By Brian Beaky, CG Editor
This was going to be great.
The first thing you have to know about me is that my love for golf is matched only by my love for soccer. So you can imagine my excitement at the news that not only would I have the opportunity to play a round at Chambers Bay on a beautiful weekday afternoon, I’d be playing that round alongside Seattle Sounders’ goalkeeper Kasey Keller, a Puget Sound native and undoubtedly the most influential American soccer player of all-time, with over 100 caps for the U.S. National Team and 20 years’ experience at the highest levels in England, Germany, Spain and the U.S.
Kasey and I’d be knocking it around for five hours at one of the finest municipal tracks in the world, and then I’d be granted a 20-minute private audience with the legend himself.
It was everything I could do not to giggle with glee like a little kid.
In the days leading up to the round, I spent hours drafting up questions, working on my game and stressing over how to balance my personal fandom with my professional responsibilities. What’s Kasey going to be like? Would it be wrong to ask for an autograph? Should I ask any questions on the course, or save them all for after the round?
My story would weave anecdotes from my round with Kasey with highlights from his globe-trotting career, using small personality-revealing moments from the golf course as jumping-off points for tales of soccer glory. It would all culminate with Kasey putting out on 18 and smiling at a setting sun, happy to have brought his career full-circle by returning home to lead Seattle into the global soccer spotlight — just as he had done previously for the United States, and indeed the entire American game — before stepping off into his own similarly bright and peaceful sunset.
It was going to be fun to write, fun to read, a literary and journalistic masterpiece. That’s what it was going to be, alright. Until I actually met the man, and everything changed.
“How’s it going, guys? I’m Kasey,” Keller said as he walked up to myself and CG publisher Dick Stephens on the practice green before our round. It was good that he introduced himself — as he approached, he would hardly have been recognizable to many soccer fans, dressed in neatly-pressed slacks, an argyle-print sweater vest, a visor and … no, it couldn’t be … glasses? America’s greatest goalkeeper of all-time wears glasses?
Already, I could feel my tidy little plan, built around certain expectations, starting to come unglued.
Joining myself, Dick and Kasey on the golf course was Bart Wiley, the Sounders’ Director of Business Development and one of the top amateur golfers in the region. A former Newcastle club champion, Bart is a scratch golfer. I am most definitely not. Kasey — well, he’s somewhere in the middle.
Wanting to go out of our way to please our guests, Dick and I let Bart and Kasey choose the tees. So it was that a few minutes later I stood over my first shot of the day from the championship tees, staring at 7,585 yards of bunker-and-gorse strewn golf course before me. The first green was 498 yards away. It was a par-4. Let’s just say it was the first of many, many — many — shots.
No, this was not going at all as planned.
The good news was, I wasn’t alone. Kasey’s first tee shot soared high and right, coming to rest somewhere on top of a 40-foot dune that frames the right side of the fairway. Dick and I fully expected Kasey to re-tee a breakfast ball — or at the very least, to send his caddy up there after it. Instead, Kasey accepted his fate and made the climb up to the top himself, helping his caddy search until they found the ball.
A few minutes later, I found myself with a downhill lie in a bunker, about to attempt an impossible (for me) little flop.
“You got this, Brian,” I heard someone say. I looked up — it was Kasey. Great, not only am I about to skull this across the green, Kasey Keller is going to watch me do it, I thought. I tried to block it out (Kasey Keller is not watching me embarrass myself, Kasey Keller is not watching me embarrass myself …); it didn’t work.
“No worries, man, that was a tough one. You’ll get it back,” he said.
I couldn’t help but smile. It was a refreshingly pleasant — and totally (and obviously, unfairly) unexpected — response from a player whose most iconic image is that of a stern-faced keeper standing tall between the goalposts, barking orders at his defenders and never holding back on hard-to-hear truths in postgame interviews.
Smiles, and soft-spoken words of encouragement, aren’t something the average television viewer sees much from Keller on the field. Which, when you finally meet him, makes his laid-back, friendly, inclusive personality all the more surprising and refreshing.
It continued that way throughout the day. After staying a little quiet through the first few holes, Dick and I soon realized that Kasey wasn’t the type of celebrity who doesn’t want to be bothered by the “little guys.” In fact, after hitting our tee shots on the spectacular par-3 ninth hole (with both Kasey and myself managing to stick it on the green below, albeit a good 100 feet from the hole), Kasey actually waited for us to catch up to him so that we could finish a conversation about my personal favorite team, Leeds United, and some former Leeds players with whom Kasey had played at Tottenham. It was a cool moment, and one Dick and I would both later reference as a highlight of the day — Kasey Keller actually slowing down to walk and talk with us, not vice versa.
At the end of the day, we all grabbed lunch on the patio at the clubhouse and Kasey kept Dick and I in rapt attention for over an hour with story after story from his time in England, Germany and with the U.S. National Team — stories only a handful of Americans have the experience to tell. There was the one about the fan in Germany, where Keller was living in a mid-century Bavarian castle while playing for Borussia Mongengladbach, who proudly pulled up his sleeve to reveal Keller’s signature, tattooed on his arm.
Or about the time an owner who had been hot to sign Keller to a contract mysteriously canceled the offer just days after seeing Keller off the field — wearing his glasses.
Turns out I’m not the only one to suffer a bout of spectacle shock.
Then there was the time Keller led the U.S. to one of the biggest wins in its history, a 1-0 blanking of Brazil in 1998. Keller said he remembered making one particularly quality save and standing up to see Brazilian great Romario before him. Frustrated in all of his attempts to put the ball past Keller, one of the greatest players of all-time had simply one move left — to reach out and shake Keller’s hand. In the middle of the game.
Throughout the lunch, multiple fans walked over and timidly introduced themselves, clearly uncertain — just as Dick and I had been a few hours before — how the American soccer icon would react. In each case, Keller not only signed the requested autograph, but went out of his way to make certain the fan knew that their support was appreciated, typically answering a few specific questions from each fan and always ending the exchange with a handshake and a smile.
After lunch, we walked together to our cars, and Kasey signed a couple of Sounders flags for Dick’s three young kids, as well as my scorecard — which now figures prominently on my office wall, despite the three-digit number in the far-right box.
“Give me a call anytime you guys want to play again,” he said, before heading to his car. “I had a blast.”
Dick and I played it cool until we were safely in the car, before turning to each other and breaking into huge smiles. We had been able to do something that few people are ever able to do — we had met one of our heroes, and found out that the real person behind the image was even cooler than the one we had admired all these years.