Out on the edge of Fort Wayne, Indiana, past the Ruby Tuesday and the stately minor-league basketball arena, sits a soccer complex with a noteworthy benefactor.
The fields of the Beasley National Soccer School are empty on Labor Day weekend, and the indoor facility is locked up. The only signs of life are the occasional bicyclists on the path that weaves between the pitches, pedaling hard in advance of a gathering thunderstorm.
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There’s not much outside signage to indicate the origin of the complex’s name. You have to press your face against the darkened glass of the indoor facility foyer to catch a glimpse of the founder on a poster in the lobby.
The understated nature of the place feels about right.
DaMarcus Beasley has never given much thought to crafting his public image. He rarely consents to interviews, and claims to have turned down David Letterman on multiple occasions after a few of his four World Cups. Despite having appeared in more of those tournaments than any other American man and having played in a UEFA Champions League semifinal, Beasley has remained one of the rarest of things in sports culture in 2019: a genuine enigma.
“I’ve always just been a person who would rather play than talk, you know?” Beasley said in a sit-down interview back in August. “It took a lot for me to even do this (interview).”
But ahead of the final game of his accomplished playing career, this Sunday when the Houston Dynamo take on the LA Galaxy, Beasley figures people might be curious, after all these years: about what drives him, how he managed to hang on for so long and whether he really, truly never desired celebrity and fame, not even a little.
“I don’t like seeing my name on TV,” Beasley said. “It’s just not me. But you give a little leeway now that you’re retiring. I get it. I’m trying to play the part.”
Beasley strolled into a coffee shop in the Houston suburbs after a late-summer training session, but few heads turned. The baristas greeted him with a collective, peppy “welcome,” but they do that for everybody.
There is no special treatment, nor any acknowledgment whatsoever, that one of the most accomplished American soccer players of all time just walked in the door — one who runs out for the hometown Dynamo on weekends, no less.
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The only indication Beasley might be some sort of celebrity is his cream-colored Maserati SUV, conspicuous in the strip-mall parking lot out front.
Soccer players do not tend to physically stand out from the general public the way NBA and NFL stars do, with their height and musculature. They’re almost always slighter than you imagine. Beasley is no exception. He’s listed at 5-foot-8, 145 pounds on the Dynamo roster, and even that might be a minor exaggeration. He is practically engulfed by the coffee shop’s wide-set leather chairs as he begins to reflect on the early years of his lengthy career.
“That feels like a very, very long time ago,” says Beasley, picturing his carefree younger self, his head full of hair.
DaMarcus Beasley and Landon Donovan (front) with the U-17 national team at the U-17 World Championship in 1999 (Phil Walter / Getty Images)
Back then, Beasley’s career seemed intertwined with another up-and-coming star who would go on to enjoy a far more public profile. The first time Beasley met Landon Donovan was at camp for the Under-16 U.S. national team, which pegs this sometime in the late 1990s. Beasley was already on the squad, and he remembers the coach mentioning a kid from Redlands, Calif., that they were considering bringing into the fold.
“From the first moment, you could see already that his talent was up above what we had,” Beasley recalls.
Donovan, told of Beasley’s description, remembers it similarly, only the opposite.
“That’s how I felt about him,” Donovan said. “It was pretty clear that he was the best player on the team. He moved in a way I had never seen a soccer player move in person.”
Thus was born a friendship that would help define the U.S. men’s national team for the better part of a decade-and-a-half.
Other peers would step into leading roles over the years. But from the beginning, the polar opposite personalities of Beasley and Donovan bookended the team. Both were flashy, exciting attackers on the field, the breakout young stars of the 2002 World Cup, harbingers of an ascendant generation who led the way to an underdog run all the way to the quarterfinals.
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Early on in his career, Donovan received a piece of advice from an older teammate that only made sense to him later, and that he’s never forgotten. In soccer, you don’t have friends; you have acquaintances. The veteran didn’t necessarily mean it maliciously, only that players move around and lives change so often that it’s difficult to maintain deeper bonds. Yet even as they pursued different paths, he and Beasley maintained a mutual admiration.
“We very quickly developed a bond and a friendship,” Donovan said. “It wasn’t necessarily spoken, but I think we both realized that each of us had something special. … We always stayed in touch.”
Somewhere along the way, though, starting soon after the glories of ’02, Beasley and Donovan’s career paths began to splinter — both on the field and in a public perception sense.
Beasley embarked for Europe, where he would spend the better part of a decade, suiting up for PSV, Manchester City, Rangers and Hannover. Following a disappointing spell with Bayer Leverkusen in the early 2000s, Donovan stayed in Major League Soccer for the bulk of his career. While Beasley turned down talk show invitations, Donovan embraced becoming what his longtime teammate described as “the poster boy for MLS and for U.S. soccer.”
Did any part of Beasley ever want that?
“No, not really,” he said. “Obviously, if it would have happened, I would have taken it in stride and gone with it. But no, I never looked at it like I was competing against Landon. We had gone through that whole process together.”
From age 16, through youth national team camps and the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., far from both of their hometowns. They blew up right around the same time, side by side, and stayed roommates on the road for years.
“So it was cool,” Beasley said of Donovan’s celebrity — the marriage to a Hollywood actress and the glitz of life in California. “I looked at it like, ‘My boy, my homie, my friend is doing great things, doing this and doing that.’ I never looked at it as envy. I was more proud that I knew Landon, because we were pretty close. And honestly, we had to be.”
Beasley was accustomed to being overshadowed: such was the fate of the younger brother of Jamar. Two years older than DaMarcus, Jamar Beasley was the bigger, stronger, more naturally athletic of the pair. Throughout their adolescence in Fort Wayne, DaMarcus says, “Jamar was the man.”
They competed, always, from an early age, at everything.
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“Sometimes I wanted the last juice box,” DaMarcus said. “And he always got it, and I always tried to fight him for it.”
The brothers tried their hand at just about every sport imaginable. They played football in the fall, baseball in the spring and, this being Indiana, basketball throughout the long winter. But soccer was always their first and deepest love.
Beasley family legend has it that Henry came home with a soccer ball when Jamar was four and DaMarcus was two, and that the rest was history. Henry can’t remember exactly why he picked up that specific type of ball — he had played football and basketball in college and his wife Joetta was a track athlete, but neither of them knew anything about soccer. He only knows that the impulse buy changed all of their lives.
“It was just a God-given talent,” DaMarcus explains. “Once me and my brother figured out we were kind of good, we just fell in love with it.”
Jamar steadily developed into an explosive, high-scoring forward, and became the first player drafted into MLS straight out of high school by the New England Revolution in 1998. His little brother watched closely, with no shortage of sibling awe.
“I always wanted to be where he was,” DaMarcus said. “I wanted to be just like him. That was what I wanted to do.”
The brothers held on to a shared dream that they would one day play in the World Cup together. But it’s here where the Jamar Beasley story typically takes a hard, left-hand turn toward cautionary tale.
Jamar embraced life in the big city, probably too much, and struggled with the spotlight that comes from being a teenage star. He was, in many ways, Freddy Adu before Freddy Adu, the youngest player up at that point ever to sign with the league.
As a pro in New England, Jamar befriended Boston Celtics players of the era such as Paul Pierce and Bruce Bowen, and admitted to the Kansas City Star in 2005 to going out at least four times a week, and occasionally showing up to practice still drunk off Long Islands. By 2002, following a single, solitary season alongside DaMarcus with the Chicago Fire, Jamar was out of MLS for good, save a brief trial with Kansas City in 2010.
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“I threw it all away,” he told the Star.
Jamar’s struggles impacted DaMarcus’ approach when he turned pro shortly afterward. How could they not? DaMarcus tagged along with Jamar during this stretch every chance he could. Whenever he had time off from school, he would stay with his brother in Boston, hanging around the locker room looking for autographs, getting a feel for the rhythms of professional life.
“I think it did help, that my brother went through it before I did,” DaMarcus said. “I got to kind of see how it was to be a pro, and to go about it every day, to go in the locker room being the young one. That part helped me out a lot.”
But he pushes back on the idea that the older brother who he still idolizes was useful only as the charter of a path to avoid.
“It’s not so much that I looked at him and saw the things that I shouldn’t do,” DaMarcus said. “It was more that I looked to him in terms of how to be a pro — both the things he did and the things he didn’t do, or should have done — I tried to apply that to my life. … Everybody’s different. Nobody is going to have the same reaction to a certain situation. I tried to always be myself, as much as I could be myself. Learn from my brother, the good things and the bad. He learned from me, the good things and the bad. Nobody’s perfect. We’ve all made mistakes. I’ve made a million of them — soccer-wise and life-wise.”
(Asked to provide an example of one of his own life mistakes, he stroked his chin and took a long pause. “Should I?” he asked the ceiling. “Nah, I don’t think I want that out there publicly.” Even in his tell-all retirement interview, he has limits.)
Jamar resurrected himself as an indoor soccer star, playing for 12 different franchises in a second career that spanned from 2003-2016, being named MISL rookie of the year in ’04 and MVP in ’07. His tenure is not a typo. He really retired just three years ago, at age 37. Those Beasley boys have some crazy longevity.
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“I was so proud of him,” DaMarcus said. “He really had to overcome adversity. He went through a lot of things — some were self-inflicted, but a lot of things were out of his control. But he still had a passion for the game. He still loved what he did.”
DaMarcus knows some part of Jamar wanted to keep playing outdoor, where the potential for grandeur was greater. DaMarcus admires Jamar for making a tough decision and staying with it.
“He wanted to make his name indoor, make it as good as he could, and he did that,” DaMarcus said. “I 100 percent admire that. Not many people could do that. A lot of people would keep holding onto different things. ‘I still want to do this,’ and fall short. But he found what he was good at, what he thought he was better at, and he stuck with it. He became one of the best players ever in indoor.”
His eyes are shining and his voice thick with pride. There is nothing patronizing in his tone, and it’s evident that even at 37 years old, some part of DaMarcus still worships his big brother.
“His name will always be etched in indoor history, because of what he did,” DaMarcus said, pointing out that Jamar will forever be the first-ever MLS signing straight out of high school. “People will look that up, and it’ll be my brother’s name. That’s pretty cool.”
If there is an irony about these superlative lines coming from a player who is so modest and blasé about the historical ramifications of his own achievements, Beasley does not mention it.
Reached by phone, Henry Beasley expresses bafflement that any reporter would ever want to talk to him to gain any insight on DaMarcus and Jamar’s relationship. (Jamar, it should be noted, did not respond to requests to share his own perspective.) Once on the topic of how Fort Wayne shaped his sons, though, Henry began to open up.
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“If you ever notice, when (DaMarcus) talks, he makes sure to say, ‘I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana,’” his father, Henry, said. “He hasn’t kicked us to the curb. Some guys leave and forget where they came from. … That’s a blessing. I’m glad (he and his brother) recognize that this is where it all started.”
Fort Wayne feels a long way from anywhere, particularly international soccer stardom. It’s three hours by car from Chicago, cutting through small towns like Warsaw, Valparaiso and Whitko, where a faded welcome sign boasted of the local high school’s appearance in the 1991 boys’ basketball state semifinals.
Fort Wayne has some charming neighborhoods and cool riverfront parks, a smart use of green space. But still, it can feel stiflingly landlocked in the way of much of this part of the world, a long way from where the action is.
Henry and his wife still live in town and take pride in it. It’s a good place to raise a family, he explains. The economy isn’t as thriving as it was 20 years ago, but still, there are jobs. Though both are retired now, he worked in shipping, while his wife was an accountant.
“They watched us work, and go to work — on time,” Henry said. “That’s the key, making sure that they know there’s a reason why we go to work, so that you guys can do what you do. I think they understood that. We gave them a work ethic.”
Certainly, they inherited their parents’ athleticism and competitive nature.
“I was always the smallest kid,” DaMarcus said. “My parents were always like, ‘Don’t let that big kid push you around. Get in there and show what you can do.’ It wasn’t, ‘Oh, that’s OK. Next time you’ll get it.’ They actually pushed me: ‘Yo, don’t let them push you around.’ That gave me confidence and gave me that little bit of competitive edge that sometimes kids need. … They always taught me to be tough, and to lead by example. That’s always been with me.”
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There were certain ironclad rules that had to be abided by in the Beasley house: clean your dishes, wash your clothes, form good habits and take care of the little things. Above all these: family comes first, and always look out for your brother.
“They’re always going to be brothers,” Henry said. “I always told them that. They took that and ran with it.”
The sons took their parents along for the ride, too. They flew across the Atlantic Ocean as often as finances and time off would allow while DaMarcus was playing in Europe. They were in the stands for each of his four World Cups, and were regular attendees for Jamar’s indoor games, too.
None of this was expected. Fort Wayne is far from a soccer hotbed, and who anticipates both of their kids becoming professional athletes? Henry never could have imagined what he started when he brought that soccer ball home all those years ago.
“Everything they did was always a surprise for us,” Henry said.
At this point, it’s hard to picture DaMarcus as anything other than a steady and reliable left back. But he came up as a winger, speed and flash, netting four goals in the qualification cycle for the 2006 World Cup alone.
His positional change probably extended his career by years, he freely admits. Certainly, it gave him fresh life with the U.S., nudging him over the 100-cap milestone all the way to 126. The shift also provided insight into his motivation, and approach to the game.
In true Beasley fashion, there wasn’t some big change of heart, or an emotional conversation with coaches about moving from the only position he’d ever known — and one with much more potential for individual glory.
He was playing during the 2014 World Cup qualifying cycle as a kind of winger/outside back hybrid in a five-defender system with Puebla, Carlos Bocanegra was hurt and coach Jurgen Klinsmann needed somebody versatile to fill that hole.
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“He asked if I could play,” Beasley said. “I said yes, 100 percent. Any coach would tell you that’s the type of player I am. I’m not gonna bitch about a certain position, or say I want to play a certain way. I’m gonna do what I can to help the team. … Looking back, yeah, of course, when I went back to Mexico I wanted to go back to attacker, but when I went back it was, ‘oh, you can play left back.’ After that, that was it.”
Beasley felt rejuvenated by the challenge. He studied tape, focusing on the left back during every game he watched — how they moved, how they used space, when they picked their moments to push forward into parts of the field where he was more familiar.
His skill set translated more easily than you might think. Even when he was a winger, he was always a grinder, and somebody who relished his defensive responsibilities, too.
“The one thing I noticed about Beas from Day 1 is that he took his 1-v-1s very seriously,” Donovan said. The two young guns would circle each other up, one-on-one, in drills that would last 15, 30, 45 seconds, Beasley never ceding an inch.
“I think part of it because he grew up playing basketball,” Donovan said. “… In basketball, if you get beat one on one, it’s a real embarrassment. He took a tremendous amount of pride in that. He took it personally. And he rarely ever got beat.”
Those combined attributes added value to every team Beasley ever played on. To go along with league titles with Chicago, PSV and Rangers, Beasley won four Gold Cups with his national team, plus playing in those four World Cups. He very well might have made it an unprecedented five appearances in soccer’s biggest event — only four men in the world have ever accomplished that feat — if not for that disastrous night in Couva, where Beasley was on the bench but did not play.
Yet take a poll of casual and even diehard American soccer fans about who was the most influential men’s national player of the last two decades, and how many name Beasley? It’s hard not to circle back around on how little he cared about his public image to explain the disconnect between his achievements and how he’s perceived.
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Does any part of him look back and wish he’d been a little bit more engaged in that realm, in terms of how it might have impacted how he’ll be remembered?
“It never bothered me, and it still doesn’t,” Beasley said. “That part, I take my joy and my pride in my coaches, in my teammates, how I played the game and how I approached the game. That’s who I play for.
“Does it bother me when people say I’ve been underrated and underappreciated? No. It’s a nice thing to hear, but for me, I don’t play for that. I don’t play for those types of accolades. I just love the game and love to play. Nine times out of 10, I played for the coach. For me, that speaks for itself. I’m good. I’m happy with that. I don’t need anybody else to egg that on.”
In attempting to explain his buddy’s reticence, Donovan brings it back to the beginning.
“He is very much a product of his environment,” Donovan said. “He grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is not an easy place to grow up. But he is also the product of absolutely phenomenal parents, who supported him in exactly the right way.”
Donovan said that Beasley lacked the chip on his shoulder that some kids develop when lacking that kind of strong support system, the ones who are more desperate to be liked. Beasley has a “magnetic” personality, Donovan insisted, one that he just never felt compelled to share beyond his circle of trust.
“He’s actually very outgoing,” Donovan said. “He’s fun, and he’s compassionate, and he looks out for guys. … He is universally loved.”
Jim Curtin, a former Fire teammate who is now the head coach of the Philadelphia Union, calls Beasley “probably the best teammate I can ever remember having.” Donovan said something similar: “He is the ideal teammate. He shuts his mouth, he does his job. He speaks up when he needs to, and he’s never critical of somebody in a malicious way.”
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There are certain athletes about whom their peers are extra eager to talk. You can sense it in their voice, in how they sit up a little bit straighter, glad that somebody finally asked, anxious to correct the public record. Beasley is one of those guys.
“I’m really glad you’re doing this,” Donovan said at the end of a phone interview. “I love Beas like a brother. He’s impacted a lot of us in a lot of special ways, and he deserves all of it.”
Curtin, having extolled Beasley’s virtues throughout a phone interview, also had a sign-off message before he hung up, making extra sure he’d gotten his point across.
“Don’t let people forget Beas, and how special he was,” Curtin said.
There are no shortage of highlights to pick from over the course of Beasley’s 20-year professional career: the night the U.S. stunned Mexico in the knockout rounds of the 2002 World Cup in Jeonju, South Korea, his buddy Landon scoring the second goal; the Champions League semifinal at the San Siro against AC Milan; Old Firm matches with Rangers in Scotland; starting all four games at the 2014 World Cup, his position change fully vindicated.
One memory in particular comes back crystal clear to Beasley after all these years. In early 2001, when Beasley was midway through his second season with the Chicago Fire, he received a call from his coach, Bob Bradley.
The Fire had been offered the chance to trade for Jamar, Bradley explained. How would DaMarcus feel about the team adding his brother?
“Yes, 100 percent, absolutely,” Beasley remembered telling Bradley. “He’s the greatest player in the world. You should sign him.”
(Bradley recalls that conversation similarly: “They are very proud brothers. They stick up for each other.”)
Bradley made the trade, and the brothers lived together in the Loop area of downtown Chicago, and trained together every day, just like in the backyard in Fort Wayne.
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Sitting in that coffee shop in the Houston suburbs, nearing the end of the final chapter, Beasley was asked if he has any regrets. He said he doesn’t, while admitting to making his fair share of mistakes: “But the mistakes I made, made me me. They didn’t happen twice — and that’s on the field and off the field.”
Thinking more positively, then, what is his proudest accomplishment?
“There’s a lot,” Beasley said, after another pause, eyes returning to the ceiling as he thinks. “But for me, my proudest moment, that was playing with my brother.”
They dreamed, first and foremost, of playing in a World Cup side by side. And for a while there, when Jamar was on the U-20 national team and DaMarcus the U-17, it wasn’t all that outlandish.
“It didn’t happen, but the next best thing was to play with one another in Chicago,” DaMarcus said. “Just for my whole family, my mom, my dad, my brother, for me personally, it was the proudest moment. Being able to play a professional game with my brother, we fulfilled one of our dreams together. That’s something a lot of people can’t say. That was my proudest moment, for the Beasley family.”
(Top photo: John Dorton / ISI)
