Lewis Moving at Fast Pace
Forgive Eddie Lewis if he doesn’t know what day it is. Especially today.
It’s been a hectic week, after all.
On Tuesday, Lewis was in Denver, playing for the U.S. national soccer team in its 2-1 victory over Derby County of the English Premier League.
Lewis scored one goal and set up the other.
On Wednesday, the San Jose Clash and former UCLA winger flew to Los Angeles, was picked up at the airport by his parents and driven home to Cerritos.
On Saturday, Lewis will be playing for the Western Conference in Major League Soccer’s fourth All-Star game, at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego.
On Sunday, he will fly to Dallas, rejoin the national team and fly to Guadalajara, Mexico, to spend the next three weeks training for and playing in the eight-nation FIFA Confederations Cup.
With that kind of schedule, it’s understandable that Lewis might forget about today. But he won’t.
It is, after all, the day he will marry his fiancee and fellow former Bruin, Marisol Meinhart, in Los Angeles.
Fortunately for Lewis, she’s a soccer player too, so she won’t be mumbling about the honeymoon evening being spent heading down Interstate 5 so he can be ready for the 12:30 game the next afternoon.
“Friday night, after the wedding, the limo will show up about midnight and we’ll shoot down to San Diego and I’ll get a couple of hours’ rest before the game,” Lewis said, as straight-faced as he could.
His wife-to-be, he said, understands.
“She knew, getting into a summer wedding, we obviously wouldn’t have time for a honeymoon now and that it was going to be a little bit busy,” he said.
“It’s been quite a ride. Just the national team experience in itself has been a dream for me. But coupled with the fact that I’m going to marry my best friend and with this big tournament coming up, this really goes beyond anything I could have imagined.”
It’s all happening very fast for Lewis, who as recently as last summer’s World Cup in France, was just another MLS player on the outside looking in.
Now, with qualification looming next year for the 2002 World Cup, Lewis, 25, is very much in the running to be starting for the U.S. should it reach the tournament in Japan and South Korea.
“He could be a fixture on our team,” said U.S. Coach Bruce Arena, who has played Lewis in every game since taking over the national team.
*
Is Lewis a rebel?
If he’s not one now, was he once one?
That’s the way Eddie Lewis has been painted.
A feature in the San Jose Mercury News earlier this year pointed out how he cut high school classes to go to the beach and how he pierced not only his ear but his nose too. It said he didn’t give up drag racing on local freeways until a friend was jailed for vehicular manslaughter after causing the death of a young woman.
Gordon Lewis, Eddie’s father, admits only so much.
“He had his times,” he said. “Let’s put it that way.”
Lewis claims it was all a bad rap.
“There was always a part of me that was a little bit edgy, but I was by no means a wild child,” he said this week. “I was always a guy who wasn’t afraid to try something. I took a few risks, but by no means you would describe me as wild. I was very outgoing, I liked to do things.”
What he liked most of all was soccer.
“He was a kid who was born with a great deal of natural athletic talent,” Gordon Lewis said. “I worked with him when he was small for several years so that he could catch the ball and hit the ball and this, that and the other thing.”
His father taught Lewis tennis and golf and just about every other sport, but soccer hooked him.
“He got into soccer when he was 6,” Gordon Lewis said. “He just had a natural aptitude. Soccer came to him just like a second thought. He could dribble the ball, he could kick it, he could do everything. Most of those little guys around him didn’t know what was going on.”
Sort of like MLS, in other words.
Gordon Lewis would have preferred that his son excel at tennis or golf, where the financial rewards certainly are better.
“Any time I talked about the money the tennis players were making he got very upset,” Gordon Lewis said. “He said, ‘I don’t want to hear about money.’ He wanted to do what he wanted to do and be comfortable about it. So I just shut up.”
So why did Lewis gravitate to soccer?
“To be honest, it’s a question my dad has asked me quite a few times,” he said. “He introduced me to more or less as many sports as I wanted to play, and especially tennis and golf.
“But I had a lot of friends in the [Cerritos] area who played the game and had an influence. I really enjoy the idea of team sports, the camaraderie. Just the game itself kind of took me away. I always really enjoyed the game. I loved watching it and playing it.
“I think I’ve probably established myself as a player who can definitely play at this [national team] level but . . . I’ve got a long way to go before I can compete with some of the top-class players in the world.”
Lewis played for Cerritos High, the North Huntington Beach Untouchables (a top-level club team), UCLA--where he was a roommate of another U.S. national team winger, Frankie Hejduk--and, finally, the Clash, which drafted him in 1996.
“He’s improved dramatically,” Clash Coach Brian Quinn said. “He was a third-round draft pick and now he starts for the national team. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
“The next three or four years are going to determine how good he can be. He can be the type of player who can change a game.”
But will Lewis, like Hejduk, have to leave MLS and play overseas to reach his full potential?
“That’s the $64,000 question,” Quinn said. “There are pros and cons. Our league is getting better every year. I really believe that. But if he goes [to a top team in a top foreign league] there’s no doubt he would improve quicker.”
For the moment, though, Lewis is making his mark in MLS. Arena, for one, has been impressed.
“I think he’s always been a player with a lot of potential,” Arena said. “I like the fact that he’s obviously technically very good. He’s got good quickness. He’s one of the few left-sided players we have in this country who can really take players on.
“He’s good in a one-on-one battles. He’s good at whipping crosses into the box. He can work back defensively as well, so we can play him in a variety of systems and he can deal with any kind of responsibility. He’s a great competitor and he’s very fit.”
Not a bad resume, but Gordon Lewis can put it more succinctly.
“I said the kid was born under a star,” he said, “and I believe it.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Eddie Lewis Facts
* Age: 25.
* High school: Cerritos.
* College: UCLA.
* Position: Winger.
* Status: Drafted by the San Jose Clash in 1996, Lewis is also a member of the U.S. national team.
****
MLS All-Star Game
* Who: Western Conference vs. Eastern Conference.
* When: Saturday, 12:30 p.m.
* Where: Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego.
* Television: Channel 7.
