What's Wrong with US? by Bruce Arena

Author:Bruce Arena
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

13

David and Landon

It wasn’t complicated. Maybe that’s the main lesson of dealing with these potentially difficult situations: Don’t make them more complicated than they need to be—not in how you think of them, not in how you talk about them, and not how you deal with them. I knew David and Landon were both professionals who wanted the same things, and I knew their styles of play and strengths on the field well enough to know they could have great chemistry as teammates. They just needed to get through a transition period that in their case had been complicated by the team going through a tough season or two. I didn’t want any drama. I just wanted to move past anything that needed moving past, so I called Landon and David into my Galaxy office for a quick face-to-face meeting to clear the air.

There had been talk of some issues between David and Landon, most of which I tuned out. There’s always a lot of chatter out there, and most of it amounts to nothing. Landon talked to Grant Wahl at a time when he was clearly frustrated from a long, difficult 2008 season, and he did a little venting. He’s human.

Then Wahl and Sports Illustrated took more of an Us Weekly approach as opposed to the more literate SI tradition started by great writers like Frank Deford and Ron Fimrite. The July 6, 2009, issue of the magazine carried an excerpt from Wahl’s book under the headline “How Beckham Blew It” with a blurb that threw around words like failed and alienated. I didn’t take any of it very seriously. When you’re on the inside looking out, you just chuckle at that kind of stuff and move on.

Who really cares about stories of players going out for a meal together on the road, and Beckham being told he couldn’t drink unless he showed ID? I guess they call that human interest. The parts that had people talking were the quotations, some of them a little surprising. I’m not going to rehash all of them here. It was the same kind of stuff teammates often say about each other when they’re going through a stretch of losing and things aren’t working. Great players hate losing as much as everyone else, probably a lot more, and frustrations build. Landon was quoted questioning whether David was giving his all for the team, and saying things like “All that we care about at a minimum is that he committed himself to us. As time has gone on, that has not proven to be the case in many ways—on the field, off the field.”

David and Landon were going to be fine. I never had any doubt about that, but one thing a life in coaching had taught me is that you always grab the bull by the horns and go straight at a potential problem. Soon before David made his 2009 debut with the team that July, I told David and Landon I wanted them to come into my office the next morning for a meeting.

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