FIERY PLAYER, SIMMERING CONSCIENCE ESKANDARIAN’S PASSION EXTENDS TO HIS HERITAGE
By Mike Wise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Post, DC
May 31 2006
On the morning of April 24, Alecko Eskandarian finished practice
with D.C. United, jumped into his sport-utility vehicle and showered
quickly at his Georgetown apartment. He got back in his car and made
it just in time for an event that had nothing to do with a photo-op
or fan appreciation day.
Unbeknownst to many of his teammates, Eskandarian joined more
than 1,000 Armenian-Americans in front of the Turkish Embassy. The
demonstrators were trying to persuade the Turkish government, as
they do every April 24, to recognize what is known as a forgotten
genocide, carried out from 1915 to 1920. Later, the protesters marched
to the Capitol.
“I wouldn’t say I’m activist or anything like that, but it’s something
I believe in,” Eskandarian said. “I don’t think it’s political. I
just think it’s a matter of justice. It’s a matter of admitting a
fact. There’s a lot of people out there who have lost 1.5 million
family members and they have no closure to that.”
A 23-year-old professional athlete with a social conscience. What
gives?
“Someone mentioned my name on TV at some point,” said Eskandarian,
pausing over lunch last week. “I was like, ‘That’s kinda weird, man.’
I expected it to be on ESPN. But not C-SPAN, you know?”
Eskandarian is United’s second-leading scorer through nine games. He
is a compact, free-radical striker with four goals, two assists and
one compelling comeback tale.
He suffered a frightening concussion last June at RFK Stadium and
after missing 10 months and any shot at playing for the U.S. national
team in this summer’s World Cup, he scored a theatrical goal in
United’s season opener on April 2. The whole scenario was typical of
Eskandarian’s existence, which does not include much middle ground.
“The kid’s life is like ‘The Truman Show,’ ” United midfielder Josh
Gros said. “Everything he does is dramatic. And I don’t know what it
is, but he always seems to find the pot of gold.”
Like? “Like he kept talking about this band he loves, System of a
Down,” Gros said, referring to the alternative metal band whose four
members are of Armenian ancestry and whose music espouses social
and political views related to the genocide. “So he shows up at the
embassy that day and there they are. He ends up hanging with System
of a Down the whole day.”
Said Eskandarian, “Very cool.”
“He also meets Playboy models all the time,” Gros said. “I have no
idea where he meets them, but he does. He goes to a Wizards game once
and ended up getting auctioned off for a date on Singles Night. The
guy is unbelievable.”
“Oh, and remember the Red Bull thing?” Gros added.
Eskandarian was fined $250 for spitting out a swig of Red Bull after
scoring a goal against New York on April 23. Red Bull was invented by
the Austrian beverage company that purchased the New York/New Jersey
MetroStars and changed their name to Red Bulls. “So, a local company
takes up a collection and ends up giving him $275,” Gros said. “Then
one of our fan clubs donated another $250 toward a charity in his
name. Alecko makes money when he gets fined.”
Said Eskandarian, “Stuff happens to me that doesn’t happen to normal
people.”
Eskandarian is essentially 5 feet 9 inches and 168 pounds of
hyperactivity. His hunched-back shoulders give him the appearance of
a middle linebacker, but overall, he’s more boyish than brutish.
That includes his thick black hair, which is cropped close to his
head and protruding ears. It just sits there, still and meticulous.
Eskandarian’s olive complexion and roundish brown eyes give him that
23-going-on-16 appeal. Some friends say he looks like Jason Biggs, the
lead actor in “American Pie.” “I don’t know what they were thinking,”
Eskandarian said. “I’m nothing like that dude.”
Indeed, Eskandarian’s soft exterior belies his hard Armenian roots.
His father is Andranik Eskandarian, a hellion defender who played
in the 1978 World Cup for Iran and for the New York Cosmos from 1979
to 1984.
“Myself, always I play tough,” Andranik, 54, said by telephone from
Hackensack, N.J., where he has owned and operated two sporting goods
stores since the 1980s. “I was a small defender, but I also challenge
the bigger players. I only weigh 155 pounds then, but I would beat
200-pound people. Ninety-nine percent of time, I win.”
Early on, father taught son two lessons: 1) Be aggressive, not dirty,
and 2) punish the defenders who punish you.
“At a young age, he taught me I could stay on the field if I wasn’t
just playing offense,” Alecko said. “He was a defender, and he told
me defenders hate to get hit by forwards. He was right. Plus, I found
out: it’s fun to hit defenders.”
Alecko’s blood runs somewhere between hot and molten. He has
accumulated 15 yellow cards in three-plus years of professional
soccer. In 2004 he tied for the league lead in cautions with eight,
which is little freakish for a scoring forward.
“Sometimes you’re like, ‘Esky, chill out,’ ” Gros said. “But it works
for him. [A] lot of times he’s over the top in practice. He’ll punt
the ball, say some words. But everybody knows, ‘It’s Alecko.’ So we
just let him cool off and it’ll be all right.”
Said Eskandarian, “I make decisions with my heart and not my head
sometimes.”
Eskandarian’s lone ejection came his rookie year, when an assistant
coach who is no longer with the team pulled him aside before a match
went into overtime and said: “I don’t care if you break someone’s leg,
I don’t want any free service from their defenders to their forwards. I
don’t care if you get a red card.”
Said Eskandarian: “I was so livid, I felt like I was being used. So I
went in aggressively on a tackle the first chance I got and was kicked
out. He ran over and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said,
‘I’m doing exactly what you told me to do,’ and I walked off.”
In his own moral universe, Esky showed them.
He always sees more black and white than gray. For example, he can’t
understand why New England goalkeeper Matt Reis never personally
apologized for his role in the injury.
Eskandarian had been named most valuable player of the MLS Cup in
2004, and 2005 was expected to be his coming-out party. But in a
violent collision last June 18, Reis went right through him, leaving
Eskandarian out cold.
After more than seven months of waking up with intense migraine
headaches, after an early misdiagnosis and multiple neurology tests
— concerned that one doctor might tell him his career was over —
Eskandarian finally returned.
“To put your knee into someone’s skull at full speed and to just
walk away after you knock someone out, you got to be a cold soul,”
Eskandarian said. “I hate to say it, but he’s dead to me. ”
Reached through a team spokesman in the preseason, Reis said he did
not intend to injure Eskandarian on the play.
The Turkish government also is on Eskandarian’s list. Turkey
considers the Armenian deaths near the beginning of the last century a
consequence of World War I, with severe casualties on both sides, while
Armenians — and many historians — say the deaths constitute genocide.
Eskandarian says he understands why any nation would not want to
be compared with Nazi Germany. But he cannot grasp why Turkey won’t
admit the atrocities after almost a century, how the Ottoman Empire
deported, abducted, starved and massacred his people. “I have Turkish
friends that don’t even know about it,” he said.
Growing up in the Armenian Christian church, attending an Armenian
school from nursery school through eighth grade — “I had classes in a
trailer,” he said, “only eight kids were in my grade” — Eskandarian’s
Armenian identity was nurtured from birth. Nothing enraptured him more,
though, than his grandfather’s life story.
Galoost Eskandarian died last September at age 92. He never knew his
actual birthday because his parents were said to have been killed in
the genocide. He ended up in Tehran. Like many Armenians, his history
had been eradicated.
“My mom was orphaned at 5 years old,” said Andranik, who said he
wants to make a pilgrimage to Armenia with Alecko and his brother,
Ara, very soon. “It’s not a nice story I tell you, but I never
saw my grandparents from my father’s side. This is why we are so
close. They try to save their kids, they give everything. This is
what they respect to this day.”
“My grandfather was actually really protective of me,” Alecko said
of Galoost. “Every time something happened, he wouldn’t let my dad
get ahold of me. I’d go over to his house and we’d play backgammon
for hours. We developed a real bond. It wasn’t a shock when he died,
because he lived a great life. But it still hurt.”
The day of Galoost’s funeral, Alecko and his family gathered around
his grandfather’s table and shared memories of the man who lost his
parents and was forced to leave his homeland.
“It just kind of hit me that day,” Alecko said. “I was like, ‘This
is all I’ve got.’ Obviously, I’ve got friends and good people in my
life. But blood, that never goes away.”
In his own moral universe, Esky showed them.
He always sees more black and white than gray. For example, he can’t
understand why New England goalkeeper Matt Reis never personally
apologized for his role in the injury.
Eskandarian had been named most valuable player of the MLS Cup in
2004, and 2005 was expected to be his coming-out party. But in a
violent collision last June 18, Reis went right through him, leaving
Eskandarian out cold.
After more than seven months of waking up with intense migraine
headaches, after an early misdiagnosis and multiple neurology tests
— concerned that one doctor might tell him his career was over —
Eskandarian finally returned.
“To put your knee into someone’s skull at full speed and to just
walk away after you knock someone out, you got to be a cold soul,”
Eskandarian said. “I hate to say it, but he’s dead to me. ”
Reached through a team spokesman in the preseason, Reis said he did
not intend to injure Eskandarian on the play.
The Turkish government also is on Eskandarian’s list. Turkey
considers the Armenian deaths near the beginning of the last century a
consequence of World War I, with severe casualties on both sides, while
Armenians — and many historians — say the deaths constitute genocide.
Eskandarian says he understands why any nation would not want to
be compared with Nazi Germany. But he cannot grasp why Turkey won’t
admit the atrocities after almost a century, how the Ottoman Empire
deported, abducted, starved and massacred his people. “I have Turkish
friends that don’t even know about it,” he said.
Growing up in the Armenian Christian church, attending an Armenian
school from nursery school through eighth grade — “I had classes in a
trailer,” he said, “only eight kids were in my grade” — Eskandarian’s
Armenian identity was nurtured from birth. Nothing enraptured him more,
though, than his grandfather’s life story.
Galoost Eskandarian died last September at age 92. He never knew his
actual birthday because his parents were said to have been killed in
the genocide. He ended up in Tehran. Like many Armenians, his history
had been eradicated.
“My mom was orphaned at 5 years old,” said Andranik, who said he
wants to make a pilgrimage to Armenia with Alecko and his brother,
Ara, very soon. “It’s not a nice story I tell you, but I never
saw my grandparents from my father’s side. This is why we are so
close. They try to save their kids, they give everything. This is
what they respect to this day.”
“My grandfather was actually really protective of me,” Alecko said
of Galoost. “Every time something happened, he wouldn’t let my dad
get ahold of me. I’d go over to his house and we’d play backgammon
for hours. We developed a real bond. It wasn’t a shock when he died,
because he lived a great life. But it still hurt.”
The day of Galoost’s funeral, Alecko and his family gathered around
his grandfather’s table and shared memories of the man who lost his
parents and was forced to leave his homeland.
“It just kind of hit me that day,” Alecko said. “I was like, ‘This
is all I’ve got.’ Obviously, I’ve got friends and good people in my
life. But blood, that never goes away.”