Just before the second half of an under-20 friendly international in Fort Lauderdale last month, Haiti’s Ricardo Champagne sidled up to Freddy Adu and asked him to pose for a photograph.
Champagne had a friend waiting on the sideline, ready to capture the moment. Less than a month into the age of Adu, the 14-year-old has already become more of a celebrity than an opponent.
At Giants stadium four days earlier his introduction 54 minutes into the game and his first goal for DC United 20 minutes later had drawn cheers and shrieks of delight from the New York-New Jersey Metrostars’ fans. His team eventually lost 3-2 and, though the story of the day had been a game-winning brace from the home side’s Jamaican international Fabian Taylor, it was Adu who was corralled by television for the post-match interview.
Befitting somebody who has spent two years in the maw of IMG, he made all the right noises about the goal not mattering because his team lost. He had even had the good grace not to celebrate the strike, coming as it did with DC trailing 3-1.
Others have been less careful with their words. The United coach Peter Nowak’s decision not to start Adu in his side’s first four games — he gave him only the final 18 minutes of the 1-0 home defeat by the Chicago Fire — has drawn particularly heavy fire.
After Adu’s low-key 29-minute professional debut in United’s first game of the season, Tony Kornheiser, a highly respected Washington Post columnist, actually called for Nowak, the club president and the Major League Soccer (MLS) hierarchy all to be fired.
His reasoning was that they had conspired in a classic piece of false advertising by hyping Adu’s arrival then failing to start him. He felt that any casual fan tuning in to see what all the fuss was about that Saturday wouldn’t have waited an hour for Adu’s appearance.
This is the sort of problem a sport encounters when it wraps a large part of its marketing strategy up in a kid who doesn’t turn 15 until next month. Ordinary Americans who watched Adu juggling the ball for David Letterman or were amused by his television commercial with Pele (the duo battle it out for a Pepsi product called Sierra Mist) will feel hard done by if they turn up at their local stadium and discover his fluorescent smile is lighting up the bench for most of the game.
They will hardly care that the correct policy for Nowak to pursue in order to assist the teenager’s long-term development may not be the best thing for the immediate promotion of the MLS. Over the past six months, the kid has single-handedly brought the game into the mainstream culture.
Through media outlets as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, MTV and the CBS current affairs flagship 60 Minutes, he has had an impact far beyond even that of the national team when it reached the 2002 World Cup quarterfinals.
More than 400 journalists turned up at RFK stadium in Washington to see him overshadowed on his debut by his teammate, the former Middlesbrough reserve Jaime Moreno. When he attended a Los Angeles Lakers game a couple of weeks ago, Shaquille O’Neal put the basketball on the floor during warm-ups and started to do step-overs to impress the youngster.
Having made the game sexy again, in a way that it hasn’t been in the United States since Pele’s appearances for the New York Cosmos had the likes of Mick Jagger and Henry Kissinger helicoptering across to Giants stadium from Manhattan, he is now charged with holding the nation’s interest.
Which is a ridiculously unfair burden to place on any 14-year-old, especially one whose salary of $500 000 a year is well known to be by far the largest in the league. Little wonder he has already shipped enough heavy challenges for his club to be crying out for referees to give him more protection.
‘We all knew from day one that players were going to go after him,†said his teammate Ryan Nelsen. ‘If I was on the opposition team I would probably go after him — he’s a young kid and he’s playing against men.
‘He realises now that this is not MTV, this is not hoopla, this is a game of adult men trying to play for their living. At 14, it’s kind of hard to fathom that every game means so much, because it’s young and exciting for him and all that, and now he’s realising these are seasoned veterans.â€
Some of the punishment he has received has prompted fears among hardcore fans that the MLS might try to make sure Adu receives special treatment rather than risk some gnarly centre-half injuring its putative saviour. That conspiracy theory is founded in the first place on the belief that the league needs saving.
Although it has lost a lot of money over its eight-year existence, MLS now draws a television audience comparable to the National Hockey League, average attendances are a healthy 14 000-plus, and Adu’s first four outings were watched by more than 110 000 people.
Arguments about whether he can help soccer usurp baseball, basketball, gridiron and ice hockey in the national consciousness are misplaced too. The sport has a constantly growing US constituency — particularly as a participation sport for schoolchildren — and can prosper in its own terms without threatening the position of the big four.
In any case, the moment Adu starts living up to the hype — his cameos so far make it impossible to judge whether he can — he will be heading to Europe for big bucks. Under the terms of an agreement where all players’ rights are held by the league, the MLS will receive a substantial portion of any transfer fee. That sort of money may yet be his biggest legacy to the game in the US. —