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[quote=Anonymous]Andy Najar’s childhood home was just over the fence from a shaggy soccer pitch. From its sideline, you could smell the coals burning on the family’s mud-brick stove. Each afternoon, once the men finished their shifts and the boys completed their classwork, the villagers gathered on the field. The thwup of the soccer ball didn’t end until dark. “Where I lived, there was only soccer,” Najar says. He was three years old when his father first plopped him on the grass.

In the early 1990s, Andy Najar’s father was living in a small town near Santa Cruz. After a short professional-soccer career, he’d become a well-known player on the amateur circuit.

Andy spent much of his childhood on the soccer field studying his father’s dribbling techniques, practicing shooting with his brothers, and playing pickup games with friends. When the rainy season flooded the field, he took the ball to the dry patches. Even back then, some villagers saw a spark. “You are going to feed your family with your feet,” Ismael Reyes, a family friend, told Andy.

As Andy grew older, his uncle, a former professional soccer player, noticed that the boy could run at blinding speed while maintaining control of the ball. “He was like a bullet,” his uncle says.

After sixth grade—the final year of compulsory education in Honduras—Andy took a job at a drinking-water company near his house. He went to church on Sundays and played soccer whenever he could. At 13, he joined a Santa Cruz team that competed against clubs from nearby villages; some of his opponents were in their twenties. His elusiveness enraged the older players, and the men went after him with elbows. “It didn’t matter how hard they hit him,” says Andy’s former coach. “He never got scared.”

Despite Andy’s ability, a professional career seemed unlikely. Honduran national-team officials were focused on finding bigger players to match up with teams in the United States and Canada. Andy tried out for Honduras’s best-known professional team but was turned away.[/quote]

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