There is no plaque in the front yard at 409 Drewery Lane in Nacogdoches, Texas, but there probably should be.
William and Elvina Gillespie live here, in this tiny, single-story home. It sits off a dirt road, tucked behind a trailer park. The front yard is in a state of disarray, a scene that includes a mountain of trash, a rusted-out horse trailer and a couple of sheep — one of which was attacked by a stray dog only moments earlier. Watch your step, or you’re liable to trip over a chicken. They are everywhere.
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The Gillespies moved here years ago, and William, a supervisor at a landscaping company, is doing his best to fix the place up. At 65 years old, it’s slow going. Down came the drywall covering the home’s beautiful, early-20th-century woodwork, and the shed full of farm implements that had been there since the same time. The place looks close to condemnation, honestly, but Gillespie has done his best to fight the slow creep of mother nature as it draws the house closer to ruin.
Every now and then, relics from the home’s previous owners will come out of the cracks. Gillespie was tearing apart the bathroom one day when he found a few items wedged between the floor and the baseboards — an old silver dollar, a matchbook and an Esso gas card from the 1970s. The name on the card, A.D. Dempsey, might feel familiar.
It was here in the yard at Drewery Lane that Clint Dempsey, A.D.’s grandson, cut his teeth as a soccer player. The skills that made Dempsey arguably the greatest player in the history of American men’s soccer were birthed on the bumpy patches of grass that border the home where his grandparents lived. Back then, Clint lived with his parents and siblings in a trailer, just past the wooden basketball goal that’s nailed to a tree behind A.D. Dempsey’s old place.
If you’re an American soccer fan of a certain age, you’ve already been here, you just don’t know it.
Some 15 years ago, Nike brought the whole of America to sleepy little Nacogdoches, to the fields and unvarnished streets where Dempsey played youth ball. And they brought us to the Dempseys’ front yard, too — chickens and all.
Clint Dempsey may have solidified his place as one of the U.S.’ all-time great attacking players on fields in England, the United States and South Africa. But here in “Nac,” as the locals call it, he solidified his place as American soccer’s greatest-ever rapper. He did so with four simple words:
“Don’t tread on this.”
It’s not easy to get ahold of Clint Dempsey. The man who once famously told a teammate that he just wanted to “score goals and go fishing” basically disappeared from public view following his retirement in 2018. Even after emerging from the shadows — Dempsey now works as an analyst for CBS Sports — he has kept a low profile, rarely granting interviews.
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It came as a bit of a surprise, then, when he agreed to speak to The Athletic, even to the publicist who arranged the chat. Yes, the publicist said, Clint was interested in speaking about “Don’t Tread,” and about his upbringing in Nacogdoches ahead of his induction into the National Soccer Hall of Fame on May 21. “His only request is that he doesn’t have to reprise the song or do any raps.”
When the day comes, it takes Dempsey fewer than five minutes to break his own policy.
He starts answering a question about his inspiration for the song by tossing out a couple of sentences about soccer’s oft-forgotten place in the American sporting landscape. Nobody has asked him to drop any bars, but reflecting on his early days in Nacogdoches, and on his formative years as a professional, “Deuce,” as he’s credited on the track, gets caught up in the moment.
“You can hear it in my lyrics,” he says, before seamlessly spitting out the first four bars of “Don’t Tread.”
Soccer took hold like the roots of a tree
Think soccer ain’t a sport, then why Nike sign me?
Cause I got on my job, I made the game ferocious
I was born with my drive, got that from no coaches
The song and accompanying music video, commissioned by Nike ahead of the 2006 World Cup as part of their broader “Don’t Tread” advertising campaign, are remembered largely as a curiosity. Nowadays, the line between music and sport has become blurry, with the two intermingling on a regular basis. But back then, the idea that someone like Dempsey would write and perform his own track was practically unthinkable. Aside from the occasional crossover — Alexi Lalas or Pelé picking up a guitar, or members of the England national team bopping alongside New Order — soccer players rarely turned musical.
Dempsey bucked that trend. And while there may be a temptation to marginalize his work as little more than a hype song or a glorified sportswear ad, it was hardly that. The lyrics and accompanying video do a good job of distilling Dempsey’s origin story, his rise to prominence and the culture that surrounded him during his adolescence. The characters you see around him in the video aren’t extras, they are Dempsey’s closest friends, his family and long-time teammates. And the landscapes featured in the video — the muddy fields, the rural roads and the trailer parks — are the places that formed him.
In the beginning, we were those kids
That played on the dirt fields
But with determination
We came from the bottom and rose to the top
Go to Nacogdoches and you’ll realize one thing very quickly: everybody claims to know Clint Dempsey. At minimum, they all have a story about him.
There’s the guy just around the bend from A.D. Dempsey’s place who mans a grill and says he double-dated to prom with Clint, cruising around town afterward in an old Mazda 626. “We stuck the girls in the backseat,” he says before offering a hamburger.
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There’s the middle-aged man in the trailer park down the street who claims to have had a huge crush on Dempsey’s aunt. Also the waitress at El Ranchero, a Tex-Mex place, who claims to have chatted him up a couple of years ago while he threw back a few margaritas.
Ryan Dempsey, who will deliver his brother’s induction speech this weekend, is probably most well-equipped to tell Clint’s story, though. Older by five years, Ryan introduced Clint to soccer and became his first mentor.
“Ultimately there were five of us kids,” says Ryan. “My mother Debbie, before she met Clint’s dad, who we call our dad, had been a single mom of two kids — myself and Jennifer — for a while. My mom was a nurse. In Nacogdoches, you’re not going to be making a ton of money, not enough to really comfortably support three, four and eventually five kids. They got enough money together to get a trailer house and put it on a piece of property that my dad’s mom had in the middle of a trailer park.”
Dempsey’s father, Aubrey, had an engineering degree and did a bit of everything; he was a carpenter, worked on bridge construction for the Southern Pacific Railway and eventually focused on building homes. Aubrey fit the mold in Nacogdoches, the captain of his high school football team. But Ryan, and eventually Clint, cast American football aside in favor of soccer very quickly, picking it up from the other kids in the neighborhood.
The Dempsey brothers learned the game barefoot, sometimes using a trampoline tipped on its side as a goal, soaking it up from the Salvadorans, Mexicans and Hondurans they lived next to. They crafted a game they called “World Cup,” which was a one-on-one competition that eschewed teamwork in favor of stepovers, nutmegs and golazos — a soccer slam dunk contest come to life.
The Dempseys’ grandparents’ home became a bit of a hub for the kids in the neighborhood. And while Ryan and Clint weren’t technically allowed to wander too far from the homestead, they’d occasionally make their way over to a friend’s house, to “try some strange helado, or something,” as Ryan jokingly puts it. On one such adventure in 1990 — when Clint was seven and Ryan was 12 — the two had their eyes opened to the world of soccer outside of Nacogdoches.
“We went to this house that had this satellite dish that was like the size of a swimming pool,” remembers Ryan. “We were able to get the Colombia vs. Germany World Cup game. I was just blown away. We were like, ‘There’s a dude with a blonde afro?’ and like, ‘What kind of Mexicans are these? Colombia? There’s black dudes on the team with Spanish names.’ It was just so cool. And they were playing against these white dudes. We’d heard of Germany, but that’s how foreign all that shit was to us.”
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The announcers, the boys noticed, were constantly mentioning one name: Diego Maradona. It felt familiar; one of the other kids in the neighborhood had taken to calling himself Maradona in their own backyard “World Cup” games. Around the same time, the Dempseys also got their hands on a copy of “Hero,” the FIFA-produced documentary about the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Clint, in particular, became enraptured by Maradona, the chief protagonist of arguably the greatest World Cup ever played.
Four years later, the FIFA World Cup came to the United States, and Maradona’s Argentina was slated to play Bulgaria at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Unbeknownst to Clint and Ryan, their parents had scrimped and saved up just enough money for a few tickets. Yet the younger Dempsey’s dream was cruelly shattered just six hours before the match, when Maradona learned he had failed a doping test and was banned from the competition.
“When Clint found out, he just broke down,” says Ryan, who goes on to playfully imitate his younger brother in distress. “‘Man, did you hear this? Maradona isn’t gonna be playing in the game. I’m not going to the game.’ And he didn’t go. He was heartbroken.”
By now, his parents had realized the talent in their young sons and had sacrificed dearly to foster it. Ryan and Clint were playing for the Longhorns, an elite youth club in Dallas, some three hours away. Two or three times a week, Aubrey Dempsey would load his kids in the car and make the six-hour round trip, often sleeping during the training sessions so he could stay awake on the drive home. The family did without new clothes, they canceled trips. They sank into debt, with Aubrey selling his boat and a few of his guns to make ends meet.
Clint’s and Ryan’s sister, Jennifer, was also a standout athlete. At 16, she was a rising talent in the world of youth tennis, winning tournaments as the top player on her high school team. By 1995, it had become clear to Debbie and Aubrey Dempsey that they simply didn’t have enough money to support all three of their athletically minded kids. Clint, as the youngest, was pulled away from the Longhorns as the family focused its meager resources on Jennifer’s ambitions.
Clint was heartbroken, but he also understood. It was only a temporary break, his parents said, and as the youngest son, he’d still have an opportunity to grow his talents with time. Once Jennifer caught on with a college team, or maybe soared to even greater heights, Clint could return to his club team.
In the end, Dempsey’s time away would be brief. Three months after her 16th birthday, Jennifer died of a brain aneurysm in November 1995. The loss affected all of the Dempseys deeply, and Clint channeled his grief and anger back into his game. He rejoined his youth team, playing with renewed purpose and determination.
In the south we got the game on lock
More game than a gamecock
Clint became a featured attraction at Nacogdoches High. He was the district MVP and all-state. Dempsey had always played at a level several years above his age and, as a teenager, he was forced to seek out a tougher challenge to continue his development. Years earlier, Ryan had discovered the city’s men’s league, largely populated by Mexican immigrants, some of whom were ex-pros paid by the league’s organizers.
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At just 15, Dempsey led Zamora — a side made up of his high school teammates and a few of their family members — to a league championship.
Santana Castillo, a teammate of Dempsey from the time, remembers it well. Over beers at his family’s home in Nacogdoches, Castillo flips through an old scrapbook. He’s gathered a few of Clint’s oldest teammates to reminisce. Before long, the roots of Clint’s prowess as a player come to life in grainy old news clippings and polaroids.
“You could see right away he had a gift,” says Castillo. “The way he grew up, in his grandmother’s house, was kinda like the Mexican way. He was always around Hispanic people. So he knew how it was.”
Dempsey has among the deftest touches in the history of American soccer and, in some ways, that skill, that quickness was honed in the adult league in Nac. Francisco Rios, Castillo’s father-in-law and one of the few adult players on Zamora, remembers the rage other teams would go into when Dempsey played with the sauce that would become his trademark later in his career.
“Clint used to dribble these guys,” remembers Rios. “And I’d tell him, ‘Let the ball go.’ These guys are going to think you’re clowning on them and they’re going to hurt you. A lot of times we’d release the ball quickly or move it around a lot because if we didn’t, they’d basically just take us down.”
There was an underground element to the men’s league in Nac, as well. People would wager on games, and Dempsey, in particular, was the subject of a lot of action. Eventually, Dempsey earned an early nickname — ”The Gamecock” — after he became a consistent payout.
So much of what made Dempsey such a singular player makes sense when you go to Nacogdoches. The United States has had a handful of truly talented players, but very few like Dempsey, a player who simply tries shit, combining fearlessness with creativity. That gall makes a lot more sense when you examine even the broad strokes of his upbringing — he had little, was exposed to the game in the most rudimentary of ways and his playing style was forged amongst the area’s Latino population, a footballing culture that places an elevated emphasis on showmanship and flair.
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It’s a strange mental exercise to think of Clint Dempsey — the USMNT’s joint all-time leading scorer — as having been molded by the sporting influence of this country’s greatest soccer rival. Castillo, though, tells a story that sums it up nicely.
“Do you remember Cuauhtémoc Blanco?” he asks, referring to the former Mexico international, Club America and Chicago Fire great. “We used to love Blanco. And back in the day, my dad would go to Mexico, and he’d bring back cleats. At some point he goes down there and he brings me back these shoes, they have the Mexican flag on them. White, green and red.”
Dempsey, wearing a weathered old pair of Pumas, took a liking to Castillo’s boots. And for a spell, he even played in those Mexican colors.
“He asks me, ‘Hey man, you think I can wear those shoes?’” remembers Castillo.
“I said, ‘Yeah, man… what is your dad going to say? And he said, ‘It doesn’t matter, man.’”
For years, American soccer has struggled with the same question — how do you identify and cultivate a player like Dempsey, a raw talent toiling away barefoot on a dirt field behind a trailer park? Yet, in large part, we cultivate our young talent through exclusive youth clubs where the cost of admission is prohibitive to all but a select few. Clint Dempsey, the floppy-haired kid from Nacogdoches, became this country’s greatest male player in spite of the way we nurture young talent, not because of it.
Got nothing to lose
And everything to prove
Dempsey’s formative years, the late ’80s and early ’90s, were also the halcyon days of hip-hop, in many ways. And while the pickup trucks rolling around Nacogdoches were broadcasting a different, twangier sound, Dempsey and his friends were discovering some of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made: Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic,” 2-Pac’s “All Eyez on Me,” Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ready to Die.”
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The artist who initially spurred his interest in the genre, though, is a little less celebrated.
“I guess I started listening to rap since I was in second grade,” says Dempsey. “So it was Vanilla Ice.”
By the time Dempsey hit high school, he had a narrower focus. He’d started listening almost exclusively to Texas rap. To Bun B and Pimp C — a.k.a. UGK, or The Underground Kings — and to Big Hawk, Fat Pat and Scarface. In the mid-to-late ’90s, and even more so in the early 2000s, Texas rap went mainstream, largely in part to the signature “chopped and screwed” sound that emanated in particular from Houston.
Dempsey says he first started rapping in high school. His parents had scraped up $500 to buy him his first car — a beat-up, old Ford Probe. Among the many amenities it lacked was a radio, so Dempsey began freestyling in the car, he says, mostly to stave off boredom and pass the time while driving. Eventually he managed to outfit his ride with a tape deck and a couple of speakers and, around that same time, he got his hands on a few instrumental tapes put out by Houston-area label Swishahouse.
“(Freestyling) was always a thing that the guys did when we got to parties,” says Mikey Villareal, another former teammate of Dempsey and close friend who has known him since elementary school.
“Clint started rapping a loooong time ago,” remembers Castillo. “When we used to play out of town in high school — in Tyler, or Marshall, or Lufkin, wherever — at the end of the game we’d always be in the back of the bus and he would start freestyling. Whatever happened during the game, like the action from the game itself, he would freestyle it. We loved it, everybody on the bus would just go crazy, encouraging him.”
On the field, Dempsey’s standout play with the Longhorns and at Nacogdoches High eventually paid off, earning him a scholarship to Furman University in South Carolina. Clint was a big fish in Nacogdoches, a town of some 30,000 permanent residents, but he arrived at Furman like any other freshman athlete — unproven and the subject of a bit of natural skepticism from his new teammates. Four years later, when Dempsey went pro, he was thrust into the same situation as a rookie with MLS’ New England Revolution.
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“It was a situation when you go to new teams,” remembers Dempsey, “you’ve always gotta do something, right? You’re the new guy, you gotta tell a joke, sing a song, embarrass yourself, rap or whatever. So that’s kinda what I did. I’d freestyle a bit, like some sort of initiation. … When I was bored, you’d have a computer and try and figure out rapping into a pair of headphones or something, like turning it into a microphone, just something to pass time, something as a hobby, right?”
While with the Revolution, Dempsey lived with Villareal, his old friend from Nacogdoches, in a two-bedroom apartment in Mansfield, Mass., just south of the Revs home base in Foxborough. You can probably picture the place if you’ve ever been the guest of any man in his early 20s: a futon, chair, sofa and not much else. Dempsey put up some cardboard boxes and set up a little studio in a corner of the place — “real bootleg stuff,” he recalls — and spent the hours between training and games doing one of two things: playing Mario Kart on Nintendo 64 or freestyling.
“He had bought a keyboard, because we wanted to start making beats and music, stuff like that,” says Villareal. “We had some speakers, and a microphone. And we kinda just messed around — we’d meet people in Boston and they’d come over, and some other guys would know a ProTools guy, and it was just kinda this thing we did because we enjoyed doing it, not necessarily because we thought we were rappers and we’re gonna make it in the rap game, or nothing like that. It was just something we grew up doing, it was in our culture, we’d have guys come up to the apartment for a little freestyle session.”
On the soccer field, Dempsey’s stock was rising rapidly. He was an instant hit with the Revolution’s fans. At one point during a match against the visiting Columbus Crew, Dempsey went full Nac, grabbing the ball between his feet and attempting to hop over a pair of defenders with a Cuauhtemiña, later telling reporters he’d learned the move, pioneered by Cuauhtémoc Blanco, in “pickup games in Nacogdoches.”
He’d go on to win MLS rookie of the year honors and, not long after, earn his first call-up to the senior U.S. men’s national team. In 2005, Dempsey nodded home the only goal in the USMNT’s 2-1 friendly defeat against England at Chicago’s Soldier Field. In the days surrounding that match, Nike’s cameras captured Dempsey freestyling on the pitch, spitting bars that included such gems as “I stay on defenders like a rash” and “If I was a dolphin I’d have a platinum fin.”
A few months later, Nike would tap Dempsey for a much bigger project.
Best to give way
For the USA
Now we’re hot
You might think we’re a sun ray
It’s easy to think of a foundational player like Dempsey as having always been a fixture with the national team, but in late 2005, he was anything but. Dempsey was a promising young talent, but his place on the roster for the 2006 World Cup in Germany was far from sewn up.
There was real hype around the U.S. men ahead of that tournament. They’d made a deep run in 2002 and, by April of ’06, FIFA’s deeply flawed global rankings would peg them as the fourth-best team in the world. They were becoming commercially viable as a result. Meanwhile, Nike was seeking to expand its footprint in the American soccer landscape.
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In late 2005, Nike approached Dempsey with a unique opportunity — to write and record a hype song of sorts for the team ahead of the tournament. They’d pair the video with their pre-existing “Don’t Tread” campaign and clothing line — shoes and other garments featuring the iconic “coiled snake” used on the Gadsden flag of the American Revolution.
“I was like … uhhhhhhhhhh…. I guess,” says Dempsey. “I’d only kinda done it around the team, or in my apartment, like not really like doing it for the whole world to see, you know? The funny thing about doing it is that they came to us in November, before the 2006 World Cup. So going into that January camp, I wasn’t even for sure on a roster. I was on the outside looking in. It was kind of like between me and Santino Quaranta, who was going to be the new guy that made it into the team.”
Dempsey was confident he could craft the lyrics and lay them down, but he didn’t really know where to start in terms of finding a beat or recording the track. So he tapped his brother Ryan, who in turn went to Micheal Chehade, a DJ and producer who also happened to have been one of Ryan’s earliest teammates.
Chehade had set up a small recording studio in Nacogdoches and rapidly earned a reputation as someone who could connect people, a conduit of sorts.
“I remember (in 2003) I saw Ryan at Walmart,” he says. “He told me he was on the phone with Clint, who was at school at Furman, and he wanted to rap for me on the phone. I was like ‘All right, cool.’ He was just like, ‘Chehade, what’s up.’ He just started freestyling, man. I have no idea what the hell he said but he definitely got it off. It was super cool. Jump forward a few years … Clint says that (Nike) wants him to make a song. I’m like, ‘OK, right.’”
Chehade got a beat from a Boston-based DJ, The Beatsmith. He’d also been working with another local musician, Steven Molanders — stage name “XO” — on some other projects and thought he might be able to help as an engineer.
“Clint has always been that guy that (never forgot) about the little people, or where he came from,” says Molanders. “Clint is that guy, so that’s how we all linked up.”
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When Jesse Stollak, who was heading up Nike’s “Don’t Tread” campaign, had approached Dempsey about the project initially, he also mentioned that the company would likely pay for a featured artist on the track, someone to provide a little starpower. He mentioned some names, Ryan Dempsey recalls, laughing — ”I think some rappers from the Pacific Northwest.” Clint pushed back on that immediately, insisting that it be a southern rapper.
By pure happenstance, Chehade and XO had only weeks earlier met Big Hawk, an up-and-coming talent from Houston and a founding member of the Screwed Up Click, the Houston-area hip-hop collective led by DJ Screw that pioneered the area’s “chopped and screwed” sound — slowed-down, pitch-shifted tracks and vocals heavy on reverb and after-effects. The two crossed paths at a car show, and Chehade approached him to inquire about a potential opportunity down the line. Hawk gave Chehade his number and they stayed in touch.
“We knew Clint was a huge fan of Hawk,” says Molanders. “Clint was a huge fan of DJ Screw and the Screwed Up Click, so when we told him we had Hawk’s number, he was all on board. He loved it.”
“I reached out to Hawk, and he was all about it,” remembers Chehade. “It was Nike. This was a big opportunity for him. Screw hadn’t taken over the world yet at that point, that influence, that group of people from his camp in Houston, they hadn’t gotten big yet. It was the biggest thing… It was Nike.”
Dempsey threw together the lyrics for “Don’t Tread” quickly. He wanted it to function as a hype song for the USMNT, yes, but also to reflect his struggle and his upbringing. Years later, Dempsey once again drops into a flow when he thinks about the experience of penning the song.
“I got nothing to lose, everything to prove. Gonna change the game, cause I done paid my dues,” he raps. “I know what it’s like to struggle, to not have much. I’m gonna try to be successful in my life, you know? I was traveling three hours back and forth to Dallas to train. I was never in Bradenton Academy. I was never your typical U.S. Soccer kid that they’d try to push, and now Nike is trying to push me? You know? It’s like that’s what’s up, man, they’re getting on board with someone who’s different.”
Dempsey and Hawk recorded the track in Chehade’s studio, and they sent it off to Nike. Everyone involved was geeked on the project, but no one really knew how the sportswear giant would feel about it. This was all uncharted territory, and “Don’t Tread” was miles away from any Jock Jam in existence, just not your average fight song. Days later, the verdict was in.
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Nike didn’t like the track.
“They loved it,” says Chehade, laughing.
They just had one note — Dempsey and Hawk had both crafted their verses to mention Nike more than a few times, which the duo imagined was sort of the point. But, to their surprise, the company wanted to be mentioned less. The brand was already ubiquitous; what they were looking for was a bit more street cred within the soccer community. Molanders, sensing an opportunity, helped rework the song. And on the drive back to the studio, he penned the lyrics to the introduction. That’s XO in the intro, not Dempsey.
This is soccer and rap
With a screwed up twist
Nike ended up loving the end product so much, Chehade says, that it multiplied the budget for the video — which was initially some $10,000 or so — tenfold. The treatment for the video was collaborative, with Chehade, Dempsey and others working with Nike on the basic idea. Half the video would be shot in Nacogdoches, giving the viewers a taste of Dempsey’s upbringing, while the other half would be shot two hours south in Houston, to show love to Big Hawk and the scene that Dempsey admired so deeply.
Lew Baldwin, who ran Team Agency, a production firm, was brought in by Nike to direct the shoot. He’d already worked with them, crafting a bunch of shorts a year prior to promote their Tiempo series of boots. They had a similar feel to what the company wanted to achieve with Dempsey’s video, seeking out soccer in urban environments and blurring the lines between soccer and culture at large.
Baldwin and his producer, Keeley Gould, met Dempsey just ahead of the video shoot to lay out his ideas.
“Clint was young,” Baldwin says. “He was kinda like, ‘Who the fuck are these guys that want to tell my story.’ I just don’t think back then he’d done a ton of media stuff and he was like, ‘This guy is gonna do a music video?’ We hung out for a while, though, and I got to know him. Once we got into it, he was great. He was willing to totally put himself into it and let go.”
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Gould, who has gone on to produce videos for essentially every big artist to speak of — Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Madonna — was a relative newcomer when she produced “Don’t Tread.” Years later, she recalls her first impressions of Dempsey.
“Clint wasn’t hiding anything,” she remembers. “He was very open. He was proud to show off where he came from. He was proud of how well he had done as a player, and how far he had come. It was a very poor place, and he could have tried to hide that. Or he could have been grandiose about it, too, and been like, ‘Look where I started.’ But he was just like, ‘This is my home. This is me. I still love it here, and I love what I do.’ That’s how it came across to me.”
Dempsey wanted the video to be a tribute to his friends and family, and to Nacogdoches. He put out a Bat-Signal of sorts, rounding up a crew for the video — his brothers, Ryan and Lance, Villareal, Revolution teammate Daniel Hernandez, and his USMNT strike partner Eddie Johnson. More than anything, he wanted to remember his sister Jennifer, who at that point had passed some 10 years earlier. Dempsey dedicated the video to her, and he closes it by placing flowers on her grave.
“I wanted to show love for my sister,” says Dempsey. “With her passing — rest in peace, and we’ll be together one day again — it showed me life is short and you gotta make the most of your life. So I wanted to celebrate her life, show her love, show my family love, have them be in the video, show my friends love, show my state love. Then show the game love — what I’m passionate about and trying to make a life for myself. So I’ve always kind of been that person, I represent where I’m from.”
The shoot’s first day was spent in Houston, in the city’s third ward, filming a few street scenes and Hawk’s intro to the video. Gould and Baldwin remember feeling a bit out of their element in Hawk’s neck of the woods.
Hawk, though, put everybody at ease. The man Gould describes as “a very calm and protective presence” gave the crew instant credibility. He also worked to keep the shoot authentic, Baldwin remembers. At one point, Hawk insisted that a couple of extras in the video be removed because he didn’t feel they represented his neighborhood, and his culture, accurately. Before long, as the crew gathered at Screwed Up Records n’ Tapes, the Screwed Up Click’s headquarters, the shoot had become a bit of a party, with a few dozen locals and a pair of lowriders joining Dempsey and Hawk on camera.
“The Screw Shop, that whole area, those are legendary grounds,” says Chehade. “Hawk had kinda just gotten folks ready before we even got there, and then, in real time, he made sure that everybody was good. They showed us love.”
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It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. All these years later, Dempsey says he’d change one thing about the video: the car he was driving. Big Hawk drove his own vehicle up from Houston for the shoot in Nacogdoches; Dempsey is seen rolling around in a drop-top “slab,” a quintessentially Houston vehicle — an ’80s American box with “elbowed-out” wire wheels and candy-colored paint. It wasn’t really his style. But it could’ve been worse.
“Lew Baldwin was adamant that Clint drive around in like an old, country-looking F-150,” remembers Ryan Dempsey. “He wanted him to be like Bubba Sparxxx, who had just gotten big back then. He wanted to push that image, where you’re still a country boy but you rap. Clint was like, ‘I would never drive something like that.’ They were going back and forth about it and Clint says, ‘Okay fine, I’m just trying to make the World Cup. I don’t give a fuck about this video, let’s just not do it.’ He was just gonna quit over that. It was hilarious.”
The scenes Baldwin and his crew filmed in Nacogdoches do a very good job of representing the stretch of town Dempsey grew up in. There are shots of children running up a field tucked between two rows of trailer homes — that is the trailer park Dempsey grew up next to. There’s a quick shot of two roosters fighting, something Baldwin managed to capture while filming in A.D. Dempsey’s front yard.
The training sequences are filmed at the city’s soccer complex, where Dempsey played those men’s league games. And the night scenes in the video, with Dempsey and Big Hawk rapping during a game of pickup, were filmed there as well, in a sudden downpour that sent Baldwin and his crew scrambling to save their equipment. That shoot, Baldwin remembers, was a complex one, with a crane operator falling off his rig and breaking his wrist.
The rain did little to dampen anyone’s spirits, especially not Ryan Dempsey’s. He arrived late for the shoot that day after having spent a few hours in the studio with Hawk.
“Hawk didn’t spare any expense when it came to getting the herb back then and he was very generous with it,” says Dempsey. “He rolled this big-ass blunt — I was just there to keep him company and then he passed that shit over to me and I got just outside of my mind high. So when I’m in that video, I am just completely out of my mind high … Being high, there was gonna be that natural bit of paranoia. But to show up on a video shoot? And there are cameras everywhere? And I’m supposed to be like, dancing? I don’t dance.”
“It was a wild couple of days,” remembers Gould. “Everyone partied hard. The energy got a bit wild. We ended up having a wrap party at some old-timey Western-themed Houston bar.”
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Clint Dempsey can’t put his finger on one specific memory from the shoot he cherishes more than any other. But the general feeling surrounding the shoot — of hope, of untapped potential — remains strong with him.
“Everybody was trying to make something of themselves,” he says. “Everybody. Whether it was me, or Hawk, or Chehade, or Steven Molanders aka XO — everybody had big dreams, everybody was hungry, trying to make something of themselves. It was a cool experience to do something like that, man.
“Nike? In Nacogdoches? Doing a video shoot for a rap video? In this country town? That’s just crazy to me.”
Everybody out your seat
(Bob your head to this)
Real recognize real
(We was bred for this)
The dream is real
(Don’t tread on this)
We live the dream
(Don’t tread on this)
“Don’t Tread” was an instant smash, at least in the medium-sized world of American soccer. It did wonders for Nike, which sold a boatload of USMNT gear bearing the campaign’s coiled snake logo. It was a fan favorite in the early days of YouTube and has since amassed some 2.1 million views. By the time the video dropped in the spring of 2006, Dempsey had solidified his place on the national team after a stellar January camp. In friendlies leading up to the World Cup, the song became a bit of an anthem.
“What was crazy is like, before games, leading up to the World Cup, they were playing that track in the stadium,” says Dempsey. “It was crazy awkward. I didn’t think it was gonna go like that. To go from not being on the team to making the team, getting to the World Cup, getting to start in the World Cup and getting to be the only American to score for the team in 2006, it was crazy. You would never have predicted that in November, when we recorded that track.”
Over the 15 years that followed, Dempsey’s star rose exponentially. He became one of the first Americans to truly thrive in the English Premier League. He became an all-time leading goalscorer for the men’s national team, won three Gold Cups, an MLS Cup and a U.S. Open Cup. He settled in the Carolinas with his wife, Bethany, and is raising five children.
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Jonathan Hawkins — aka Big Hawk — never got the chance to soar to Dempsey’s heights. In a tragic twist of fate, Hawk was gunned down in Houston on the same day Dempsey was named to the World Cup squad: May 1, 2006. His murder has never been solved. Molanders, Chehade and others were at his funeral. Everyone involved with “Don’t Tread” still feels the loss.
“There were so many things that were starting to happen for him,” says Dempsey. “He was starting to be recognized more outside of Texas. He was taken too soon. He had a family of his own, wife and kids. It hit hard. It’s just kind of like one of those things that shows you that life is short, make the most of it. All I could do at that time was pray for him and his family.”
Dempsey still has a soft spot for the song, as do many soccer fans in this country. He achieved what he set out to do — something a little different and that paid tribute to his hometown and his family.
“Well, I mean, shoot, it’s not gonna be like Kendrick Lamar, or J. Cole, or Jay-Z,” he says. “At the same time, I thought I was creative with it; I thought I made some good metaphors, analogies in there. And I was also trying to tell a story and promote soccer, show love to Texas and get people hyped about the game and do an anthem for U.S. Soccer, you know what I mean?”
Dempsey’s rap career was pretty short-lived, though from time-to-time he’d pop back up. At a release party for EA’s FIFA15 — a game he was on the cover of — Dempsey popped up with Molanders and dropped a new track, “Hot Fire,” performing it live on stage. There was talk of a new album coming out ahead of the 2014 World Cup, but it never surfaced.
“We got this whole other album that we never even put out,” says Molanders. “I’m sitting on that entire album, just waiting. I did talk to (Clint) and Chehade and the producer, Tony, it’s probably been six, eight months ago. I said, ‘Let’s just put some of it out, man, we don’t have to do anything crazy with it. Let’s just put it out.’”
For a moment, Molanders offers up a track or two to run with this piece, but days later, Dempsey puts the kibosh on any release. It’s too complicated, he says, to get all the samples cleared and the artists properly credited. Maybe we’ll hear it someday.
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“I had family,” says Dempsey, “I had kids, I had so much other stuff going on, trying to finish my (playing) career strong, I had the heart procedures I had to get done, (the rap stuff) kind of gets put on the back burner when you got real-life stuff going on.”
Dempsey’s legend has never really stopped growing in Nacogdoches. If you go there nowadays, the fields featured in the video have been renamed in his honor. A plaque at the entrance to the Clint Dempsey Soccer Complex bears the following message:
“There’s a thing with Texans, a pride thing, that’s, like, built into us,” says Chehade. “On top of it, Clint is really from the gutter, man, as far as all that ‘pay to play’ shit — Clint had to fight his way through all of that shit. That’s why Clint is always reppin’ Nacogdoches and that whole area. He wants people to know: ‘I didn’t come from no silver spoon shit, boy. I’m from the mud, dawg, from the oldest town in Texas. Nobody handed me that shit.’
“Let’s give Clint his flowers,” Chehade continues. “Clint is about his shit, and his town, and his people. He’s one of the realest people I know.”
(Photo illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photos: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images; Pablo Maurer)