan Was Our Savior All Along

It's a strange thing, to watch a hero die. First came the shock, the denial, the OMGs and WTFs that exploded through our Twitter feeds last night when we found out that Landon Donovan wasn't traveling with the United States men's national team to next month's World Cup in Brazil. Then in snaked the smugness, the cynicism, the #wellactuallys, the doubt. There's no surprise here. We knew he wouldn't make it this whole time.

It was a version of his career in miniature, Donovan getting buffeted along an expectations curve of our own devising, finding himself discounted in the end.

We Americans consider ourselves special, plucked from our father's testes by God himself. Our idea of international competition is running out LeBron James or Michael Phelps as proof that we are all the Chosen Ones, that we have an inalienable right to victory, to domination. And so, when soccer washed upon our shores during the 1994 World Cup, we decided we wanted that, too.

We immediately started searching, scheming up ways the United States—decades behind the rest of the world—could mount the summit of the globe's most treasured sport. It became a sort of national parlor game. What if, we thought, we got Shaq to play? What if Randy Moss grew up with a soccer ball? In another life, would Troy Aikman have a nose for goal?

We were so busy theorizing that we barely noticed him when he presented himself to us. And then when we did, when a 17-year-old Landon Donovan was awarded the tournament's best player at the U-17 FIFA World Championships, we looked up, and we shrugged.

That shortish kid with the bleached hair and bad tan? We know that fricking kid! He was the guy in high school with the seashell necklace and the Abercrombie polo who listened to 311 and smoked weed at lunch in the senior parking lot. He wasn't different. He was like us.

He didn't even have an origin story. He wasn't from the hood, and he didn't have Olympians as parents. He was just a dude. Donovan was unlike any player we'd ever produced, but because he was too like any guy off the street—because he didn't look or act the part of an American sports hero—we doubted him.

We knew enough about soccer to know that we didn't have the league or the coaching or even the know-how to develop a world-class player. So it was exciting to see German club Bayer Leverkusen sign Donovan to a six-year contract, so that he could go, develop, and return to us as a savior of the sport.

He failed. He couldn't get settled in Europe, away from his family, his friends, and sunny Southern California, and in 2001, he slinked back after two unsuccessful years to the San Jose Earthquakes in Major League Soccer, our joke of a league where the 12 teams played on football fields and hollow cheers echoed through empty stands. But he preferred this. SMH, we thought. He couldn't tough it out.

San Jose won that year, and Donovan became the face of a league that desperately needed it. In 2002, MLS contracted to 10 teams, and Donovan went to his first World Cup with the USMNT. Somehow, the United States fought all the way to the quarterfinal. Donovan scored his first World Cup goal, and won the award for the best young player.

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