CHAPTER 4

GOLDEN BOY IN A GOLDEN FAMILY

“Your mother has moved out,” my father said to me as he hung up the phone in my Aunt Leanne’s condo in Chicago. This was shortly before I quit judo and I was in Chicago with my dad to compete in a tournament. Dad was in tears, but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying until he said, “Your mother wants to divorce me.” I was in shock and started crying myself.

As far as I knew, my parents were happily married. It never occurred to me to think that they weren’t. You ask some people whose parents divorced and they can tell you they saw it coming, that their parents argued, that they were cold toward each other, that they were like two strangers living together. Not my parents. They were masters at keeping up appearances. And I guess I was, too, because despite how upset I was when my dad broke the news to me, I won the judo tournament in Chicago and I remember being happy about it. I don’t think I was playacting, but I was able to put it in the back of my mind while I competed, which was how I dealt with just about everything that was upsetting. Throughout much of my life sports served as my escape.

To me—and, I’m guessing, to people looking in from the outside—my family was picture-perfect. And in most ways, up until that phone call, it was. My parents, while working together in the successful legal practice, were raising five athletic kids in a comfortable house next door to my grandparents (who lived in the house where my mother grew up) in Rolling Hills Estates, an affluent, semi-rural community in the hills above Los Angeles.

When people imagine the perfect Southern Californian childhood, my childhood was close to that ideal. Leaving aside the fact that we were always running from one practice or competition to the next, with never enough downtime for any of us, growing up in Rolling Hills Estates meant almost total freedom to roam and explore. Many houses were set on large pieces of land and some people kept horses, goats, and even a few cattle. Scrambling over hills, hiking along horse trails, and bushwhacking through the undergrowth, you’d never believe we were an hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles.

Rolling Hills Estates, where we’d moved when I was five (we’d been living in a working-/middle-class neighborhood in nearby San Pedro before that), is a community of eight thousand people, located in Palos Verdes, which is a peninsula in southwestern Los Angeles County. Rolling Hills Estates is just one of several little cities perched on that peninsula above Torrance and just east of the Pacific Ocean. It’s the kind of place where you can walk or ride your horse to the general store after school to buy ice cream and supplies for horses (saddles, stirrups, bridles, halters, reins, bits, harnesses) at the same time. I didn’t ride when I was a child, but my mom did when she was growing up.

Like most of our neighbors, my family was socially and politically conservative and very Catholic. But because of all the sports my family was involved in, and given the range of people who came through my parents’ law firm, I was fortunate to meet a lot of diverse people who weren’t just like us. In some ways, my family is a bit of a contradiction. Most everyone votes Republican no matter what and is conservative in how they present themselves. But my family is also open and accepting. My mom is very loving and will hug people she has just met—my whole family is very physically demonstrative—but she goes to mass every day and she expects her children to be married before living with a partner.

I loved that my mom and dad were both very affectionate. We all did. When I was growing up, my dad loved having us on his lap, hugging us, giving us kisses. When I was really young, before we got so busy with judo and soccer, I especially liked the weekends. We’d wake up early and Dad would make breakfast for us while my brother and I watched superhero cartoons. Then my dad would take all of us for a long walk to the park in San Pedro near our house, and then on our way back we’d stop at the bakery and he’d get us a treat. Back home we’d all lie on the couch piled up together while Dad watched golf and we’d all fall asleep, Dad included.

My older sisters remember the tensions that came before my mom decided to move out, but I was too young to see it. I’ve since come to understand that every family has its problems and challenges whether they’re visible or not, but until that phone call in Chicago I had no idea that my family was anything but perfect. And then all of a sudden we weren’t.

For a short time Mom moved next door to my grandparents’, and my sisters, brother, and I were sent to stay with one of my aunts up in Washington State for a few weeks. It was so strange because we went from having this intense, highly scheduled life to suddenly no schedule at all, and no one really told us what was going on. And then we moved back home and split our time between our mom’s house in Rolling Hills and my dad’s place in San Pedro (which was the same house we’d lived in before we moved to Rolling Hills).

For the first couple of months we switched off every week, which was way too hard for everyone, especially when you added our already packed practice and competition schedule. It was just too hectic and disorganized trying to get to school in one place and practicing in another while living in two different places at the same time. So one by one my sisters, brother, and I decided to live with our mom full-time. I know my dad was heartbroken, because he probably felt we were choosing Mom over him, but it was just easier to live in Rolling Hills with our mom, near our schools, and next door to our grandparents, which was also where our Aunt Lisa lived. We all loved Aunt Lisa, or “Lollie,” as we all called her.

Aunt Lollie was my mother’s youngest sibling. (My mother is the second of seven children.) And she moved back in with our grandparents to help my mom right after my parents separated. She’d been really involved in our lives from the time we were little. Before she left for Revelle College at the University of California, San Diego, she babysat my sisters. Once she was in school she’d sometimes bring us there to visit with her. After my parents separated, Aunt Lollie and my grandparents really helped keep things together.

We jokingly called Lollie “the Sergeant” because she’d gather us all up and make sure we behaved. She made very clear that she adored each of us equally, but I felt like I had a special relationship with her, which I’m guessing was how we each felt about our aunt. At that moment in my life, with my parents having a rough time, my Aunt Lollie was the most important person in the world to me. She’d come over to the house and we’d hang out on my bed and she’d ask questions about soccer and school.

And then she was gone.

There was a nighttime police chase and the woman being chased turned off her headlights. Aunt Lollie was driving through an intersection when the woman came through at 110 miles per hour, T-boning Aunt Lollie’s car, killing her instantly. She was thirty-two years old.

After Aunt Lollie died, I talked to her a lot in my prayers, saying that I hoped she was with God and was being well taken care of. To this day I miss her terribly, and a couple of years ago I got a tattoo on the inside of my bicep in memory of her.

If my family wasn’t what it seemed once you looked below the surface, then neither was Rolling Hills Estates, and the older I got, the more clear that became. The most obvious evidence that things were not quite as they seemed were the parties and the drugs. I started going to parties the summer after eighth grade. These were insane parties, unlike anything I’ve ever been to since. They were always somewhere in Palos Verdes at someone’s giant mansion while their parents were away for the weekend or on vacation. Imagine four hundred kids in togas, a live band playing music, kegs of beer, and people doing drugs, just like you’ve seen in the movies. It was all these kids with too much money, having fun and getting into trouble with absolutely no adult supervision. It wasn’t like I didn’t drink, too, although I was a quick learner, so it only took getting sick a couple of times to discover my limits. But I didn’t do drugs, other than trying pot a few times, which made me tired, anxious, and paranoid.

I was definitely not one of those unsupervised kids, and after my mom saw what went on with my two older sisters at Peninsula High School and heard about all the trouble other teenagers in our community were getting into, she decided to send me forty miles east to live with my cousins in Huntington Beach so I could attend Mater Dei, a private Catholic school. It happened to be a more convenient place for me to live because of where I had to go for soccer practice, but that wasn’t the primary reason my mother sent me there. She just wanted me far away from Peninsula High School, and I don’t think she minded that Mater Dei conducted routine drug tests.

When my mother first told me she wanted me to go to Mater Dei, I was outraged (in the way only a teenager can be outraged at his mother) because I didn’t want to leave all of my friends who were going to Peninsula, and besides, I complained to my mother, my sisters were both going there, too. It just wasn’t fair. But then I went to visit Mater Dei and thought it was a really cool school with a nice campus. And much to my surprise I wound up loving it—the history, the tradition, the school pride, all the school activities, the football games, and even the school uniforms. I’d wear khaki, gray, or blue shorts with a navy blue, maroon, or gray polo shirt, with a pair of Converse or Vans sneakers. This made it easy to dress well, because everyone had to dress in the same kinds of clothes. I’ve always liked dressing well, but I’m also Californian, so I like my clothes to be casual.

After a year of living with my cousins I moved in with my soccer coach’s parents, Gene and Luanne Theslof. (My coach, who was also one of my first mentors, was Nick Theslof.) And that turned out to be perfect because I wasn’t driving yet and Nick could take me to all of my trainings and games. By then Nick had invited me to play with the Orange County Blue Star, a Professional Development League team that he coached, in addition to my club team, the Palos Verdes Raiders. Most of my teammates on Blue Star were college players from the local area, which was a lot of fun because I got to play with guys who were a lot better than I was, but I could still outrun them. So it was a chance to learn a lot and also to show off a bit to guys who had a lot more experience than I did. This included Jürgen Klinsmann, a legendary German footballer who played for a time with Blue Star using the alias “Jay Göppingen” (and in 2011 was named head coach of the U.S. men’s national soccer team).

My mom always seemed to know what was best for me. And lucky for me, at that age I didn’t have a choice about doing what she said.

I think one of the lessons you learn growing up is that things are usually a lot more complicated than they look on the surface. Just because something seems golden, like your family or your community, doesn’t mean that once you scrape away that shiny outer layer things will look as good underneath. And the same could be said for me when I was a teenager, because, just like my family and the community in which I grew up, I looked pretty golden, until you scratched the surface. In fact, if you were to ask my brother and sisters, they would tell you that in our family I was the golden child who almost always got his way. From the outside I was a stereotypical, all-American boy who was into sports, never got into trouble, and was nice to his grandparents.

I have to admit that with all the attention I got and all the success I had in judo and later in soccer, I felt pretty golden. Some people who knew me might have thought I was a bit spoiled. Then as I grew into my teens I began to understand that while I may have felt golden and looked pretty golden to the people around me, I had this one huge flaw. And from everything I’d learned up to that point in my life I knew that if I ever let anyone see my flaw I’d be guaranteed disappointment, condemnation, and maybe even rejection from my family, friends, God, and the soccer community.

Yet long before I came to the realization that I had anything to hide, those who knew me best could already tell that I was different from other young boys. They could sense that little Robbie Rogers, who loved his bow ties, vests, and dress shorts—and notwithstanding his status as a soccer and judo prodigy—was a “fairy.”