Hair today . . .
The road goes ever on, but not Cobi Jones.
“I’ve told everyone that I’m retiring and that’s where I’m at,” the last of the Galaxy originals said.
There will be those who will try to talk him out of it -- David Beckham already has said he’d like to see Jones return next season -- but at 37 and with new fields beckoning, American soccer’s own icon is adamant.
“If by some weird or unbelievable circumstance I do end up coming back, it would be the shortest retirement,” he said. “But I’m not extending my career. At this point, I’m retiring.”
Unless the Galaxy reaches Major League Soccer’s playoffs, Jones’ final home game will be Thursday night at the Home Depot Center and the final match of his extraordinary career will be Sunday in Chicago, where he could share the field with -- and might steal the spotlight from -- Beckham and Fire standout Cuauhtemoc Blanco.
“Even if it turned out that we didn’t make the playoffs and this was it, I could be content with that,” Jones said.
And why not?
Few players in the history of U.S. soccer have achieved what Jones has since he first walked out of Westlake Village Westlake High and onto the UCLA campus in 1988.
From there, the soccer road led him to the Barcelona Olympics, where he shared a name with the Games’ equally popular mascot, Cobi, and on to the 1994, 1998 and 2002 World Cups. He played a record 164 games for the U.S., appearing in 28 countries, and has played a record 349 games for the Galaxy.
He is one of only 10 original MLS players still in the league and is the only one of the 10 to spend his entire career with one team. Until Landon Donovan recently overtook him, Jones held the U.S. record for assists with 22 and also scored 15 goals for the national team. With the Galaxy, he has 76 goals and 104 assists, both team records.
Jones scored the first-ever Galaxy goal and helped Los Angeles win two MLS titles, the U.S. Open Cup and the CONCACAF Champions Cup.
“In America, I think if you name a few players who have kind of paved the way, he’s one of those guys,” said Kansas City assistant coach Chris Henderson, a former teammate at UCLA and on the national team.
“You could say he’s like the past, the present and the future,” Chicago defender C.J. Brown said. “We’ve got to thank him for all the stuff he’s done for this league. He was the actual Beckham, the Blanco, of the USA at one point. He’s amazing.”
Not that he ever received the sort of fan adulation and media attention that his accomplishments deserved.
Cobi was never going to be Kobe, not in Los Angeles, not anywhere. Basketball and soccer exist on different planes in the U.S., but Jones has been a larger-than-life figure in his sport just as Bryant has been in his.
Like no American player before him, Jones caught the imagination of the fans and held it for almost two decades. Part of it was the excitement he brought with those explosive bursts of speed down the wing. Part of it was his looks -- the smile that was always there and the dreadlocks that changed from season to season.
“It was something that really helped identify him and helped him stand out,” former Galaxy and now Kansas City goalkeeper Kevin Hartman said of Jones’ hair. “His dreadlocks became synonymous with a great crosser of the ball, a hard worker, somebody who could dribble very, very well. And people everywhere recognized that. It wasn’t only in the U.S. When we traveled, everybody would recognize Cobi Jones.”
Most of all, though, fans took him to heart because they recognized that Jones was playing not just for keeps but also for fun. His teammates saw the same thing.
“The one thing I admire about Cobi is that he always went about the game like he could leave it at any time and be just fine with it,” Henderson said. “He could go do something else and be completely happy.”
And from Hartman: “I just think of Cobi as a character. Everything that he did made it so fun and enjoyable. There were a ton of times where things were really, really rough and Cobi would always be the one who would kind of laugh stuff off and keep things in perspective.”
Jones doesn’t argue the point and talked fondly of playing alongside the likes of Earnie Stewart on the U.S. team and with former Mexico goalkeeper Jorge Campos on the Galaxy.
“For me, it’s always connecting with people who know that it’s a job and they’re going to work hard at it but also are having fun with it, realizing that it is a game that we’re playing,” Jones said. On the field, no one has been more competitive.
“He demanded a lot of the guys around him,” said another MLS original, Chicago Fire and former U.S. midfielder Chris Armas. “He wasn’t the most vocal guy, but he led by example and it made you want to match the intensity that he brought.”
Jones might have struck it rich had he come along a little later and gone to play in Europe. He did spend a brief time, before MLS, with Coventry City in England and with Vasco da Gama in Brazil, but the Galaxy has always been home.
“Because I’m still playing, everybody forgets that I came up at a time when Americans really weren’t accepted in Europe too much and the goal for every American soccer player at the time was really to get this league going,” he said.
And in any case, money was not his motivation.
“Maybe it hasn’t been as lucrative, but I’m happy because everyone that’s older says that 20 years from now you’re not so much concerned about the money aspect and everything, you’re kind of concerned about how you lived your life,” Jones said.
“And that’s one thing I’ll always be proud of -- that I lived my life and played the game the way I wanted to do it. I’ll be happy with that.”
