Time for Eddie Johnson?
Here come the urgent calls for an offensive paramedic, with America's national soccer team hurting, its primary scoring threat literally gushing blood after taking a nasty elbow to the face against Italy on Saturday.
Play Eddie Johnson, several World Cup commentators are bleating. Widen the search for talent to the inner cities, sudden soccer experts are demanding. Critics so regularly dismissive of the sport somehow have now come up with the answers for the Yanks' must-win game vs. Ghana on Thursday in Nuremberg.
In fact, U.S. officials have been working on these solutions for years in shedding their soccer mediocrity. Johnson, the black 22-year-old striker who considers himself an "inner-city kid" in spite of hailing frome the small Florida community of Palm Coast, merely is the most recent product of that work. The youngest man on the U.S. roster and a briefly used substitute in the tournament's first game, Johnson's speed and offensive aggression indeed could be an option for coach Bruce Arena alongside battered but relentless forward Brian McBride.
Diversity, said recently elected federation president Sunil Gulati, continues to be a U.S. Soccer priority. "We have outreach to the Hispanic community. We don't have to teach them to enjoy the game; they already do," Gulati said. "But it's different with the African-American community. And that's tied to visibility."
Which is tied to another long-standing U.S. Soccer aim of increased major media exposure -- primarily television -- that is most obviously boosted during the quadrennial World Cup, in spite of regular calls by high-profile pundits that "Americans don't care about soccer."
Just during Eddie Johnson's young life, that aspect has changed dramatically. He began playing recreational-league soccer when he was 8, simply because his childhood friends did. "I wasn't good. I was just fast," he said. "At that age, all you've got to do is be fast."
But, at 10, televised coverage of the 1994 U.S.-based World Cup was a revelation to Johnson, who was so thrilled by the Brazilians that he had no qualms about pulling for them in their 1-0 victory over the United States that year.
"My coach told me to watch the World Cup," he said. "I didn't even know who Pele was then. I played basketball with my friends, but during water breaks, I'd be juggling the ball [with his feet and legs]. They said, 'Go kick the ball with the white boys.' "
But, just as Johnson became aware that international soccer's greatest star was a black man, so his friends came to the realization that DeMarcus Beasley was a central character on the U.S. team, along with Eddie Pope and, most recently, Oguchi Onyewu.
Johnson still was in high school when he was identified by U.S. Soccer for its Project-40 program, which placed future prospects in its Bradenton, Fla., academy (as was prodigy Freddy Adu). With that conduit to Major League Soccer, Johnson scored his first professional goal when he was 17. Called up to the national team in 2004, Johnson scored in each of his first four U.S. appearances, a record.
"I tell Landon Donovan and DeMarcus I want to accomplish what they did," Johnson said. "Residency program. Under 20s [national team], the Olympics, same as them. Now I want to do it in the World Cup."
