Landon Donovan and the Last Goodbye

A crowd of 36,265 fans chanted "Thank you, Landon!" as the finest player in U.S. Soccer history, Landon Donovan, talked to Bob Ley and the rest of the ESPN crew at halftime, moments after his final action for the U.S. Men's National Team Friday night. Those who came to pay tribute to Donovan fought New England traffic on a holiday weekend to do so. Thousands were still streaming in well after the friendly match against Ecuador began.

"When I started, there probably would have been a few hundred people," Donovan said of the supporters' clubs who populated the stands on Friday night. "And now there's thousands of people, who made the trip from all over the country to support us, support me."

Ultimately, that may be how the career of Donovan is remembered. A career that took place, almost entirely, during a period in U.S. Soccer history when merely accessing the National Team required more effort than many cared to give. And it ended just as the country at large begins to embrace the sport.

This is not Donovan's fault, but it is the one area where the expectations for Donovan back at the turn of the century—when he was a fabulously skilled attacker asked to be the sport's Babe Ruth—weren't quite realized. Donovan's failure to be that Babe Ruth figure gets in the way of understanding what was being asked of him.

Ruth transformed the way Americans saw baseball. There were other factors—the effort to keep balls clean, for instance, contributed to the end of the dead-ball era—but Ruth's mammoth home runs ushered in not only a new era in Major League Baseball, but in the sport's broader cultural relevance. Baseball's own mythology needed a transcendent figure like Ruth to serve as its perfect protagonist.

Donovan was never going to be that guy. A skilled, gifted soccer player for sure, but never a larger than life figure in terms of both on the field performance and off the field personality. As Donovan put it about the focus on him this week, "I'm not overly comfortable with that kind of attention on me." Try to imagine Ruth saying that.

What a Ruth would look like in U.S. Soccer isn't particularly difficult to imagine. Consider what this country would do with a Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo playing for the National Team. That long sought after moment of cultural eureka would almost certainly follow. However, what Donovan has done is help move U.S. Soccer further down the path to that moment.

I asked Donovan after the match about how the landscape is different now for 16 and 17 year old soccer players in the U.S., "I mean, it's night and day," Donovan said. "The kids now—we've got a kid on the Galaxy, Bradford Jamison, 17, he's grown up watching us all play. He's idolized all of us. And I think about me growing up—I didn't have anyone to watch, there was no Major League Soccer. There wasn't anyone to idolize."

Donovan isn't Ruth, but he's still an idol to a generation of U.S. players on the come up—a legacy worth celebrating even if it doesn't match the one he was assigned. He was set up to be something no one should have expected him to be, and in those unfulfilled expectations so much of his significance is lost. After all, against expectations suited to a mythological figure, how can Donovan's five MLS titles and 57 National Team goals measure up? Donovan's deciding goal against Algeria in the 2010 World Cup remains a breathtaking moment, but it fares poorly when judged against the mythical Donovan scoring the deciding goal in a World Cup final.

In seeming spite of such unfair calculations, Donovan remained content to be himself; the sort of person we relegate to a supporting role in the American sports drama, even as his skills and accomplishments surpassed any who came before him. A nuanced quality you'd expect to serve him well in retirement, and life generally.

For instance, listen to where his focus was when viewing a post-match highlight film on the field Friday night. "I watched some of the highlights, and thought about where I was in my life, off the field, during those times," Donovan said. "The game has given me an outlet to express myself, to learn, and grow."

Not even a botched moment of final glory could break Donovan's healthy distance from his own mythology. A clean strike on goal bounced off the right post and Donovan was denied the cinematic finish he'd seen Derek Jeter enjoy in recent weeks; something he acknowledged was on his mind heading into his final match. A laid out Donovan took the customary moment of frustration, but that was all he needed.

"Yeah, [scoring] would have been nice," Donovan said when it was over. "But that's okay. Maybe it wasn't meant to be."

The pressure on Donovan to be that Ruthian soccer player never let up from soccer fans desperately hoping that someone would accelerate the slow rise of the sport here in America, but right on through to the very end, the pressure never broke Donovan's healthy perspective on the significance of kicking a ball around. Besides, waiting on soccer's Ruth may end up being remembered as a distraction from the sport's ongoing rise.

Football's ascension into mainstream American culture provides a better aspirational model for soccer in this case. No single star is credited with football's rise—if anything, the catalytic event most often cited is the 1958 NFL title game between the Giants and Colts. It's easy to imagine, say, a World Cup semifinal match involving the U.S. doing the same thing for stateside soccer.

U.S. Soccer's slow burn was noted by Donovan his halftime interview on Friday night when he said "we wouldn't be on this set ten years ago." He's right: I still remember watching the U.S. qualify for the 2010 World Cup on an internet stream through an illegal feed. Being a soccer fan in this country, until very recently, was to scratch and claw for coverage while experiencing joy and misery within a country long known for marginalizing the world's sport.

Sure, plenty of fans cleared out once the match ended, but thousands remained while Bob Ley interviewed Donovan on the field. For these fans, making that extra bit of effort through New England holiday traffic fit in seamlessly with how they'd followed the National Team through most of Donovan's career.

And so as I watched Donovan applaud the remaining throng as "Heroes" by David Bowie played, it seemed that everybody was finally at peace with what Donovan had been, and what he hadn't.

"It's so different now," Donovan said. "But that's a good thing. That's what we wanted. And that's what we're all here to do… and we should all be proud of it."