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Soccer consumes the mind, body and soul of Roger Espinoza. It has to when you’re a rookie in Major League Soccer, competing for firm footing in the big time and trying to make a living on your own for the first time.
But in the deep recesses of Espinoza’s mind, he thinks about a journey. It’s a trip that’s still eight months away, but one very close to his heart. It will take him back to a homeland that seems like a distant memory, to a place he hasn’t seen in nine years.
“I’m going back to Honduras this Christmas,” Espinoza says, his brown eyes growing wider, his smile broader. “It’s something where I’ve just been waiting for an opportunity, having the time and money. I’m really excited about it.”
When he was just 12, Espinoza left Honduras with most of his family for the United States and a chance at the American dream. He has fulfilled that dream through the only sport he’s ever really known, the only sport any Honduran boy ever knows — soccer.
Espinoza, the 11th overall pick in the 2008 MLS SuperDraft, broke his foot in preseason but, because of injuries to some veterans, has quickly worked himself into the Wizards’ starting lineup at midfielder. He has started each of the Wizards’ last three games in which they’ve gone 1-1-1.
“I’m still of the belief he’s a work in progress,” says Wizards coach Curt Onalfo. “Due to injuries, he’s had opportunities earlier than we might have expected. But he’s making the most of those opportunities.
“I love his service of the ball. And I didn’t expect his ability to adjust to defenses to be so quick.
“The fact that he was injured and able to get back and step in without missing a beat … He’s just a very good person and very good soccer player.”
Espinoza’s American dream continues to become more and more reality by the day.
“It’s been kind of like a movie,” says Rafael Amaya, a former MLS player who now serves as manager of the Colorado Storm, a Denver-area youth soccer club. He refers to Espinoza, whom he took under his wing when he was in his early teens, as “my adopted son.”
“I think now that Roger is at the pro level,” Amaya continues, “he has another level he can push himself.”
•••
From the time he was an infant until he left Honduras when he was 12, Roger Espinoza saw his father one time.
Anibal Espinoza was a construction worker, but there was little work in Puerto Cortes, a principal Central American port city on the northern coast of Honduras. The crippling economy prompted Anibal to seek a better life elsewhere. A friend told him about the Denver area, where a building boom was taking place. He left the family soon after Roger was born and headed north to work, hoping to save enough money and plant roots so that one day his family could join him.
Meanwhile, in Puerto Cortes, Roger Espinoza said there were two paths for local youths to choose — join a gang and become immersed in a world of drugs, or play soccer.
Roger says he followed the path put before him by his brother, Herson, eight years Roger’s elder.
“He’s the reason I play soccer,” said Roger, now 21. “He took me with him when he went to play soccer.”
As Roger tells it, it was never hard to find a game.
“A big percentage of the men (in Puerto Cortes) didn’t have a job, so everybody played soccer,” he says. “Every park, every street, every open field. We made a field in our back yard. We’d have 20 kids divided into four teams, winner stays on. My mom could never get us to come in for dinner.
Wizards lose at Toronto
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