The untold story of the American soccer star who almost lost it all – For The Win

HINGHAM, MASS. — Charlie Davies’ dad was gone.

It happened again. He went off drinking, using maybe, with those friends from around town in Manchester, New Hampshire, those friends who weren’t really his friends. It had been days since his dad disappeared, but Charlie wasn’t sure how many. Two days. Maybe three.

His mom looked at Charlie and his brother, Justin, two years younger, and shook her head. “I can’t believe it. He’s going out and wasting his check on drugs,” Charlie recalls her saying. Charlie could believe it. His father had done this before. He would do it again.

That wasn’t his biggest concern right then, though. His mother had struggled with mental illness. Charlie wasn’t sure if she’d taken her pills that week, or if she’d taken too many. That had happened once, and Charlie remembers sitting in the backseat with her and doing his best to keep her awake on the drive to the hospital.

With his dad gone, though, Charlie wasn’t sure he could get his mom the help she needed if she had another episode.

So Charlie sat quietly. He comforted his brother. And he hoped. He hoped his mom would keep it together that week. He hoped his dad would sober up and come home. He hoped his family would get through it one more time.

Charlie Davies doesn’t remember exactly how old he was when this happened, but he thinks he was six or seven years old.

If you’re a fan of United States soccer, you know Charlie Davies. The energetic and lightning-quick forward burst onto the national team back in 2007. He scored a massive goal against Mexico in Azteca Stadium and helped set up teammate Jozy Altidore for a goal against Spain in the 2009 Confederations Cup.

Then on October 13, 2009 after a night out in Washington D.C. he got in a car with two women he didn’t know well. At 3:15 in the morning the car ran into a metal guardrail on the George Washington Parkway and split in two. One of the women in the car died. The female driver was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter.

A surgery left him with a right leg that was one and a half inches shorter than his left.

It seemed unlikely that Davies, then 23, would be able to run again, let alone play soccer at a high level.

Davies is back now. He’s emerged as one of the best strikers in MLS again. No one knows what would have happened with Davies’ career had he never got in that car, but he’s at peace in a way he’s never been before. And he’s ready to explain why, ready to tell a story he’s never fully shared of what mental illness and addiction can do to a family.

I went to see Davies in Hingham, Massachusetts, a small coastal town just south of Boston where he lives with his wife, Nina. The town is what visitors would call “charming.” There are small boutiques and a preponderance of Volvos. Davies and his wife live in a nice housing development that appears to have sprouted out of the marsh grass. The houses are uniform, painted in calming pastel shades. Everything is fresh, new, different from the rest of Hingham, with its stately old houses and tradition. There is none of that here. This is a place devoid of history. It is a place to start anew.

Davies moved to this town because his wife’s family is from here, and he loves them. He doesn’t just say that, either, like you’re supposed to say about your in-laws. When he speaks kindly of them and I jokingly say “smart answer,” he stops me, makes sure I understand just how much he appreciates having the family here. “When we go over to hang out with them,” he says, stressing the point, “Nina has to drag me out of there.”

Davies, the flashy striker who is known for doing the stanky leg as a celebration for his goals, the kid who wore metallic Nikes back before anyone did, has settled in the suburbs. And he’s happy. He sits in his living room, decorated in a clean minimalist style, and pets his dog, a tiny white thing he adores. He doesn’t care that it’s a tiny dog, either. “I’ve never had a dog before,” he says. “So this is all I know.”

Davies is speaking with me because he wants to tell his story, a story he’s kept in for a long time. “I feel that people don’t really know me,” he says. “People have known me as Charlie the soccer player, or Charlie the kid who went through this crazy accident with the national team. But they don’t know how I got to where I’m at or how I got to be the person who I am.”

Davies isn’t tall, but he’s ripped, still cut with the muscles he’s had since he was 15 years old. What isn’t the same is his face. He’s still handsome, with that big smile he’s quick to flash, but now he has a scar, a parabola that starts above one ear and traces the top of his head to the other. It’s not the only one, either. You don’t notice the scars unless you’re looking for them, but they’re there, on his face and arms, cutting up through his six-pack abs, on his leg. They’re reminders of that moment he woke up in the hospital, when he realized what had happened, and what was to come.

Trauma affects people in different ways. It’s impossible to predict. Some people dwell on the catastrophic moments of their lives, obsess over them. Davies says he never did that. He wonders what might have been, but he doesn’t lose sleep over it. He’s had hard times in his life. He has worked through them. This would be no different.

“Just from day one, it was: ‘OK, this is what happened,’” he says. “You can’t change the past, so all you can do is learn from it and move forward. And the only way to move forward for me was to get back on the field.”

Davies learned hard work from his father. An immigrant from Gambia, Kofi Davies came to the United States to play college soccer. He had a semi-professional soccer career as well, and during this time he met his wife, Kathleen, through a mutual friend. In 1986, they had Charlie. Two years later Justin came along.

Kofi was their coach, cheerleader and harshest critic. He would drill the boys for hours, going late into the night. Justin, who would go on to have a successful career at San Diego State, hated it, always, the long hours and the repetitive kicking. The sprints. The touches and feints. The drills. The endless drills.

Charlie, for whatever reason, loved it.

“Justin was always the more talented one,” Davies says. “But I liked to work.”

Soccer was hard and the drills were long, but life out on the field made sense. And for Davies and his brother, it was preferable to being at home.

“We weren’t living in the best situation, with both my parents being sick,” remembers Justin. “There were times where we didn’t really have food. We were getting groceries from the places where people leave food for free in the front. We’d be that family that took all the free stuff. And it was embarrassing.”

Being the older brother, a lot of the responsibilities fell on Charlie.

“Growing up, it was kind of like being a mother, father and brother all at the same time,” Davies says. “There was a lot of pressure on my shoulders, for a young kid.”

His father dismisses the family’s turmoil when asked about those days. (Davies’ mother declined to be interviewed for this story.)

“It is like anybody’s family,” Kofi Davies says in a phone interview. “We go through ups and downs. But we were always steadfast about soccer. We took him to games. Watched his games. Coached the team.”

He pauses a few seconds, adding, “What do you want me to say? Life wasn’t bad all the time.”

Charlie Davies also stresses that, for all his parents’ issues, they were there. He is blessed to have grown up with two parents. His dad was on the sideline for every game. His mom got the boys to school every day. “In a lot of ways,” he says, “we were lucky.”

Davies was a talented young player growing up, but he was undersized. When it came time for high school, Davies and his father decided on Brooks School, a small boarding school in North Andover, Massachusetts. One of his father’s former teammates, Dusty Richard, was the head coach there. The soccer quality was good, which satisfied Davies’ father. The boarding school meant that Davies would get a chance to spend some time out of the house, which satisfied Davies.

His freshman year, Davies was technically gifted and fast, but he was too small to make a major impact. Then that winter he joined the wrestling team, and quickly became one of the greatest athletes ever seen in New England. Davies spent hours in the gym, adding muscle, growing stronger, faster. By his senior year he was the New England champion in both soccer and wrestling. Davies scored 73 goals in his last two seasons at Brooks, tearing up the Independent School League (ISL) record book.

“The thing with Charlie was that he always had the talent, the feet, the skill, but at that age in high school, he was just so athletic,” says Chris Tierney, Davies’ teammate on the Revolution who played against him in high school. “The speed, the pace. I mean, the thing a lot of people don’t know about Charlie was that he was a New England wrestling champion. He was just such a strong kid, and he knew how to use his body.”

It wasn’t just the way Davies beat everyone, though, it was the style with which he did it. He had swag, back before any of us even knew what that word was. While it seems normal now, back in the early aughts kids didn’t wear cleats with any color in them. In Puritan New England especially, high schoolers wore black cleats. A couple flashy guys might wear white. Davies wore baby blue Nike Mercurial Vapors, a statement to the rest of the prep schoolers that he was there to show them something they’d never seen before. And he did.

He was cockier back then, too. There was one club game in high school when Davies showed up five minutes late. A car dropped him off, and he sauntered down to the field, laced up those flashy cleats and checked himself into the game. He scored three goals, each one more stunning than the last, and then he left at halftime. He got right back in the car that was waiting for him, and they drove off. I know this story isn’t apocryphal because I was on the other team that day, and I watched him do it.

Brooks School didn’t just allow Davies to shine on the soccer field and on the wrestling mat. It allowed him to get out of that house back in Manchester.

“None of my friends knew,” Davies says. “I always kept things in. I never was one to go around and talk. I never went to a counselor.”

While he was holding things in, at the same time, Brooks was freeing. Soccer had always been his escape, but now he had a new home. Davies not only got to see how other kids behaved, he got to be a kid himself. He had never experienced that before.

“I needed Brooks,” he says, “more than a normal kid might need a place like that.”

Brooks School gave Davies an opportunity. But by going there, he had left his brother Justin behind.

“He didn’t handle it very well,” Davies says. “But he had to handle it. It’s one of those things where no matter how you feel, or whether you think you can or can’t do it, you have to do it. He knew that.”

Davies knew that his brother needed to grow up and become a man, so he made the call. His brother would have to grow up quickly. Davies made that decision when he was 14. His brother was 12.

“Charlie’s been my dad pretty much since I was little,” says Justin. “We have our dad, but Charlie was the one who knew the situation we were in, and he took on that role. Especially when he went to Brooks, and I was at home alone with my mom and dad. He’d make sure I’d make it to Brooks every weekend I could. He was the one since I was little who pushed me on the soccer field. I wouldn’t listen to my dad. I’d listen to Charlie.”

It’s been six years since the accident that nearly took Davies’ life.

He just finished his best season since the incident, leading the New England Revolution front line in a season that saw them make the postseason before falling short against D.C. United in a one-game playoff. Davies won the team’s Golden Boot award, scoring the most goals on the year (10 goals in 33 games). He was also the fan’s choice for player of the year.

Davies feels as good as he ever has on a soccer field, something that seemed unlikely to ever happen again. He’s doing the things that first got the attention of former USMNT head coach Bob Bradley. There’s renewed talk of Davies getting a call up to the national team again.

It wasn’t easy. There was a brief loan spell at D.C. United where he struggled to find his form, then a return to Sochaux in France, where the game seemed impossible.

“The game was far too fast for me,” Davies says. “It’s strange to say, but the players were just so much faster and stronger, quicker. My instincts weren’t there.”

His confidence was shot. But he kept working, trying to get his body balanced. He returned to MLS, to his home club in New England, and started wearing a lift in his shoe. He worked hard with a trainer, making sure his body was strong on both sides. And then it happened.

“And all of a sudden it just started to click. Boom, boom, boom,” he says. “My body started feeling great again. The mind started working with the body.”

Davies was back to his old self, getting into dangerous positions, holding up play with his strength, beating guys to balls with his speed. And he found that, in some ways, he was playing even better than he was before the accident. He’d learned a lot in his time off the field.

“After my accident, I didn’t have the pace, I didn’t have the strength, and I had to change my game accordingly,” he says. “But I think now, since I got everything back, I can look back and start pulling different things from that. And now I think I’m a better player than I was before my accident because of all the knowledge that I have.”

Davies first spoke about his parents issues’ in a press conference last year, when he revealed to the media in attendance that his father struggled with drug addiction and his mom suffered from mental illness. Davies says now he hadn’t planned it.

“It just came out,” he says. “I thought maybe people were going through the same stuff that I was going through at the time. It’s not really talked about. People dealing with family members with mental illnesses, or people dealing with mental illness, it’s not really talked about. I thought, this is the time to say that I’ve been through that, and people can maybe relate to me a little bit more. I wanted people to know: You can still get to where you want to be, dealing with those issues.”

Going public surprised Davies’ family, but his brother supported him.

“It was something that we definitely held in a lot,” Justin says. “It was good that we were able to get this out to the public, because not only did we feel embarrassed about our family situation, having a mom that was sick, and a dad that was also sick, it was embarrassing. We were two kids at prep school, great soccer players, athletes, no one would have probably thought that. It was embarrassing. And Charlie felt like now was the time for release. We’ve held it in for so long.”

Davies says his father is clean now, and their relationship has never been better.

“My dad has apologized so many times,” he says, “I’ve had to tell him to stop. Like, ‘I know, Dad! It’s OK!’”

Both Davies’ parents live in San Diego now, near Justin, who recently took a job at a startup company there.

Both Davies and his brother say they hold no resentment toward their parents. If anything, they appreciate what their parents did for them.

“I didn’t get to be raised in the best of circumstances, they know that,” says Charlie. “I know my dad is regretful, remorseful, about how he lived his life while I was growing up. And it’s not my mother’s fault that she has a mental illness. At the end of the day, the past is the past. He’s done everything to put me in the position that I’m in. He’s given me the opportunity to get where I’m at, and I’m forever grateful.”

Davies had bad moments growing up. His father worked him hard, pushed him mentally, right to the edge. But Davies’ father also gave him the mental strength to handle life’s hardest moments. To handle the rigors of professional soccer. To fight back after a car wreck nearly took his life.

“Both of my parents are ashamed. They have their pride. It was a tough situation they were in,” says Justin. “But look at where their kids ended up. I think they did a pretty damn good job.”

Davies is excited about the future. He has a year left on his contract, and thinks this could be the best season of his career. And even when his career is over, he’s still excited, giddy even, for what’s next. There’s coaching. There’s TV (he’s been a guest on ESPN FC and recently provided color commentary for a BC Eagles game). He’s always loved Nike, and is interested in the product side of the sport. He thinks soccer has a bright future in this country, and he’s ecstatic to be a part of it.

And Davies says he’s ready to be a father. He’s seen how kids are raised in France, Sweden, Denmark and the United States, spends time with his neighbors’ kids (they come to all the games) as well as the youngest kids of teammate Jermaine Jones. He didn’t get the best childhood, but he’s learned from it, and he’s ready to improve on the past.

His father can’t wait for the moment, either.

“If Charlie ever has a baby, I’ll be jumping for joy,” Kofi says excitedly. “I’ll run bare naked down my street.”

There are two ways to look at the life of Charlie Davies. He is either blessed or cursed, lucky or unlucky. He had a rough childhood. His career was nearly destroyed by a car accident. He has also played in Azteca Stadium and scored a goal that silenced a stadium of 95,000. He has a beautiful wife and a family he loves, a family that he hopes will one day grow.

There are two ways to look at the life of Charlie Davies, and the only thing for certain is that he has a choice. He gets to decide how he sees it, and he’s made up his mind.

Layout edited by Rubie Edmondson. Top photo by Greg M. Cooper, USA TODAY Sports.

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