Altidore's potential is immense (cont.)

Eight-year-old Jozy Altidore was discovered and coached by former Rapid Vienna general manager Josef Schulz.

Josef Schulz

The tidy four-bedroom ranch sits on a corner plot in a quiet, sun-soaked Florida neighborhood where the bermuda-grass lawns grow thick and springy. It is the type of home and the type of neighborhood that was unimaginable to Joseph and Gisele when they were growing up in Haiti, he in four iron-sheet-roofed rooms on his family's subsistence farm near the southwestern town of Les Cayes, she sharing a one-room apartment, with fabric hung from the ceiling to create living and sleeping areas, with her father, sister, stepmother and three stepsiblings in Port-au-Prince.

Like most Haitians during the 30-year dictatorship of Francois Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, Jozy's parents lived under the constant threat of violence. When a business owner who had fallen behind on his payoffs to the regime was pulled from his truck around the bend from Joseph's family's farm and hacked to death by machete, neighbors were horrified but not surprised. More often, people simply disappeared into the Duvaliers' dungeons, never to be seen again.

The comfort that Joseph and Gisele now enjoy was something for which they could only hope when they immigrated to New Jersey, at age 23, he in 1974 and she a year earlier. One day in '75 Joseph was returning home on the number 20 bus from his job as a busboy at the Friar Tuck Inn in Cedar Grove, N.J. Gisele stepped through the folding doors, took one look at the handsome young Haitian on board and sat down next to him.

During the next 18 years Joseph and Gisele would get married and have four children, and through it all they worked for their future -- hard. In 1984, while holding down full-time jobs, they earned degrees from Essex County College in Newark, he in electronics and she in nursing. After that Gisèle would work overnight shifts at a hospital as many as five times a week. Joseph rose at 4 a.m. each weekday to begin his rounds as a deliveryman for FedEx. Finally, in '93, after a stop in Coral Springs, Fla., they had saved enough to afford a down payment on a house in Boca. It still wasn't easy. They lived paycheck to paycheck to pay their mortgage. Their older children had to prepare the younger ones for school each morning while their parents were at work. The family ate dinner at night on cheap plastic chairs, and their television had no buttons on it. But the house was theirs, and they felt they had made it.

In between the work, moreover, there was play. Joseph made sure of it. He passed on his love of soccer to each of their children, gently kicking balls to them as soon as they were three years old. Each showed aptitude: Janak spent some time in the U.S. development system, and Sadia was a college fullback at East Carolina and then Florida International. The youngest child, though, was a natural. One Saturday in 1998 Joseph took eight-year-old Jozy and some other boys to play pickup soccer in Boca's South County Regional Park. A man named Josef Schulz walked by and stopped in his tracks.

Schulz, then 46, had played in 418 games in the Austrian Bundesliga. He had been the general manager of the Rapid Vienna club, which in 1985 reached the final of UEFA's now-defunct Cup Winners' Cup. He had written an 800-page dissertation-- half on soccer training, half on soccer administration -- that had earned him a doctorate in economics at the University of Vienna. He had just taken early retirement and moved to Boca, planning to spend his days taking relaxing walks in the park with his wife, Barbara. Then he saw the way this eight-year-old played the game he loved, and he knew that his early retirement would come to an early end.

"I said to my wife, 'Look at this player! This is impossible that this is America!' " Schulz recalls in a Schwarzeneggerian cadence. "First, the physical part. You already saw that he was something special. But the most important thing that impressed me was the mental part. Although it was only a pickup game, the understanding [in] the runs he did! He made sprints into open spaces you can't even dream [of with] somebody who is 12 or 13. I never saw an eight-year-old who was that talented, even in Europe."

Schulz marched up to Joseph. "I asked if his son would like to train with a professional coach," Schulz says. "I told him [the boy] would end up on the national team and play in the World Cup.

"He said, 'What are you talking about? My son is only eight years old. What do you see in him?'

"I said, 'I see everything someone can see in a good player.' "