Now that Kasey Keller is in uniform, the Iranis, the Yugoslavs and even the Germans seem a little less threatening. The U.S. will enter the World Cup knowing that it has a player capable of dominating games. Being an American, naturally Keller is going to catch the ball, not kick it.

His 10 teammates will be using their feet, however, which is why the U.S. is given little chance to win its June 15 opening match in Paris against Germany, a three-time World Cup champion. The 6'2", 190-pound Keller might help the Americans defy the odds. Off the field, he looks a bit like Clark Kent. He wears glasses when he isn't keeping goal, and at his country home, 110 miles north of London, he tends daffodils and eight-month-old twins, Cameron and Chloe. He grew up on his parents' egg farm in Lacey (pop. 27,570), Wash., thousands of miles removed from the world of English soccer.

Keller's eyes—and hands—are ready for the World Cup.    (Bob Martin)

That's a world most American sports fans are indifferent to, yet Keller, 28, thrives in it. For seven years he has defended his nets in some of English soccer's most belligerent neighborhoods. Even the hooligan fans of his first club, Millwall, warmed up to him. In 1993, near the end of Keller's first full season with the team, they poured over the railings and onto the field like beer from a sun-warmed keg and surrounded their Yank goalkeeper. It turned out they only wanted to help themselves to his clothes—which they did.

"It was their last game in that stadium, they'd been playing there 83 years, and everybody wanted to leave with something," says Keller's wife, Kristin, who was watching from the stands. "They had Kasey up in the air. They pulled off his gloves, his shoes, his shirt. He was holding on to his shorts." One of Keller's teammates was left stripped naked and standing behind his clasped hands as if worrying about a free kick. All together, the players trudged back to their locker room, put on fresh clothes and came out on the pitch again; after all, there was still another half to play.

Keller has made a career of bracing himself against unforeseen and often difficult circumstances. He has been a keeper at the sport's highest level since Leicester City of the Premier League purchased him from Millwall for $1.5 million two seasons ago and signed him to a reported three-year, $750,000 contract. Working for such less-talented clubs, he has had to nullify the attacks of richer and deeper sides, knowing that he would be sent back to the soccer backwoods of America if he didn't. In June, Keller will be up against the same challenge in France, albeit on a larger scale. It's as though he has been preparing all his professional life to defend his goal against the World Cup field.

"You have to be incredibly impressed with his confidence and his willingness to persevere in some of the crazy situations he's faced over there," says U.S. defender Alexi Lalas, who played in Italy's top division in 1994-95 and '95-96. When Keller comes jogging onto the Leicester pitch, American flags wave in the crowd. His best saves incite stadiumwide chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" Last season Leicester City won the English League Cup, one of England's major competitions, in front of Keller. This year it finished with a 13-11-14 record while allowing the third-fewest goals among the 20 teams in the Premiership. Local fans do Keller the honor of mentioning him with legendary goalkeepers Gordon Banks, who helped lead England to the 1966 World Cup, and Peter Shilton, who succeeded Banks both at Leicester City and on the national team. "I have a very traditional, English style of goalkeeping," says Keller. "I try to do things as simply as possible."

Kasey Keller's acrobatic moves have kept Leicester City competitive.    (Tom Hauck/Allsport)

Socially he's much the same, content with silence, as farm folks supposedly are, and perhaps a bit amused that it makes city people nervous. If his teammates are sometimes in a panic on the field, doing everything they can just to fend off the opposition, they might gain strength from the fact that Keller doesn't seem worried at all. Most of the time he stands his ground as serenely as the leftfielder on Roger Clemens's finest day, blowing little pink bubbles with his gum.

The Brits have trained Keller to ignore what less worldly American players and coaches refer to as "distractions." In a three-day stretch in November '96 he shut out Trinidad and Tobago (for the U.S. team) and Manchester United (for Leicester) with a red-eye transatlantic flight in between. In February, following successive shutouts against Liverpool, Manchester United and Leeds—three of the top five clubs in England—he boarded one of those three-movie flights to Los Angeles to join his American teammates for the semifinal of the Gold Cup tournament. The opponent was Brazil, the defending World Cup champion, and Keller performed like a Hollywood stuntman, leaping from one emergency to the next and denying the striker Romario at least four seemingly certain goals. "That was the greatest performance I've ever seen by a goalkeeper," said Romario, a top scorer and the most outstanding player of World Cup '94, after the Americans' stunning 1-0 victory. "It was an honor to be on the field with him."

The U.S. went on to lose the Gold Cup final by 1-0 to favored Mexico, but Keller was named MVP of the tournament, and the upset over Brazil represented a breakthrough for American soccer. "The Brazil match put Kasey on a stage that allowed people to say he is definitely world-class," says U.S. coach Steve Sampson.

At his best Keller will frustrate America's World Cup opponents and liberate his teammates to go forward, mimicking the role Dominik Hasek played in leading the Czech Republic to the Olympic ice hockey gold medal in Nagano. The U.S. faces a far more daunting challenge than the Czechs did, of course; while only a handful of nations field medal-worthy hockey teams, the qualifying rounds for this World Cup began two years ago with 172 countries, most of whom treat soccer as a national religion. The tournament draws its players from a talent pool numbering in the hundreds of millions.

What Keller is about to say is going to sound distinctly un-American. For the U.S., he predicts, winning the World Cup will be "about as close to impossible as it gets." What if somehow, after facing Germany, Iran and Yugoslavia, America was not only one of the two teams from that group to advance to the round of 16, but the U.S. also went on to win a second-round match? "That would be tremendous," says Keller. "That's our dream," agrees Sampson. "Anything more is unrealistic."

By playing overseas Keller has gained a more sophisticated perspective, enabling him to put his accomplishments in a larger context. Keller grew up juggling the more traditional hand-eye sports of baseball, basketball and football until, one by one, he gave them up to concentrate on goalkeeping. He was a four-year All-America at North Thurston High, which came as a surprise to his father, Bernie, a former pitcher who was drafted by the New York Yankees. Before the 1990 World Cup, in which he backed up Tony Meola and didn't play a minute, Keller turned down a contract with the U.S. Soccer Federation. At the time he was starring at the University of Portland, which he selected ahead of dozens of other schools that had offered him scholarships; he made his choice largely because Portland coach Clive Charles could best prepare him for a playing career in Europe.

"He had all the natural athletic abilities of a goalkeeper," says Charles, 46, a defender for West Ham in the English first division before landing in the old North American Soccer League. Keller found out the hard way that Americans weren't—and still aren't—used to a college soccer player aiming as high as the stars in football or basketball. "He was probably the most misunderstood athlete I've ever had at the school," says Charles. "In his first week the press asked him if he might leave school early. He said, 'Yeah, if a team offered me $1 million, I'd leave.' Everyone was saying, 'What kind of a guy is this?' They thought he was bigheaded, but he was just being honest."

Between Cameron (left) and Chloe, Kasey can seldom keep a stiff lower lip.    (Bob Martin)

After four seasons at Portland, during which he was named All-America and appeared in a final four, he received a few feelers from clubs in Europe, none remotely hinting at a $1 million payday. In February 1992, Keller signed with Millwall in England's second division. He recalls telling his professor of philosophy, a Scot, that he would be leaving school early to join Millwall. The professor, aghast, fixed him with a stare and said, "They kill people there."

Millwall is the Hell's Angels of English soccer. It's a little, heavily scarred club with a big heart and brass knuckles that makes its home across the river from London's East End, stomping grounds of the murderous Kray twins and other Dickensian mutations. That was where Keller landed in December 1991 as a 21-year-old bespectacled American still hoping to finish his sociology degree by correspondence. "He knew he wasn't going into any five-star hotel," Charles says. "I told him, 'You're a Yank, and you're going to be called a Yank.' It would be like an English guy coming over here to play for the Portland Trail Blazers. The only thing they were going to know was that he was from the U.S.A., which to them would mean he wasn't any good."

Keller became Millwall's starting goaltender early in the 1992-93 season. In the following year he gave up only 53 goals in 51 games and was voted team MVP by the fans. In the narrow, 19,900-capacity stadium known as the Den they would stand in dense, terraced layers around the field, singing and threatening in a single belligerent voice, like a loud picture frame dominating the painting within. "They made it easier for me, because I knew I had to concentrate 100 percent," Keller says. "They're a tough crowd, and you have to try really hard to please them."

Keller tried to explain the subculture of soccer hooliganism in a sociology paper he wrote as part of his correspondence-course work several years after settling in England. He had lots of field data to choose from. Once during a game he was greeted with a "Hello, Kasey!" from a Millwall fan running across the field on his way to decking an enemy fan. During the peaceful times in goal, while the ball was at the other end, Keller would look up into the stands and watch the brawls. It was as if the movie Slap Shot were being remade by a British studio. "The Den was basically a venue for people to fight," Keller says. "Most of it happened outside the stadium, but you wanted to make sure you were cheering when the right team scored."

Back in the U.S., soccer administrators were slow to recognize Keller's pioneering achievements as the first American keeper to make a name for himself abroad. For reasons never fully explained to Keller or to the public, he was left off the roster for the 1994 World Cup, which was played in the U.S. Coach Bora Milutinovic instead relied on Meola, who would play decently while helping the team advance to the second round. Sampson, then an assistant to Milutinovic, says that Keller was shunned for having directed critical comments at Meola, who had trained for two years with the national team. "I find that hard to believe," Keller says. "My 'critical comment' was that I was playing professionally and [Meola] wasn't. That's not critical. That's just a fact." Says Charles, a U.S. assistant coach since 1995, "I don't know why he wasn't included. The only thing I know is that Kasey Keller's not being in the World Cup had nothing to do with his ability."

Keller is untouchable now. He finds himself thinking more and more about the World Cup—not about the lost chance of becoming a star in his own country four years ago or even about the quick, precise attacks the Germans will be directing at him. In his mind's eye he's trying to ignore the obstacles that the U.S. is facing and prepare himself for the foot meeting the ball. "I just try to put myself in the right position, in the right place," he says. "I can't anticipate where the ball is going to go. My reaction comes after the ball is struck. In that split second everything has to be right."

In that moment, the finest soccer player America has produced will be trying to make all the difference.

Issue date: May 18, 1998