Last year, Robbie Rogers quit football and revealed he was gay. This year, he's reached his second career MLS Cup final as one of the league's best left-backs. The American's tale needed to be told, writes Jon Holmes...
Monday 21 August 2017 16:53, UK
Running away to make a new start - the reason Robbie Rogers, "mostly subconsciously" as he admits in his new autobiography Coming Out To Play, chose to leave Major League Soccer to sign for Leeds United in January 2012. He barely got out of the blocks.
Yet it's clear that when he joined, the USA international truly dreamed of success on these shores, even though the manager that signed him - Simon Grayson - was sacked before the then 24-year-old had pulled on his new club shirt. "I think playing in England could suit my style," the speedy winger told the Yorkshire Evening Post the following month. "With my pace, I could get at defenders."
Instead, a defender got at him. Rogers relished the Elland Road experience (he even includes seven verses of terrace anthem 'Marching On Together' in his book) but his first taste of it as a substitute against Doncaster lasted 10 minutes before a clash of heads with Tommy Spurr gave him concussion. Two months later, after a couple more appearances from the bench (the second of which, at Reading, saw him take the captain's armband), he made his full Leeds debut at home to Peterborough - and fractured his ankle early on. Rogers never played a first-team game for the Whites again and after an injury-ravaged loan spell at Stevenage in the first half of the following season, his contract was cancelled by mutual consent.
An unhappy time? Perversely perhaps, Rogers would likely have grown more miserable had he stayed fit at Leeds. He might have established himself in the side (18 caps for the US proves he has the ability and application); he might have become the poster-boy player; he might have later been snapped up by a Premier League club. His emotional health, however, would have surely worsened in such a scenario. "I couldn’t imagine continuing to live a life that was so lonely and sad," Rogers writes of how he felt in that summer of 2012. The constant internal dialogue he kept having wore him down: "Keeping such a tight lid on myself because of my sexuality made it impossible to feel the whole range of emotions that people normally feel... I wound up feeling isolated whether I was around people or not."
I wound up feeling isolated whether I was around people or not.
Over the course of the next few months, following years crippled by fear of anyone discovering his "big secret", he let it slip - tentatively to a friend of a friend; then nervously to his sister; then with even more trepidation to his mum; and eventually to anyone who read a post on his personal website in February of last year. "Try explaining to your loved ones after 25 years you are gay," he blogged. "It's time to discover myself away from football."
However, football wouldn't let Rogers walk away. After a flood of support for the Californian from former team-mates, coaches, fans and most importantly his family, it wasn't long before Rogers returned to the game to sign for hometown team Los Angeles Galaxy. For a while, a serious stomach infection sidelined him again, and the injury setbacks continued - but since June of this year, he's been playing regularly for the Galaxy at left-back. The stats show he's one of the best tacklers in the MLS and on Monday, he played a crucial role in the Western Conference final second leg at Seattle Sounders.
LA lost 2-1 on the night but won through on away goals meaning that on Sunday, Rogers will appear in an MLS Cup showdown once more, six years after helping Columbus Crew to the title at the same venue - the Galaxy's own Stubhub Center home.
Coming Out To Play documents Rogers' personal journey before the current MLS season; whatever the result this weekend, his 2014 campaign will certainly be worth another chapter (and he recently signed a multi-year contract extension with the Galaxy to boot). But this is not a footballer's autobiography which you judge by the subject's achievements on the field. On a literary level, though, Rogers follows ably and honestly in the footsteps of Tony Adams (Addicted, 1998), Stan Collymore (Tackling My Demons, 2004) and Kelly Smith (Footballer: My Story, 2013). Memoirs like these, and also the award-winning 2012 biography A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke, offer valuable insight into the myriad off-field issues that can affect footballers, and the impact they have on their careers.
With the help of Eric Marcus, who worked with Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis on his coming-out autobiography Breaking The Surface, Rogers explains how the constructs of his daily life - relationships with family members, his Catholic upbringing, the locker-room joking around - all combined to box him in, and were further exacerbated by challenges that often face young footballers trying to hit the big time, such as homesickness during a spell in Holland with Heerenveen in his late teens, and the frustration caused by so many injuries.
Reading about those tough experiences will be of benefit to many, players and fans alike, but what happened after Rogers' blog post was read around the world is important too. The manner of his coming out was, he admits, "totally selfish" and he initially had no desire to become any sort of LGBT activist: "I was just trying to save myself." Attending a youth forum event in Portland changed his opinion, though, and set him back on the path to what best defines him: being a footballer.
One of the fans' groups that will cheer on the home team on Sunday are called the Galaxians, and their motto is 'Loyalty, Pride, Tradition.' As a team-mate, out gay sportsman and lover of the beautiful game, Rogers is a fitting representative of that motto; a far cry from the lost boy who never fitted in.
