In the hills of deepest, darkest old East Germany, Bobby Wood blends in like a lai on a bronze bust of Karl Marx. “I do stick out, that’s for sure.” Football takes all sorts of people to all sorts of places. Never before has it taken a boy from the endless summer of Honolulu to the dark days of die Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains that separate the Germans from the Czechs.
Specifically, it’s the town of Aue that Wood calls home right now. It has a population of well under 20,000 and yet also a team that came close to promotion to the Bundesliga a few years back. Mostly though, they can be found fighting to stay out of the third division, which is the battle they are in right now.
So what is a promising young USMNT striker doing at a club like FC Erzgebirge Aue? In a strange twist of fate (and internal politics), Wood is trying to help them relegate the club he joined Aue from, 1860 Munich. Both teams are fighting to beat the drop – indeed they occupy the bottom two places in Bundesliga 2 at the moment – but the success of one could well be at the expense of the other.
And it is looking like one of the best things that could have happened to Wood. “I like to play in an environment where I feel welcomed, and the players get along and the people are working for each other. For me that’s important, so I can play at my best. Everyone does that here.”
It’s fair to say they aren’t the best of friends at the moment, Wood and 1860, the club he moved across the world for at the age of just 14. His initial struggles were with the language and the culture; in recent times, they have been with the club itself, where he got little game time and felt he was dumped to the reserves for no reason.
But did he really tell the coach to kiss him where the sun don’t shine, as the Munich press has reported? “No, no, no. I did not say that,” he responds, resolutely. “I did not say that.”
What did happen, he says, was that he and a group of players stayed out on the training pitch to do some extra work one day. There was six of them out there, “but the coach just decided to really yell at me in front of everyone, and in front of the fans, for really no reason.
“He wanted to yell at me, and I just told him, like, ‘Really? You’re really just going to yell at me because I’m the youngest player?’ All I said was, ‘You just want to show your power, you know. Like, what’s up with that?’ I didn’t cuss at him or anything.
“And that’s another thing I didn’t like. It got out to the press, which it shouldn’t have, and then they started telling lies about the whole story, as well. And I felt that was really messed up, because stuff like that, it happens, you know, and it should have stayed internal.
“They made a big deal of it for no reason. They told stories that I cussed at the coach, the biggest lies in the world. It’s whatever. That coach got fired. I really don’t care about that. I was laughing when he got fired to be honest. It’s whatever, it happens.”
It’s turned out to be like the lancing of a boil. If Jürgen Klinsmann calls him up for June’s friendlies in Amsterdam and Cologne, he might seem like a different player to the one who lined up against Chile.
Wood is just the second Hawaiian to represent his country in the sport (a fact he was surprised to learn). The first was Brian Ching. For USMNT fans baying for more homegrown talent, he is a worrying sign. Not Wood himself, but what his position says about American grassroots development.
Here is an injury-plagued 22-year-old whose talents could soon be submerged into the third tier; yet if not for Klinsmann’s relentless recruiting drive in these parts, he’d be the only member of the USMNT cadre regularly playing in the top divisions here in Germany.
The fallout with 1860 hasn’t helped all parties, though it has been wonderful for Wood. And Aue. In eight games together, they have five wins, and he has three goals. That’s as many as he scored (at this level) in all his years in Munich, and he is one reason their coach now believes they will drag themselves out of the drop zone.
If they do, Wood stays put. If they don’t, his coach at 1860 has said he would welcome the striker back. With the way the relegation battle is playing out, anything is possible. The bottom four sides have been the form teams of the past month, and the worst case scenario is that both Aue and 1860 go down. It would be a harsh blow for Wood, who is at last is getting a chance to show what he can do. He’s philosophical about it.
“It’s slowly working out. I just have to stay healthy, and I think I can make my way through. Mentally, it’s been tough, especially moving here at such a young age. But I did learn a lot about myself, and I’m learning just to do my own thing now.
“If I want to make it big, I just have to bite through it.”
