Rookie Turning Jeers Into Cheers

The rookie mistakes were bound to happen.

Maybe Clint Mathis tried to force the ball into a tight spot. Maybe he passed to the left wing when he should have looked right.

The problem is, the Galaxy midfielder gets paid to make decisions on the run. The first few times he made bad choices, boos fluttered through the Rose Bowl.

“I noticed that,” Mathis said. “The first three or four games were tough for me.”

But the booing was precisely what Galaxy Coach Octavio Zambrano wanted his first-round draft pick to hear.

“I wanted him to experience that aspect of the pro game,” Zambrano said. “Once you go through that, than you can really start playing.”

These days, Mathis is playing well enough to start for the unbeaten Galaxy, which faces the Chicago Fire at Soldier Field tonight. The Georgia kid has a reason to smile.

He is a good-natured sort who speaks in a drawl and winks after he tells a joke. As an All-American at South Carolina, he was talented enough to consider trying out with Feyenoord in the Dutch first division.

Major League Soccer offered an alternative.

In Europe, a young American might toil for years hoping to get noticed. In MLS, Mathis had a shot at playing immediately. Zambrano told him: “You stay here, you’re going to be a known commodity.”

Mathis took the advice and Los Angeles took him with the sixth pick of the 1998 draft.

“The first 30 seconds he was on the field, you could see he was a player,” defender Robin Fraser said.

Zambrano explained: “Clint has something that very few made-in-America players have. [He] has vision, can see the gaps, can see the holes in the defense and can put that through ball where it needs to be.”

But professional soccer took some getting used to.

During those first difficult games, Mathis compensated with sheer effort. He was a fresh pair of legs to run beside veteran Mauricio Cienfuegos, pushing forward on offense and scrambling back on defense all game long.

The turning point came in the fourth week of the season, when he scored a game-winning goal against the New York-New Jersey MetroStars. That took some pressure off. A few weeks later he had three assists against the Colorado Rapids.

Now the rookie is a cog in an offensive machine that has stormed to a 9-0 record. Each game seems to give him more confidence.

Now mistakes are fewer, good plays more frequent.

“You have those players who always see the little things that other players might miss,” he said. “I want to be that type of player.”

The type who hardly ever hears boos.