U.S. soccer needs some Mathis-like imagination

With Saturday’s massive World Cup qualifier in his adopted home town, former U.S. national team forward Clint Mathis went down memory lane with Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, who famously dubbed the Conyers native “Cletus” for his Southern iconoclasm. It’s a nickname that stuck as he became an American soccer folk hero for an all-too-brief spell earlier this decade.

When the Yanks meet El Salvador in Salt Lake City facing the possibility of missing out on the World Cup altogether, I’ll be thinking of the inventiveness Mathis demonstrated, his instinctive playfulness that is a virtue in soccer around the world but all too rare in the development of the game in America. It’s a quality that is glaringly missing from Bob Bradley’s current team, which features Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey and a promising attacker in Jozy Altidore but otherwise has one thinking “work rate:”

“Not since Reyna retired has an American shown his cleverness at varying the pace and direction and rhythm of possession by holding the ball as well as running with it or passing it. Calmness and patience and diversity in attack, especially against a bunkered-in opponent, is still hit-or-miss. Having a lot of the ball doesn’t guarantee a lot of success.”

If Mathis had been able to blend his innate skills with better discipline, we might not be thinking of him now as a could-have-been. He parlayed his international success into a disastrous spell with Germany’s Hannover, where he contemptuously dropped his shorts after being put into a game by a coach who rarely played him. He’s settled down now, a husband and a father, still enjoying a respectable career in Major League Soccer at the age of 32.

The memories shouldn’t haunt, but might perhaps inspire a younger generation of American players riding an exasperating roller coaster this summer. Humiliation at Costa Rica, victory over No. 1-ranked Spain, agony at the hands of Brazil after going up two goals early, leaving it late against Mexico at Azteca. And now, needing three points against lowly El Salvador to stay out of the CONCACAF danger zone.

The searing free kick goal Mathis scored in San Pedro Sula to down Honduras during this very same stage in qualifying eight years ago was one of the defining moments of recent U.S. soccer history. Then there was the goal against co-hosts South Korea in the 2002 World Cup. When asked days before the game about the unpredictability of Mathis, then-U.S. coach Bruce Arena sheepishly told reporters: “Clint could show up for the game bald for all I know.”

Cletus' finest moment, albeit a fleeting one

So Cletus went out and got himself a Mohawk instead.

In the clanging hothouse of Daegu, Mathis was cool and precise under pressure. The Americans got a vital point against a South Korean side riding the euphoria of tens of thousands of youths joyously gathering in the streets, all over the country. It was hard to tell which was louder: the deafening thundersticks in the stadiums, or the marching, chanting and viewing parties on big screen TVs in downtown Seoul.

Mathis’ goal was pure brilliance, and so was the service:

“I just remember Johnny O’Brien played a phenomenal ball. But what I’ll remember most telling my grandchildren is, you couldn’t hear anything during the game. There were 65,000 home fans screaming. You couldn’t hear each other ask for the ball. And when I scored that goal, you could hear a pin drop. It was a really cool feeling. In sports, people always like to get the crowd up and to hear your fans, but in my opinion, there’s no better feeling than to silence a crowd.”

He was maddeningly inconsistent, and he’s honest with Wahl in explaining some of his regrets. But the combination of fearlessness and free play that was crafted on hardscrabble ground in Rockdale County, and against ruthless older brothers, gave Mathis the confidence to reach an exalted place in world sports. His perspective now, offered to his successors, is both instructive and hopeful:

“You don’t need to really be peaking now. You need to qualify for the World Cup but you need to be peaking next summer . . . It’s just about the timing. Hopefully this new era of kids can withstand the pressure, because it is a lot of pressure. You’ve got a billion people watching you. I can’t think of any other sport that has that. It’s crazy to even fathom.”