USA TODAY International Edition
Horrific injury, family woes can’t keep Davies down
Former phenom fights through tragedy, injury, parents’ troubles
INTERNATIONAL SPECIAL EDITION
This is a special edition of USA TODAY designed and edited for readers around the world. Additional content and late- breaking news and sports scores can always be found at usatoday. com.
HINGHAM, MASS. Charlie Davies’ dad was gone.
Kofi Davies went off drinking and using again with those friends who weren’t really his friends. It had been days since his dad disappeared from their home in Manchester, N. H., but Charlie Davies wasn’t sure how many. Two days. Maybe three.
His mom looked at Charlie and his younger brother, Justin, and shook her head. “I can’t believe it. He’s going out and wasting his check on drugs,” Charlie Davies recalls her saying.
Charlie could believe it. His father had done it before.
That wasn’t his biggest concern right then. 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 happened once, and Charlie sat in the back seat with her and did his best to keep her awake on the drive to the hospital.
With his dad gone, 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. He hoped his dad would come home. He hoped his family would get through it one more time.
That was when Charlie
Davies was 6 or 7, long before he would become a soccer phenom in high school and a star at Boston College. It was years before he made his mark playing in Europe with teams in Denmark, Sweden and France and went on to score a massive goal for the U. S. national team against Mexico at Azteca Stadium in 2009.
He was at the peak of his career then. Everton and Tottenham of the English Premier League reportedly were interested.
Then on Oct. 13, 2009, after a late night out in Washington, D. C., he got in an SUV with two women he didn’t know well. The vehicle hit a guardrail on the George Washington Parkway and split in two, killing one of the women. The female driver was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter.
Davies, who was riding in the back seat, awoke in the hospital with no memory of the accident. He suffered a lacerated bladder and bleeding on the brain, broke his tibia, femur and elbow and needed 36 staples in his stomach.
Surgery left him with a right leg that was 11⁄ 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 was undeterred. He had gotten to this point in his life through hard work, and he wasn’t afraid of it.
“I feel that people don’t really know me,” Davies tells USA TODAY Sports in an interview in the small coastal town just south of Boston where he lives with his wife, Nina. “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.” ‘ STEADFAST ABOUT SOCCER’ He learned hard work from his father. An immigrant from Gambia, Kofi Davies came to the USA to play college soccer. He had a semiprofessional soccer career as well, and during this time he met his wife, Kathleen. In 1986 they had Charlie, and two years later Justin came along.
Kofi was their coach, cheerleader and harshest critic. He would drill the boys for hours in soccer, going late into the night. The sons preferred the soccer field to being at home.
“We weren’t living in the best situation, with both my parents being sick,” Justin Davies says of his childhood. “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.”
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 for 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 of his parents’ issues, they were there. He is blessed to have grown up with two parents, he says. His dad was on the sideline for every game. His mom got the boys to school every day. “In a lot of ways,” Charlie says, “we were lucky.” ‘ I’VE BEEN THROUGH THAT’ Charlie Davies, 29, just finished his best season since the tragic accident, leading the New England Revolution front line as the team made a playoff run. He won the team’s Golden Boot award, scoring the most goals ( 10 in 33 games), and was voted player of the year by fans.
Davies feels as good as he ever has on a soccer field. The road back was a bumpy one, with 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 with a trainer, making sure his body was strong on both sides. And then it happened.
“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.”
He has rediscovered his game, and he’s making peace with his family.
Part of the reason he decided to share his story is because he wants to shed light on families that struggle with mental illness. He first spoke publicly about his family’s situation in a news conference last year.
“I thought maybe people were going through the same stuff that I was going through at the time,” Davies says. “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.”
Justin Davies supports his brother talking about the adversity they’ve overcome. “It was something that we definitely held in a lot,” Justin says.
Charlie Davies says his father is clean now, and his parents live in San Diego near Justin.
“I didn’t get to be raised in the best of circumstances, they know that,” Charlie says. “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.”
“I wanted people to know: You can still get to where you want to be, dealing with those issues.”
Major League Soccer player Charlie Davies, on talking publicly about his mother’s mental illness and his father’s struggles with drug addiction