http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ts/7303716.htm
Adu a prodigy from any angle
Fourteen and a multimillionaire.
Fourteen and expected to do for soccer what Tiger Woods has done, is doing, for golf.
Fourteen and with a name, and a game, that causes aficionados to invoke - hush now - the holy of soccer holies, Pele.
Fourteen and paid a million dollars by a certain swoosh logo to shod his dancing feet in their slippers.
Fourteen and due to finish school, high school, in March. With a degree in May.
Fourteen and for his news conference debut, he plays the Garden, Madison Square Garden, which modestly bills itself as the world's most famous sporting arena.
Fourteen. Freddy Adu is 14 and considered world class, and that adds up to "prodigy from any angle. Freddy Adu. Last name pronounced like the French word for good-bye. It's what he says to the defenders he leaves behind, in flopping frustration, as he dances down the pitch.
Fourteen ...
So the NBA has now been surpassed as the day-care center for professional athletes.
Freddy Adu makes LeBron James eligible for AARP membership and the early-bird specials.
In a blatant play for the media attention it has craved, Major League Soccer on Wednesday introduced Freddy Adu to the strobe lights and the camera's unblinking red eye, introduced him as the newest member of D.C. United and as the youngest capitalist in captivity, and something of a patriot, too, seeing as how he spurned more lucrative offers from overseas to remain in the States. For now, at least.
The kid was brilliant. Spoke without notes. Spoke with a maturity and clarity and an ease and confidence that made you blink. Fourteen and sounded 44.
Asked what he thought of all the commotion he is causing, he replied: "I don't think of myself as being different from anyone else. I play video games with my friends ... "
That's either charming naivete or a shrewdly calculated effort at ingenuousness.
"We still want him to be a 14-year-old kid," insisted Ivan Gazidis, the deputy commissioner of MLS.
Right. Lots of luck with that one.
Everyone related to him or financially tethered to him talked a good game, mentioning again and again family and the importance of being able to play for a team so close to his home (Potomac, Md.) and the unimportance of money, which is terrific, if true.
And, in fact, by every account and indication, his mother, Emilia, has done a smashing job raising a genius while keeping him grounded and protected and armed with a proper perspective.
They came to America in 1997 after winning an emigration lottery in their native Ghana. That's a long, long trip, on several different levels, to the stage in Madison Square Garden. Bully for them.
You find yourself rooting for the kid. The league is using him, of course. His coming out was timed to be a hype for the league's version of the Super Bowl, to be played Sunday in California.
But then, exploitation works both ways, doesn't it? Freddy Adu is making a handsome buck, and even more handsome bucks are to come, for if he turns out to be the performer everyone expects. Then eventually, he will end up in the lucrative employ of one of those storied overseas franchises. (Hello, Manchester United?) So it's rather difficult to summon up an argument based on violation of the child-labor laws.
For all the ruckus he has raised, Freddy Adu is only 5-feet-8, 140 pounds. Ah, but dribbling a soccer ball, weaving here, slithering there, turning defenders tangle-footed, he plays big. Very, very big.
Of course, that's against players his own age. Now, he will have to compete with grown men, which gets to the core of it all. Is this fair? And why the rush?
Freddy Adu is the latest, and the youngest, in a definite trend in our play-for-pay sports. Younger and younger and younger.
The tennis pubescents have been with us for some time, precocious and tending to the bratty and frequently burned out by 16. Hockey drafts adolescents, some barely having time to grow in their adult teeth before someone knocks them out. The NBA began harvesting high school seniors. There is no age limit in golf, and so we have the wondrously talented Michelle Wie, barely in her teens, driving the ball over the horizon.
The debate is a familiar one. Is this bad or benign? Have we lost all perspective? Do we hurry our children and, in so doing, rob them of their childhood? Or do we provide them with every opportunity to take advantage of an extraordinary aptitude?
I only wish I were smart enough to know.
Generalization is always dangerous. It seems to me this is best approached on a case-by-case basis, for circumstances and family history and background vary wildly.
In the case of Freddy Adu, an emigrant prodigy nurtured by a resolute mother, he is being given both sizable wealth and opportunity, and with that a responsibility of crushing weight. The rest of us may sit in judgment, but it is their choice.
And the consequences, in whatever form, are theirs as well.
Fourteen ...
What were you doing at 14?