Among the colorful characters painted on the totem of American soccer players, there is no one quite like Frankie Hejduk, the SoCal surfer dude-turned  World Cup player and Columbus Crew legend. “A lot of times, it was just Frankie being Frankie,” says Hejduk five minutes into an almost hour-long phone interview.
 
What does he mean by that? Well, there was the time in early 1996 when he refused a ride to practice from the U.S. national team general manager Tom King, opting to get a ride from a buddy. It was his first-ever national team camp. His coach, Steve Sampson, was furious. A year later, the national team was set to leave for a trip to China, and the night before the flight to Asia, Hejduk went out with his college buddies at UCLA.
 
Frankie overslept and missed the trip. He played seven minutes for the national team over the next 12 months.
 
“I didn’t grasp the craziness and gnarliness of the national team and how important it was,” says Hejduk. “I chalk it down to being young, naive, and wanting to have a good time.”
 
But Hejduk ended up becoming one of the most consistent field players for the USA. He’s the only American to have played in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics and the 1998 and 2002 World Cups — not bad for someone who was sometimes perceived to have cared more about getting pitted than kicking a ball around: “Surfing was my first love. Soccer was my second.”
 
“Dude, I was going to be a pro surfer, then Sigi Schmid called me up and offered me a scholarship to UCLA,” says Hejduk. “My parents basically told me, ‘You’re taking the scholarship. We’ve put enough time into getting you to club games and practices back and forth.’”
 
Hejduk’s performance at the otherwise disappointing World Cup in 1998 for the USA saw him earn a move to Bayer Leverkusen in the Bundesliga. The secret to his success? He balanced two of the world’s most physically demanding sports in what could only be described as a symbiotic relationship: Surfing kept him fit for the field, and being a pro soccer player allowed him to chase waves whenever he could.
 
While his teammates chilled in the soccer offseason, Hejduk was busy getting shacked on exotic islands with his friends from home. But it was also a part of a much bigger plan. “Everyone was kind of out of shape and came in slow at preseason,” says Hejduk. “I had the opposite mentality: It was, ‘I’m going to come in fast, make ’em think, ‘Wow, this guy’s fit, he must’ve been working out the whole offseason’’ — which I was.”
 
Surfing provides an excellent counterweight to soccer. Hejduk says in all of his years with the national team, he never lost a beep test — the short distance, interval fitness test.
 
“Me and Landon [Donovan] would go back and forth on the beep test and he would always try to beat me,” says Hejduk. “I would just go until he couldn’t go anymore, and then I’d go like three or four more times just to show him I could do it.”
 
But what comes up, must come down.
 
“But then we’d always have training after the beep test,” says Hejduk. “And I was the worst player on the field. Bruce Arena would always say, ‘Don’t pass it to Frankie after the beep test!’”
 
Hejduk’s national team experience includes the politically charged USA’s 1998 World Cup against Iran, which is again a U.S. opponent at the 2022 World Cup.

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