Coming Out to Play, page 5
It wasn’t like I came up with these ideas on my own. While my mom was in one corner arguing for college, “the men in your life,” as she referred to them—my dad and some of my coaches—were arguing for Europe. Here’s what my mother recalls, and she remembers better than I do because she could see the whole thing playing out from ten thousand feet up. I was in the middle of it and not really aware of the battle of the wills between the adults:
My feeling was that every person needs the experience of a university. Because that’s where you find yourself. You can be a soccer player at the university, you can be a writer, you can be a botanist. You get to explore your interests and meet other people from different walks of life. Robbie was a teenager and I saw his time at the university as precious years during which he could develop into a well-rounded young man. But the men in his life were telling him, “No, you need to go to Europe. That’s where fame and fortune is. You’re not going to learn anything at the university, because the level of play there is so inferior.” Of course I’m paraphrasing and giving it my tilt, but Robbie was being pulled in that direction, so my job as the mom was to counterbalance the men and pull Robbie back. I didn’t feel that the men had Robbie’s best long-term interests at heart and believed that I did.
From my perspective my coaches were opening up a whole world to me. For example, during my sophomore year of high school Jürgen Klinsmann set up an opportunity for me to play with the youth team for Bayern Munich in Germany, which I did, and I loved it. And then in my junior and senior years Nick Theslof arranged for me to go over to Holland for a couple of months to train with PSV Eindhoven, with their reserve team and their youth team. (Nick had played with PSV when he was younger, so he had connections at the club.) The second time, which was at the start of 2005, I’d finished up at Huntington High School a semester early, so I was free to go, but Mom set some conditions. Again, here’s what my mom remembers:
By this point we’d already met with Sasho Cirovski, the coach from the University of Maryland, who desperately wanted Robbie on his team. This man is incredible, a total alpha male. You have to scrape him off the ceiling. Sasho called me from Maryland and said, “Don’t sign anything. I’m flying out tomorrow. I’m going to form my team around Robbie. I know him, I’ve seen him, I’ve scouted him. Promise me you won’t sign anything. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
Sasho had such high energy I thought I was going to get electrocuted through the phone. I said, “You’ve got my ear, I promise I won’t do anything until we break bread.” And true to his word, as always, he flew out from Maryland and was here the next morning. We went to a sandwich place in Newport and seated at the table were Nick Theslof, Sasho, me, and Robbie. Sasho was a tsunami and very quickly had me convinced that Maryland could be the right place for Robbie, but I knew Robbie was thinking, I’m going to tell Mom I’m going to college, but I’m really not.
Mom was right, because that’s what I was thinking. So she made a deal with me in the secret hope that I’d go see the University of Maryland and fall in love with it. She said I could go to Holland only if, when I was in Europe, I signed up to take the SAT exam. I hadn’t been in a rush to take the SAT because I figured I didn’t need to if I was turning pro, and if I wound up going to college instead I didn’t think I’d need SAT scores if I was going to school on a sports scholarship. I protested and said that I didn’t think you could take the SAT in Europe, but Mom said I had no choice and that she’d arrange it, which she did. Clearly she wasn’t giving up without a fight. And I wanted to go to Holland, so I agreed to Mom’s terms.
At the same time, Sasho persuaded me to stop in Maryland on my way to Europe to meet the guys on the team, which I knew would make my mother happy, so I agreed to that as well. I still thought it was a waste of time to stop in Maryland, but then I arrived on campus and it was like something out of the movies—red-brick buildings with white columns all set on beautiful lawns. UCLA is nice, but it’s not like that. I was there for three days and met all the guys on the soccer team, the Maryland Terrapins (the Terps, for short), who were easy to get along with and made me feel really welcome. I spent a lot of time with Sasho and the coaching staff. They took me around the campus, through the classroom buildings, and to the stadium. And they talked with me about my goals and what I hoped to achieve playing for Maryland. After the first day I was sold and called home. I said to my mom, “I love this school. If I go to school I want to go here.” I was confident that if I went there it would be a great experience and that I’d be successful there in the way I wanted to be. The University of Maryland also happened to be a good school, but reading and studying at that age weren’t as important to me as they are now, so I really didn’t care about that.
From Maryland I flew to the Netherlands and spent the next two months training and playing in Eindhoven. It’s a cool city and I could ride my bike to training—and it was the best training I could hope to get anywhere in the world—then I’d come home and have the rest of the day to do what I wanted. I was a bit lonely, but I had some friends on the team and would meet them after practice and we’d walk around the city. From my time there it was easy to imagine living in Europe, but I wound up not getting any serious offers from European professional soccer teams. So it was a good thing my mother had arranged for me to take the SAT, which I wound up doing in Amsterdam, because once I said yes to Maryland, the first thing they asked for were my SAT scores. Mom was right again, but fortunately she’s not the kind of person to ever say, “I told you so.”
From the Netherlands I flew directly to Florida to attend a U-20 national team training camp. I’d been invited by the team’s coach, Sigi Schmid—I’d known Sigi since I was eight years old. His son Kyle and I were good friends on the Gunners, my youth club team. Sigi would come and watch all of our games, and we’d often go to LA Galaxy games together. Then after national team training camp I went home to California to get ready to leave for the University of Maryland. Unfortunately, by the time I got home, after months of intense training and playing, I was having a lot of trouble with my knee.
My knee hadn’t been right since I’d had surgery on it the year before, and now it was swelling up almost every day after practice and games and I was in a lot of pain, which meant I couldn’t play at my best. That surgery hadn’t been so bad, but the recovery had been awful. I’d been diagnosed with osteochondritis, which is a rare knee problem (although not uncommon in adolescent athletes because of all the stress we put on our joints) where the end of the thighbone, the femur, gets damaged and doesn’t heal properly. I’d been warned that if I didn’t have the surgery and continued playing, I could do permanent damage to my knee and might never walk again, so it wasn’t like I had a choice.
I had the surgery during the summer of 2004, and afterward I had to be in a wheelchair for six weeks, because I wasn’t allowed to put any weight on the knee, and then had to be on crutches for weeks. It was really depressing when I went back to Huntington High School in September for my final semester and couldn’t play soccer at all. I was in rehab for months before I started playing again in 2005, and by the time I left to see the University of Maryland, and then went on to the Netherlands for two months, I was in pretty good shape, although the swelling continued to be a problem.
So come August, after packing my bags, I flew across the country with my mom and Tim and Katie for orientation at the University of Maryland, hoping the whole time that if I kept icing my knee and taking care of it, it would get better on its own, but I couldn’t even get through our first exhibition game. I somehow managed to play for the first twenty minutes, but that was it. Running was excruciating and after those twenty minutes I could hardly walk.
I was lucky that my mother was with me. She and Katie and Tim planned to stay a few days to help me get settled (and Mom wanted Katie and Tim to see where their older brother was going to school). Sasho, my new coach, took me right from the exhibition game to the team doctor’s house. He examined my knee, which was pretty swollen, and sent me for an MRI. At the hospital the doctor explained to my mom and me what the problem was—that there wasn’t enough clearance between the kneecap and the femur, so the kneecap was rubbing against the femur, cutting off the blood supply to that bone. Apparently my knee hadn’t healed properly after the first surgery and now I was going to need another operation. I was in tears because I couldn’t believe I had to do this all over again.
What worried me about having surgery for a second time was the possibility—the fear—that I wouldn’t recover to the point where I could be the kind of soccer player people expected me to be and I wanted to be. That was my identity. It’s who I was. Everything I did, all of the people I knew, and all the praise I got were connected to soccer. If I didn’t play soccer at the level I’d been playing, how would I go to college? If I was washed up, it wasn’t like the University of Maryland was going to give me a scholarship for my brilliant academic record. Without soccer, what was my purpose in life?
But Sasho was very reassuring. He said, “We’re going to take care of this.” A couple of days later I went in for surgery and then my teammates came to the hospital to take me back to the hotel where my mom was staying, because she wanted to look after me. That evening Sasho stopped by to talk to my mother. He said, “You really don’t know me, but Robbie is now part of our family. You can stay in Maryland as long as you want. But we’re going to take over, we’re going to take care of him, and he’ll be back on the field in no time.”
With that reassurance, my mom, Tim, and Katie went home and I got to work getting back on my feet. Sasho was true to his word, because they really took care of everything. During my recovery, Sasho had me stay with our captain, Michael Dellorusso, at his apartment. This time I didn’t have to be in a wheelchair, just crutches for several weeks. I did rehab in Baltimore every day, or would do rehab with the physical therapists at Maryland. Within two weeks I was in a pool running on a treadmill and I was back training with the team long before I could have imagined, and only missed the first two games of the season.
Sasho turned out to be the perfect coach for me because he really cared. That’s something he demonstrated to my family and me from the start. Once I was back training and playing, I found Sasho to be the kind of coach who encouraged me to work harder and do better, which was exactly what I needed.
It was a couple of weeks after I went back to training with the Terps that my teammate, totally out of the blue, said that if I didn’t hook up with a girl that weekend I was gay. Looking back now, I wish I’d said in response: “Don’t be stupid. I’ll hook up with a girl if I want to hook up with a girl. And besides, having sex with a girl doesn’t prove you’re straight. Or don’t you know that?” But I was too afraid and too young to say anything remotely close to that. I didn’t even think it.
You have to wonder what was going through this guy’s head to say that kind of thing to a freshman. I have no idea, but I can tell you what was going through my head. I was totally panicked and decided I’d better hook up with a girl that coming weekend to prove that I wasn’t gay. Just writing about this story makes me feel so sad to think that I felt like I had no choice but to have sex with a girl to prove that I wasn’t gay. I feel sad for my eighteen-year-old self and I feel sad for the girl I had sex with, because the truth is I was using her and that was clearly wrong.
Finding a girl to hook up with didn’t exactly take work because there were a lot of girls who wanted to hook up with the soccer players. That weekend, after the game, we had a party in our suite at Kent Hall. There were at least a couple dozen people there and it was pretty clear to me that one of the cheerleaders wanted to hook up with me (especially since one of her friends told me she wanted to). She stayed close to me the whole night and was really flirtatious.
As the evening wore on, the pressure built because I knew what I had to do. Finally I said to myself, Okay, I’ve got to get this done, so let’s do it. So I took the cheerleader’s hand and led her to my room and we were there for maybe thirty or forty-five minutes, which was about thirty or forty-five minutes too long for me. It wasn’t like it was the first time I’d ever done this, so I knew what I was supposed to do. And it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but the only reason I did it was to get people off my back for at least a little while.
Of course that wasn’t the end of the constant pressure—from my teammates or from the girls who wanted to hook up with me. And it could be intense. One time I came back to my room and found a girl in my bed waiting for me. And for a while I had a stalker who somehow knew where I was going to be, and she’d just show up at the places I was going. I never figured out how she did it, but she must have had scouts who tracked my movements.
One irony about the timing of my prove-you’re-straight hookup was that around the same time I was doing my best to prove I was straight, back at home in California the state legislature had passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. It was the first time a state legislature had passed that kind of bill without having its hand forced by the courts. That was so not about my life and the life I wanted for myself that I doubt it even registered on my radar.
My knee held up fine through the season, although I had to take care of it and ice it after every practice and game. It wound up being an incredible season for us, which ended in December with the NCAA championship, and which we won for the first time since 1968. Winning that championship is the goal for any college athlete and to do it my freshman year, when I was eighteen, was amazing!
The thing about the NCAA championship is that no one’s a professional. You’re not playing for money. You’re playing for your school and for your teammates. And the win came after a season of being with my team on campus and training together, going on the road together, and competing together. When you win the championship you also get a ring. The ring is the least of it, but it’s an enduring reminder that I came out on top at the end of my first season playing for the University of Maryland.
Mom flew out for that championship game, which was against New Mexico. We won 1–0. When I talked to my mother about it recently, she said it was one of those times when she had the uneasy feeling that I was bottled up, that I was hiding something. I don’t remember holding back, but here’s what she told me:
I was so excited about being able to be there and to see him reach one of his personal goals and see the Terps take it all. But when I saw him after the game, just before he got on the bus and left, he said, “Great to see you. Glad you came. Bye, Mom.” And he got on the bus to go. There was almost no emotion in what he said and it made me think that there was something with Robbie that was compartmentalized. All of the normal, natural outpouring of emotion over winning just wasn’t there. I had to wonder why Robbie was so contained when all of his friends were celebrating their victory with each other and their families. It would be years before I had any idea just how much he was keeping inside.
I wasn’t yet aware of it then, but the whole gay thing was weighing on me, which made it difficult to really experience the kind of joy that came along with winning a championship. I knew I should have been happier than I was; I could see how excited everyone else was, but I just didn’t feel it and I didn’t know why.
Most of my time in Maryland I enjoyed myself so much and was so busy with classes and soccer and partying that usually I didn’t think about what I was keeping inside. But sometimes I did, and when I thought about it I realized I wanted more than anything else in the world to be like my straight siblings, who could get married and have kids. And somehow I persuaded myself that I was not only capable of doing that—marrying a woman, having kids—but I might even be kind of happy doing it.
As an athlete I was very, very disciplined, so if I put my mind to doing something I could do it. So, I asked myself, why couldn’t I marry a woman one day and be happy about it? Of course being disciplined had nothing to do with trying to change your sexual orientation, because that’s not something I could change any more easily than a straight guy could if he wanted to become gay. But I was really ignorant about sexuality and the fact that it can’t be changed, so I tried.
That’s how I wound up getting involved with a girl for the first time beyond a one-time hookup. This happened toward the end of my freshman year. I don’t want to overstate what we had by calling it a relationship, but “Leslie” and I would hang out and we hooked up a few times. There was something about Leslie that I thought could change me. Leslie was very pretty, really nice, and when I touched her I enjoyed it—not that I was excited by the experience of touching her, but it was fine.
You would think this would be a straightforward process. All I had to figure out was, did having a sexual relationship with Leslie change me from a man who was sexually attracted to other men to a man who was sexually attracted to women, to Leslie in particular? But what was going on in my head was anything but straightforward.
To understand what kind of mental gymnastics I was going through and why this was such a tortured process, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a nineteen-year-old who really didn’t want to be gay and had worked really hard at never being attracted to other guys. I was so good at it that I could even talk to attractive guys I knew were gay and squash any sexual feelings I might have had for them before they could even register. So it wasn’t like I was making any effort to get in touch with what I felt in my heart of hearts. Instead, I was trying to convince myself that whatever spark of attraction I had for Leslie might somehow mean that I could have a relationship with a woman and really like it.
