TEEN SPIRIT.(soccer player Freddy Adu)(Biography)

In certain company, talking about the state of American soccer, particularly professional soccer, can be a little like talking about urban renewal: a boom is always just around the corner. The infrastructure, for instance, is already in place, in the form of the more than seventeen million recreational soccer players in the country, nearly half of them under the age of eleven, and impressionable. All that is needed, enthusiasts argue, is a spark--some recognizable star power to excite the complacent American sports fan, with his short attention span and his expectations of high-scoring action and individual heroics. Soccer is a more remote, but also a more rewarding, pleasure: the world's game. If only it were on television, in prime time, like baseball.

In recent history, there have been several bold attempts to achieve this soccer awakening: signing the Brazilian legend Pele, when he was thirty-four and past his peak, to play for the New York Cosmos, in 1975; luring the World Cup to the United States, in 1994, with the promise of a new professional organization, Major League Soccer, to follow. None of it has quite worked. After a brief burst, the interest subsides, and soccer resumes its mostly anonymous place somewhere below ice hockey and above lacrosse in the American sports consciousness. Still, optimism persists, and last year great new hope arrived in the form of a teen-age prodigy, from Ghana by way of Maryland. His youth and his winning looks--he is five feet six but broad-shouldered, with wide eyes and soft features--made him the perfect ambassador for a sport played by so many American boys and girls. Even his name, Freddy Adu, sounded auspicious.

The story of Adu's early years resembles that of many foreign-born star athletes: the uncanny, innate affinity for the sport (his mother likes to say that his eyes would light up when she held a soccer ball above his face in the crib); the barefoot games played in the street, amid shards of glass, from dawn to dusk. No coaches, no referees, no uniforms--just pure sport. Freddy was born Fredua Koranteng Adu, in Tema, Ghana, a fishing port twenty miles outside the capital city of Accra, on June 2, 1989. His parents, Maxwell and Emelia, were shopkeepers. Unlike Pele, who, according to lore, filled socks with crumpled-up newspaper to fashion makeshift soccer balls in his home town of Tres Coracoes, Adu was the frequent beneficiary of proper, factory-made balls--gifts from his mother's brother, who lived in the United States. He started playing with the older kids in the neighborhood when he was four, and soon they were calling him Pele--after the other Pele, Abedi Ayew Pele, a Ghanaian who was named African Player of the Year three times in the early nineteen-nineties.

In the fall of 1997, when Freddy was eight and his brother, Fredua Akoto, or Fro, was six, the Adus came to the United States and settled with Emelia's brother in Gaithersburg, Maryland. (Maxwell left the family soon afterward, and is no longer in touch with them.) Within a few years, Freddy was being courted by a number of the big European clubs, including Milan's Inter, which offered the Adus seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but, at Emelia's urging, Freddy decided to remain in the U.S. and complete his education. Then, at the age of fourteen, he signed a multiyear professional contract with Major League Soccer, making him the youngest pro in American team sports in more than a century. (In 1887, a pubescent Philadelphia A's pitcher named Fred Chapman took the mound for five forgettable innings, and was never heard from again.) When the signing was announced, at a televised press conference at Madison Square Garden, in November of 2003, Ivan Gazidis, the deputy commissioner of M.L.S., said of Adu, "He's the best young player in the world right now, not just in the United States."

The United States has never before had its own international men's soccer star. Most M.L.S. players earn about as much as New York City public-school teachers--a few even work second jobs to make ends meet--and the league imposes a maximum salary (two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars) that is smaller than Major League Baseball's minimum. For Adu, who was still seen to represent a flight risk, an exception was made: five hundred thousand. In the months leading up to Adu's professional debut, for Washington's D.C. United, last spring, he signed a million-dollar endorsement deal with Nike, went on MTV's daytime ...