Meet the coach who made Howard a soccer star
As creation myths in U.S. Soccer go, Tim Howard’s is one of the most legendary.
A generational athlete, Howard was raised in a single-parent home in North Brunswick, N.J. His life changed at age 12 when he met the coach who would transform his raw ability into one of the most successful soccer careers America has ever seen.
The story is the stuff of legend: Howard, then a part-time goalkeeper, showed up at Tim Mulqueen’s semiweekly skills clinic. Howard impressed so much that when his mother, Esther, hesitated at the thought of scraping together $25 for another session, Mulqueen extended an open invitation for Howard to return any time, no charge.
“Back then,” Mulqueen explains, “when you got into coaching, it wasn’t about money. It was about love.”
“The art of goalkeeping is special to him,” Howard, now with MLS’ Colorado Rapids, said in a recent interview. “It’s something that he incorporates and makes sure all his kids understand the nuance of it.”
But the serendipity that placed Mulqueen on that field — that launched two illustrious careers and powered the most auspicious era of American soccer — traces its roots to Philadelphia.
Back in the mid-1980s, Mulqueen was an undersized keeper on a scrappy but rarely successful Saint Joseph’s team. Those days, the program was overseen by a part-time coach “on a shoestring budget,” Mulqueen generously offers. The result was 18 wins in four years, the Hawks jammed into schedules with larger schools and a burgeoning powerhouse in Rutgers. Any success, Mulqueen said, owed to tremendous team camaraderie, a bond that endures to this day.
Yet in 1985 and 1986, St. Joe’s played Rutgers to two one-goal decisions, despite the latter roster containing indoor soccer star Bobby Joe Esposito and U.S. National Teamer/Sporting Kansas City coach Peter Vermes. The reason was a goalkeeper from St. Joseph’s High in Metuchen, in the Scarlet Knights’ backyard, who chose the chance to start for the Hawks rather than sit for the Scarlet Knights.
“That was probably the best game of his life,” roommate and St. Joe’s forward Chuck McGlinn said of the 1986 game. “… Tim basically stood on his head.”
Mulqueen, though flattered by the praise, didn’t use quite so glowing terms. But far more important was the conversation his performance inspired after the game with legendary Rutgers coach Bob Reasso, whose summer camps Mulqueen had worked.
“He came up to me, said ‘That was a great performance. What are your plans after school?’” Mulqueen said. “I told him I kind of want to get into coaching, but I don’t know how to go about it. And he said, ‘After you finish, if there’s an opportunity here at Rutgers, I’d like to offer it to you.’ I was ecstatic.”
Mulqueen graduated in 1988 and walked into a full-time job as the goalkeeping coach for a Rutgers team that blossomed, making the 1990 NCAA final. He played on the side in various leagues, then very much part-time pursuits.
Those connections brought Mulqueen into contact with Howard, where another remnant of Mulqueen’s playing days helped the partnership prosper. Mulqueen wasn’t gifted with natural assets like height and reach. Instead, he fastidiously analyzed the game, hunting for any edge he could glean on shooters’ preferences or how to best organize the defense to prevent chances before they materialized. He emphasized goalkeeping within a game framework, higher-order nuance like distribution that make the difference between a good and a great keeper. Or in Howard’s case, a very good MLS goalie and an all-world keeper who played at Manchester United, Everton and is on the verge of fourth World Cup. He could earn his 115th cap Friday when the U.S. takes on Trinidad & Tobago in the Rapids home park in World Cup qualifying.
“He wasn’t physically the biggest but he had very, very good technique, which is important to teach young goalkeepers,” Howard said. “It’s something you learn that carries you all the way through. You learn to be very tenacious on the field, because he understood that without the size, he had to be a pit bull, had to be in your face and brash.”
Mulqueen’s coaching style has propelled him to be a mainstay in the U.S. coaching ranks. Alongside club jobs with the MetroStars (with a 19-year-old Howard), the Kansas City Wizards and now Orlando City, Mulqueen has been on the U.S. staff for a bevy of youth World Cups and the 2008 Olympics. His list of disciples reads like a who’s who of American goalkeepers of the last two decades.
Howard talks about his mentor — always by his nickname, “Mulch” — in terms usually reserved for family, for accepting a talented kid with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder in the one aspect of life where he felt comfortable. Mulqueen refers to Howard, 12 years his junior, as “a brother.” In his autobiography, “The Keeper,” Howard wrote of Mulqueen: “It’s fair to say that this book, and indeed my whole life, would be very different — and far less — without you. You’ve been a coach, a mentor, and a dear friend.”
When Howard hit rough patches at Manchester United and in his personal life, Mulqueen has been an omnipresent confidant. Mulqueen called games he coached for Kansas City against Howard’s MetroStars as “two of the most uncomfortable moments of my career.”
The bond is so unbreakable that presenting the hypothetical reversal of their first interaction a quarter-century ago seems so distant that it’s hard to ponder. What if Mulqueen had explained to Esther Howard how important $25 was to cover expenses for a 25-year-old upstart coach? What if he hadn’t extended such a magnanimous gesture?
“I’m very fortunate to have met someone like Tim at that stage of my life,” Howard said. “For whatever reason, he was drawn to me and I was drawn to him. He looked after me and mentored me, took me under his wing and did anything and everything for me.”
“I was never motivated by (money),” Mulqueen said. “I love the position. I love the game and I love kids who really want to get better and have a chance to either be the starter on their club team, be the starter on their high school team, or play in college. Whatever level I can get them to, I want to get them to.
“It was just natural. I can’t even think about what would happen.”