Frankie Hejduk

This is reprinted from yesterdays New York Times Sorts page.
Frankie is one my favorites athletes that I have worked with. I got to coach
him with the Tampa Bay Mutiny and the 1998 World Cup team. This guy is fit! He
came to the Mutiny late in the 1996 season after playing on the US Olympic team.
We tested him on the old beep test and he scored the highest ever for a team
sport athlete that I had tested. The previous best was Steve Nash when he with
the Canadian national team and that was on a basketball court, not a soccer
pitch with cleats on. Today in the MLS Cup I will be cheering for the Red Bull
because my good friend Juan Osorio is the coach, but I will also be cheering
for Frankie. He is a tough competitor, when he came to the Mutiny we had a
veteran team, players that had played all over the world, when he started
practicing the intensity of the practices picked up considerably. He was not
afraid to take on Valderama. He doesn’t say much, he lets his tremendous work
rate and action speak.

Soccer Field to Surfboard: Crew’s Hejduk Has a Passion to Be
the Best

By BILLY
WITZ

Published: November 22, 2008

CARSON, Calif. — If Frankie Hejduk wins the first title of his lengthy
professional career on Sunday, it will be nice if the stands are filled with
dozens of his friends who made the short drive from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, his
sleepy hometown 90 miles down the coast.

Frankie Hejduk, the 34-year-old Crew captain, above and at
left after Columbus won the Eastern Conference title. When the M.L.S. season
ends, Hejduk will trade soccer for surfing in his

But he figures it will be a game-time decision.

“It’s going to depend on whether the waves are good or not,” Hejduk said on
Friday after the Columbus Crew went through practice for Sunday’s M.L.S. Cup
matchup against the Red Bulls. “If they are, half my buddies won’t show up.”

But Hejduk seems to understand.

With his shoulder-length, sun-bleached brown hair and surfer vocabulary,
Hejduk (pronounced HAY-duck) has for more than a decade looked like United
States soccer’s answer to Jeff Spicoli, the surfer-stoner character played by Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont
High,” a 1982 movie based on a school not far from where Hejduk grew up.

Not only does Hejduk talk the talk, he walks the walk — all the way out to
the end of a longboard.

When Hejduk was growing up, if a soccer ball was not near his feet, a
surfboard was under them. He was the national junior high school surfing
champion and qualified for the United States amateur surfing team. He attended
San Dieguito High, where one of his classmates and best friends was Rob
Machado, now a well-known professional surfer.

Though he has played in two World Cups, spent several seasons in Germany
with Bayer Leverkusen and has no plans to retire anytime soon, it is not hard
for Hejduk to imagine following Machado’s career path.

“Maybe I would have liked to have been a surfer, too,” said Hejduk, whose
two children are named Nesta, which is Bob Marley’s middle name, and
Coasten, a tribute to his coastal roots. “That’s the same type of lifestyle.
They’re traveling all these places.”

Then he stopped himself and smiled.

“The only difference,” he said, “is I’m in cold, rainy Columbus and in
Germany, whereas surfers are normally in Tahiti and Fiji.”

As unlikely as it seems, Hejduk said he was content in Columbus. So perhaps
the surf is a little flat, but he has become a fan favorite. He shared a beer
at a tailgate party after Columbus clinched the Supporters’ Shield, which is
awarded to the Major League Soccer team
with the best record, and met his wife there.

He has been an ideal captain for a rebuilding effort that began three years
ago when Sigi Schmid was hired as the coach. When Hejduk walks into the locker
room after a game, he makes sure to slap hands with everyone. He is a captain
who often brings just the right touch.

“His personality takes a lot of the pressure off very tense situations,”
said Jeff Agoos, the Red Bulls’ sporting director, who roomed with Hejduk when
they were teammates on the national team in the late 1990s.

Agoos recalled being in Mexico City for a World Cup qualifier when the
American players noticed fans whistling a profanity. Some were not sure what it
meant.

“That means ‘Get a goal, Frankie,’ ” Hejduk told his teammates before
making the same whistle.

Agoos said: “He made everybody laugh. It really broke the ice. That’s the
kind of naïveté he offers, which is very rare.”

Also rare is Hejduk’s level of fitness. Even at 34, one of his strongest
assets is his ability to run up and down the field, wearing opponents out.

Robbie Rogers, the Crew’s promising young midfielder, laughed when he was
asked if anyone had ever beaten Hejduk in a conditioning drill.

“I don’t think it’s ever happened in the history of soccer,” Rogers said.

Schmid, who coached Hejduk at U.C.L.A., remembered Hejduk’s return from a
torn knee ligament that had kept him out of the 2006 World Cup. He would run a
two-mile conditioning test, then sprint up bleachers while the team was
practicing.

“Frankie just comes with an energy about him every day,” Schmid said.
“There’s not a lot of pretense there. You don’t have to worry if he’s saying
one thing and thinking something else. He wants to win, he wants to battle.

“That’s what I noticed in him when I saw him play in high school. Here’s a
kid who plays with a lot of energy, covers a lot of ground and wants to win
every time he steps on the field. That part of Frankie has never changed.”

Neither has his desire to grab his board and feel the sand between his toes
and saltwater washing over him.

“It’s no secret that in the off-season, I’m pretty much in Cardiff surfing,”
Hejduk said. “You can find me on the beach, ratting out there, three times a
day, every day. It’s a big part of my life, every day.

“At the same time, it gets me away from the game for a little bit. It gets
me a chance to get mentally prepared for the next season. You’re at one with
the ocean and the water and all that stuff. I’m that type of guy — kind of a
hippie by nature.”

So there is little doubt where Hejduk will be Monday, win or lose, out where
even mid-November feels like an endless summer.