American dreamers

For eons, that puppy of a country between the Pacific and the Atlantic dwelled in a global obscurity. The savants of the world’s most popular sports league assessed Americans with the curiosity one would lend a benign extraterrestrial.

Well, look now. The English Premier League, with its $1.2-billion overseas TV contract, viewers in 195 countries and soccer players from 66 nations, employs a record 12 American players.

Not even the most sneering pub philosopher deems the Americans as novelties anymore.

That’s a leap from the mid-1990s, when a trickle of Americans had reached England and Europe, as the Seattle-ite goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann showed up to train in a fellow elite soccer country, Germany.

“They thought I was going to be a joke,” Hahnemann said.

These days, he mans the goal for Reading, the year’s Premiership surprise story in sixth place.

“A few years go by,” he said, “and there are more and more players over here, and you don’t have to break down all the stereotypes.”

Dead stereotypes include: They’re Mostly Goalkeepers Because They Can’t Survive Without Their Hands.

“Definitely, the perception has changed.”

Of the current American crop, five defenders, three midfielders, three goalkeepers and one striker dot eight of the 20 English Premier League clubs.

The striker, Brian McBride of London-based Fulham, even scores goals (nine this season), and his goals appear on “Match of the Day,” the BBC’s 43-year-old Saturday night religious service and highlights show.

These days, you might even hear English chanting that sounds straight out of the 1984 Summer Olympics -- “USA! USA!” -- especially at Reading, where after every match Hahnemann popularly removes the shirt off his back and presents it to a fan.

At Fulham, the property of Harrod’s owner Mohamed Al Fayed, they’ve committed an arcane morsel of sports trivia. When on Jan. 20 in the 81st minute, the Texan Clint Dempsey took the pitch alongside Chicagoan McBride and Alta Loma-raised Carlos Bocanegra, that marked the first American trio on one top-division club since the English commenced competitive soccer around 1871.

A primer: Twenty clubs make up the Premier League, or “Premiership.” Each plays 38 league matches from August to May.

Tucked in that stretch, clubs also compete in two concurrent, months-long national tournaments -- the Football Assn. (or FA) Cup and the League (or Carling) Cup -- with top clubs also competing in one of two European tournaments. Some clubs pursue four trophies each season.

The four most glamorous clubs -- global brands, really -- dominate and form almost a super-tier of their own: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United.

Yet the dungeons of the 20-club “table” (standings) also light up each melodramatic spring, when the fans of the most lagging teams commence quaking, because the 18th-, 19th- and 20th-place teams suffer relegation into the second tier, the 24-team “Championship” (in which three Americans play at present).

The Championship coughs its bottom four teams into a third tier called League One, which spills its annual detritus (two teams) into a fourth tier called League Two.

Emotion abounds. Jay DeMerit, a Watford defender, tells friends to imagine the entire NFL tucked into his home state, Wisconsin.

Adapting from a lower tier or a lower country to the top tier in England -- or Spain or Italy, for that matter -- often distills to a central issue: the pace of play.

DeMerit went from the Championship to the Premiership and said, “The inches that you possibly could give away last year aren’t even to be found in this league. You switch off for a second and you get burned.... It’s the split-seconds. It’s the inches.”

In the second tier, which often draws both comparisons to Major League Soccer and the ensuing ire of insulted MLS fans, DeMerit would see a guy coming and process he was coming.

In the Premiership, DeMerit said, by the time you’ve finished processing that he’s coming, “He’s there.”

If asked to cite an American pioneer, historians or players or fans usually begin with New Jersey-born midfielder John Harkes, who in 1990 arrived for a tryout at the club Sheffield Wednesday and fielded reporters’ and fans’ questions toward a novelty.

“ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Why are you here?’ ‘What do you hope to get out of this trial?’ ” Harkes said.

“ ‘A contract, basically,’ ” he’d answer.

“He was probably of greater interest to the female population of Sheffield,” said David Richards, co-founder of a Sheffield Wednesday fanzine.

Harkes did get the contract with Sheffield Wednesday, and that fall he got to the pitch fairly quickly when a teammate wrecked a knee. He did rocket a threatening shot in his 13th minute from 35 yards, and he did hear the chant congeal immediately.

We got Yankee Yorkie

He can score from 40

(Geography note: Sheffield is in Yorkshire.)

Harkes played for three clubs in six seasons, scored one of Sheffield Wednesday’s most remembered goals with a 40-yarder in a League Cup match, and became the first American to score at Wembley Stadium, in an FA Cup final against Arsenal.

Harkes is now Coach Bruce Arena’s assistant with the New York/New Jersey Red Bulls and says American players offer “value for money” compared with what English clubs must pay players from gaudier leagues.

Of the 12 Americans in the Premiership, DeMerit’s path ranks first in the improbability division.

A Green Bay native with two teachers for parents, the grandson of a woman in the Wisconsin track hall of fame, DeMerit played on defense at Illinois Chicago, went unmentioned in the MLS draft, worked as a bartender in Chicago and in January 2003 alighted in London like any other 23-year-old adventurer.

He took up with Sunday-in-the-park-type teams and lived in a remorselessly expensive city on a budget so stringent he’d play in gloves with widening holes. He hung around for 18 months, weathered a shriek of a groin injury and refrained from heading home partly because he’d told everybody back there of his daydreams.

DeMerit also fulfilled said dreams, progressing from the ninth tier of English soccer, to the seventh, to the second, to the first. And he scored in the most dramatic annual game, the playoff between the final two candidates for promotion to the Premiership -- hearing bedlam-level noise.

Now 27, he lives in the energetic North London pocket of Camden where, he notes, “You have guys with six-foot Mohawks talking to guys with business suits on. That to me is what a place or a city should be all about.”

At the other end of this newfound gamut of Americans are the veterans such as Blackburn goalkeeper Brad Friedel, 35, or Fulham’s McBride, 34, or Hahnemann, also 34.

With stays that stretch to the last century, they’ve honed English lives.

Hahnemann lives in the village of Pangbourne with his wife, Amanda, whom he met in a design fundamentals class at Seattle Pacific University, and two sons, Hunter, 8, and Austin, 6. He owns four cars, including one that doesn’t run, and loves hanging around engines with guys at a local Porsche dealership.

Every so often, he’ll crave space. He’ll spot the great North American west in a movie, and he’ll remember that a “mountain” in England is actually a hill.

But in ultimate proof of the progression of American players in the most famous league across these last 20 years, Hahnemann has children old enough and just English enough to correct him when he mispronounces two of the most crucial words in the language.

They tell him it’s not some slang old “Harry Potter.”

It’s “HAH-ree POT-tuh.”

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Moving up

U.S. players in the English Premier League:

DaMarcus Beasley, MF, Manchester City

* Carlos Bocanegra, D, Fulham

* Bobby Convey, MF, Reading

* Jay DeMerit, D, Watford

* Clint Dempsey, MF, Fulham

* Brad Friedel, GK, Blackburn

* Cory Gibbs, D, Charlton Athletic

* Marcus Hahnemann, GK, Reading

* Tim Howard, GK, Everton

* Brian McBride, F, Fulham

* Oguchi Onyewu, D, Newcastle

* Jonathan Spector, D, West Ham United

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Source: yanks-abroad.com