Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on Dec. 17, 2019. We are republishing it today, with additions, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the photo shoot’s release to the public. The additions include an epilogue and quotes from Pablo Mastroeni gathered after the story was initially published.
Language in this story may be offensive to some readers.
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There’s a water fountain at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina, a Most Dependable Fountains model SD440 that lost its factory luster long ago. After two decades under the Carolina sun, the silvery sheen on this unassuming bubbler has dulled a bit, its age marked by patches of rust. You can push the button on its side, but don’t expect to be refreshed — the fountain now runs dry.
The SD440 may be forlorn, but it certainly isn’t forgotten. In the spring of 2002, at the very moment that a 20-year-old Landon Donovan leaned in to let its water ripple over his lips, the fountain took its part in perhaps the most memorable photograph ever taken in the history of U.S. men’s soccer. It’s a photograph — you know the one — that remains a running joke among U.S. soccer fans, part of a larger collection of photos that graced the New York Times Magazine in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup. The photos — highly-stylized fashion shots of Donovan, Pablo Mastroeni, Clint Mathis, Brian McBride, DaMarcus Beasley, Cobi Jones and Kasey Keller — remain notorious to this day. More often than not, they’re derided, reduced to an afterthought or a punchline, fodder for trash talk or parody. And yet they’re still referenced, kept alive in the public consciousness, blown up by fans and brought into stadiums around the country.
Seventeen years, four World Cups and countless photo shoots later, why do these photos remain lodged in our collective memory? What is it about them, all these years later, that still captivates? The answer, like the story of the photos themselves, is more complex than it might first appear. It’s a story that involves the complicated public images and private feelings of the players featured in the shoot. It involves the artistic vision of a renowned photographer who, throughout his career, has worked to reshape the public’s perception of masculinity and sexuality. It involves a soccer federation struggling to capture the attention of a nation, the greatest men’s player in the history of the American game and a pair of white linen pants.
And it’s a story, of course, that involves a water fountain, and a young man attempting to look sexy while drinking from it.
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But what if I told you that the water fountain, along with the set of photographs that made it famous, was, depending on your point of view, not simply a source of embarrassment, or regret, or glee? What if I told you that in addition to that heady swirl of emotions, it was also, improbably, indispensable to the United States’ deepest run at a World Cup since the 1930s, a catalyst for the brightest moment in the team’s modern history?
That the Most Dependable Fountains SD440 was the USMNT’s 12th man in Korea?
Would you laugh then?
Probably.
It’s not easy these days to get your hands on a copy of the May 26th, 2002 edition of the New York Times Magazine. I should know; I recently spent a few months trying to track one down on eBay and a variety of vintage newspaper and magazine websites. And then I realized I could find it down the street from my home in D.C., at the Library of Congress.
There, not far from some other classics — the original drafts of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights — I find my own American treasure. In a basement-level periodical room, I load an old roll of microfiche and jog through months of old issues, past headlines like “Can Amazon.com Bounce Back” and “Pentagon’s Worry: Iraqi Chemical Arms” before arriving at my prize.
“The Boys of Soccer: Meet seven hotshots on the U.S. World Cup team.”
Cover boy Kasey Keller, sprawled out in front of a goal. Donovan, Beasley, McBride wearing silks, linens and longing gazes, their collars open, their necklines plunging. Under each photo, a caption: “Originally from Argentina, Pablo Mastroeni plays defense, but not in his Roberto Cavalli turquoise-studded shirt, $1,138, and linen pants, $350.”
And there, in the margin, the name of the photographer: Matthias Vriens. I begin to dig.
In 1992, Matthias Vriens-McGrath — he is now married — founded a magazine called Dutch, and grew it from a one-man show to what he calls an international “style bible.” In the late ’90s, the Amsterdam-born photographer became the worldwide creative director for Giorgio Armani, then moved on to the upper ranks at Gucci. Dozens of A-listers have found themselves in front of Vriens’ lens, then subsequently on the covers of Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and a litany of other glossy rags.
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His work has a raw, provocative feel. Not infrequently, it veers well outside the societal norms of traditional masculinity. In May of 2002, the same month that Vriens-McGrath shot the U.S. national team, he photographed Eminem for British music and fashion magazine The Face. During post-production, Vriens-McGrath decided to change the color of the rapper’s tank top from red to pink, earning him an angry phone call from the Eminem’s publicist. “You turned him gay,” the publicist fumed. Eminem threatened to cancel his U.K. tour if the photo came out. The Face destroyed 25,000 copies of the magazine and reprinted them with a different cover shot.
I track Vriens-McGrath down on the web. It takes me a while to get a hold of him, but then, one day, I receive a text message.
“Hey Pablo,” it reads. “This is Matthias. I hear you wanna talk about balls? Call me.”
“The whole ‘gay’ thing is completely obnoxious,” says Vriens-McGrath when I get him on the phone. He is telling me about Eminem, but it might as well be any photo shoot with him behind the camera. “I have fought with that my entire career and I’m still fighting with it. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a man or woman, gay or straight, I can make anything look sexy. If you ask me to take a photograph of a tomato, it’s going to end up looking like a hot tomato.”
When the New York Times Magazine approached him ahead of the 2002 World Cup, they were looking to do a spread on the U.S. men’s national team as part of a package of soccer stories. There would be an accompanying profile of Clint Mathis — “America’s best shot,” they’d call him — and a Simon Kuper feature on soccer’s failure, historically, to captivate fans in the United States.
The Times seemed eager to try something different. They could fill the magazine with run-of-the-mill action shots, but that would be boring. Instead, they decided to use the athletes as fashion models. Vriens-McGrath loved it.
“Soccer wasn’t particularly big back then in this country,” he says. “In my country, players for big clubs were the equivalent of Hollywood movie stars, really. They were glamorous and hot and sexy; they had hot wives and everything about it was just glamor. So when the Times asked me to shoot the team, I was thrilled.”
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U.S. Soccer press officer Michael Kammarman still remembers the Times’ approach. It came a few months before the shoot, and the United States Soccer Federation did not hesitate to accept. Coming off the national team’s miserable 1998 World Cup, the USSF was eager to introduce the men’s team to a broader, more receptive audience.
“When you think back to 2002, the New York Times approaching us and wanting to feature the men’s national team was obviously a big deal,” says Kammarman. “We, at that time, were just trying to not only get eyes in the soccer media but also just get into the mainstream. So the opportunity to be a part of it was a no-brainer.”
They settled on a day in early May to take the photos, at the then-brand-new SAS Soccer Park (now known as WakeMed Soccer Park) in Cary, where the USMNT was in camp. On the day of the shoot, Kammarman was busy wrangling some 30 journalists at the team hotel.
“It’s not like (U.S. Soccer was) some huge operation at that stage,” he says. “Obviously you can’t be in two places at once, and we were doing media at the hotel. So the main focus for me was just making sure that guys were getting there and getting back and that we were handling things on our end, which was delivering what we promised the Times — the players. I never saw the setup over there, not once.”
Vriens-McGrath arrived at the training facility and surveyed his options: a pair of training fields, a parking lot, a water fountain. It wasn’t exactly ideal terrain for a photo shoot, but this was hardly the first time he’d had to adapt on the fly.
“We had to do the shoot quickly,” says Vriens-McGrath, “which is idiosyncratically ‘me’ anyway, because I feel that when you deal with celebrities, whether you deal with movie stars or athletes, you have to do it fast because these photos at first seem exciting for them but then they get bored or self-conscious.”
The players were set to arrive one by one. Kasey Keller was first. He strolled into a locker room typically filled with tracksuits and training gear and found a distinctly different setup, one Vriens-McGrath describes with a chuckle as “maybe full of pink coats, glitter, this and that.”
“We’d all done different shoots before,” says Keller, “They were just more sports-orientated than fashion. So you go in, there’s different outfits, they say, ‘Put this one on, put that one on, do this, do that,’ and you’re looking at these outfits going, ‘Well that’s a little interesting.’ I was looking at all of this stuff and going, ‘This stuff isn’t really my style,’ but secondly, these were all model sizes. I’m not fitting into a lot of medium or large — my legs and my ass just were not going to work with what they had.”
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Keller chose the only thing that fit him, a plain black Calvin Klein undershirt (“$22, Bloomingdale’s”) and a pair of training shorts. “It was like a blessing,” he says now with a laugh. “I should give praise to all the plyometrics over the years that made my ass so big that I couldn’t fit into those sample sizes. I could’ve been in some sort of skin-tight, snakeskin something-or-other.”
“My least favorite picture is Kasey Keller, the goalkeeper,” says Vriens-McGrath. “That’s sort of like — I think he was particularly handsome, super-tall, masculine, great jawline — I was really into him as a photo subject. But it wasn’t really happening. So I took a classic standard portrait and that one, within the stretch of the others, is a bit boring.”
With Keller’s photographs sorted, Vriens-McGrath next welcomed Brad Friedel, his least willing participant. The Blackburn Rovers goalkeeper had been playing abroad for more than half a decade. Like Keller, he didn’t see anything particularly appealing on the rack, and he faced the same dimensional challenges.
“If you look back through my career, anytime I posed for anything, I was in a suit or in soccer gear,” says Friedel now. “When I saw the clothes on the rack, they were not clothes that I would wear — I’m with Kasey on this. None of the clothes fit me at all and they’re just not clothes I’d ever put on. It was a very simple scenario for me. But they wanted a picture, so I just did the one in a black T-shirt. That may have been the only thing that fit us, honestly.”
Friedel is the only player shot that day whose photo did not appear in the spread. He is barefoot, squatting down below a goal in training gear, his arms outstretched. If there’s one thing that comes through in the shot, it’s Friedel’s reluctance to be there. Years later, he’s still reluctant. My conversation with Friedel is full of laughter, but when I mention that I have a copy of the photo, the line goes silent for a moment. He’s still insistent that it not be released.
“I knew for sure it wasn’t going to happen,” recalls Vriens-McGrath. “So I didn’t really push. I tried behind the nets to try and create some sort of a hide-and-seek, to create some sort of sexual tension within that, but it just wasn’t happening. I don’t want to force anybody into a situation they don’t want to be in. It’s their loss, really.”
DaMarcus Beasley followed the goalkeepers. Lying in the grass, he’s shot from the waist up. A diamond-encrusted No. 7 pendant dangles from his neck, resting against a white shirt. The photo rivals Keller’s for blandness; to Beasley, that’s what makes it successful.
“I mean, I can tell you that my photo isn’t as bad as everybody’s else’s” says Beasley. “Mine was halfway decent. That’s just an epic photo shoot. At the time, none of us thought the photos would be like that. I remember personally, I had some funny clothes set up for me. They wanted me to wear pink pants for my photo. Like bright, bright pink. Thankfully, when I saw mine at the end of the day I thought it wasn’t that bad, and I still don’t.”
Some of the other photos, Beasley says, are “right there on the edge, right there almost crossing the line.”
Landon Donovan, who along with Beasley would go on to have a breakout World Cup, arrived next. Vriens-McGrath had sensed Keller’s hesitation and chosen not to push his subject into uncomfortable territory. In Donovan, who declined to be interviewed for this piece, the Dutchman found a more willing subject. Like many of his other teammates, Donovan was fully committed to the U.S. cause, eager to sell his country not only on the men’s national team but on the game of soccer itself. That pliability — and the player’s receptiveness to go along with the photographer’s creative direction — is what brought Landon Donovan and the water fountain together.
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“When I connected with Landon, he was so enthusiastic about it,” says Vriens-McGrath. “I felt like he’d do more than the others, so really it’s about weighing out what people will do, how far you can stretch something. Because I’m a firm believer in not making my subjects uncomfortable, in a way. I tell my subjects that if they feel uncomfortable, they look uncomfortable. With Landon, I recall he was really up and happening and had a ton of energy, and so I found the water fountain and was like, ‘Hey, let me give it a try?’ He was up for it.”
Wearing a purple, cotton, Jacquard shirt ($480) and a come-hither stare (no charge), Donovan gripped the side of the SD440, holding the water fountain’s button down with his index and middle fingers, the latter adorned by a silver ring. He looked into Vriens-McGrath’s lens and ever-so-slightly opened his mouth, allowing the water to hit his bottom lip and flow back into the fountain’s bowl. At that moment, Landon Donovan and the water fountain became inexorably linked.
“At the end of the day,” Vriens-McGrath continues, “it’s about making these guys look hot, look sexy. It’s not interesting to me, to a certain extent, what their job is, or their sexuality is. So we went for it. And now look, here’s Landon Donovan sucking water out of a fountain with these cock-sucking eyes.”
Brian McBride arrived next. He put on a Prada shirt and patterned pants, then took up position with a fencepost not far from the water fountain. At Vriens-McGrath’s direction, he leaned forward, grasping the post in a pose that looks natural and unnatural all at once, like so many fashion shots do. He is undeniably handsome. (McBride did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)
“These guys are studs,” says Vriens-McGrath. “One of my favorite pictures is actually of Brian McBride. The pose, I really had to guide him into it, because I wanted him to hold on to the fence post as if it was a giant dick. If you look at 17th century still lives or portraits, they are full of suggestions. There are suggestions everywhere, honestly.”
Others followed. Cobi Jones slipped into a pair of Helmut Lang jeans, leaning back against the netting of a practice goal like a hammock. Barefoot, with his pant legs rolled up, Jones looks like a castaway, like he woke up on a deserted beach after a night of clubbing.
“I thought it was an interesting photo, honestly, an interesting idea,” says Jones. “We were all sent off separately, which was interesting as well, so no one knew what anyone else had done. I think we would’ve had a better idea of what was going on if we were all together. Maybe someone would’ve just been like, ‘Oh, yeah, not so much.’”
For whatever reason, when the Times ran the photo, it was cropped from the waist up — a choice that almost completely eliminates the jeans from the shot.
“A lot of my pictures were rejected on first edit,” says Vriens-McGrath. “If you look at Cobi Jones hanging onto that net, originally his legs were spread and his ass and crotch were in that picture, and believe me, the photo was a thousand times better. He’s such a handsome guy, and the look on his face is like, ‘Come fuck me.’”
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Mathis and Mastroeni rounded out the shoot.
It’s hard to overstate the hype around Clint Mathis in the buildup to the ’02 World Cup. With hindsight, Donovan was the team’s star. We often forget Mathis, mohawked and unapologetic, sprinting across the field after scoring against South Korea in the group stage. Just a day before the team convened in Cary, Mathis had flown to Europe to meet with representatives from Bayern Munich. Not long after, he would pose in an entirely different set of photographs, one of which landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Cletus was brash, cocky and emotional. In the profile that accompanies the Times Magazine shoot, he predicts that the U.S. will win the World Cup.
“Americans are sort of greedy people,” he tells the writer, Jeff Z. Klein. “We’re pretty much the lead country in everything.”
“Looking back at the photos now, I think they were kind of funny,” Mathis says today. “I mean, I’m no model, man, but I think I did OK. I’m looking at the picture here and it’s just me just with my hands on a fence, looking down, with my shirt open. It wasn’t really in my wheelhouse but hey, I’ll take it. I guess right after that I was the ‘mohawk bad boy’ anyway, so whatever.”
Mathis actually appears in the magazine twice. There is the photo of him making eyes from behind a fence line, yes, but there’s also a far different photo, a black-and-white portrait of Mathis seated on a wooden block in his uniform shorts and socks, legs spread apart, his arms resting on his thighs. The photo is simple, a classic black-and-white portrait that wouldn’t look out of place as a Calvin Klein ad.
“I took extra pictures of Clint Mathis for another story,” Vriens-McGrath recalls. “These are classic studio pictures, very simple lighting, black and white. I remember asking him to just hang out. Because I wanted him to look like, you know, big legs, calves, and just like a big dude. And so I said spread your legs a little more, I asked him two or three times. I felt like he was shutting down a little bit, but we ended up really with one of my favorite pictures. I’m sure if he looks at that picture now he’s probably in love with himself.”
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The shoot climaxed with the arrival of Pablo Mastroeni.
Mastroeni only narrowly made the 2002 World Cup roster. With just eight caps under his belt, the defender hadn’t played in a single qualifier. This was also the 26-year old MLS player’s first time being photographed in a $1200 shirt.
“Obviously as a younger player on the team and a guy that essentially just squeaked onto the roster I had no expectations of what (the shoot) would be like,” says Mastroeni. “I remember going with a couple of older guys on the shoot, and I’m saying to myself ‘if those guys are doing it, I’m doing it.’ None of us knew what we were gonna get into as we got into that shoot.”
The stylist on the shoot, Anne Christensen, busied herself picking out the correct outfit for the Argentine-American, as she’d done for all the players. She cycled through a series of shirts, measuring each against Mastroeni’s skin tone, and finally made her selection: a textured, white-and-turquoise button-up that fit Mastroeni’s frame perfectly. She paired it with maybe the shoot’s standout garment: a plain pair of white linen pants.
“At the time,” says Mastroeni, “I was 25 and I was willing to be daring in the clothes I’d wear, my hairstyles. I was willing to try all kinds of different things. There is no way you’d find me in those pants today. Nor doing that photoshoot. But back then, going through what we were going through, and my age, in the experience in its totality, it was a really interesting experience.”
Mastroeni’s outfit feels like a perfect time capsule of the fashion sensibilities of the time; something that wouldn’t look out of place at the MTV Video Music Awards. His posture, though – the arched back, the longing gaze – is what makes his shot timeless.
“The photographer was very demanding in a lot of ways,” says Mastroeni. “In terms of poses, in terms of our facial expressions. I was in a different world, I had no idea the level of detail that they put into shoots like these. So I totally just rolled with it. I was really happy to be there, I was just taking in the whole experience both on and off the field … I felt like a guinea pig, you know? I was just like whatever you guys need, this is a big deal.”
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Donovan’s photo may be the shoot’s most memorable, but to the members of the 2002 USMNT polled for this piece, Mastroeni’s is the one, 20 years on, that causes the most laughter.
“I’d love to just hear the direction on some of the photos,” Jones laughs. “I’d love to hear what (Matthias) said to Pablo. ‘Arch your back more,’ probably.”
“If I had some advice for Pablo,” Mathis adds, “I’d tell him to listen to a little more Ludacris, and do what Ludacris says: ‘Stand up.’”
Bruce Arena is sitting on a metal bench, taking off his boots. From 20 yards away, I can hear him groan when he is told what I want to talk about. We are at a New England Revolution training session. A few weeks before my visit, Arena became the club’s head coach. He turns in my direction.
“You want to talk about this fucking photo shoot from 17 years ago?” he bellows. I nod. Arena pats the bench next to him. “All right. Come on over.”
Arena took over as head coach of the U.S. men’s team soon after their last-place showing in the 1998 World Cup. In May of 2002, he was at the tail-end of a four-year process designed to rehabilitate the team’s image.
“What do I remember?” Arena says. “I remember how ridiculous they looked. We were all just saying, ‘Why the hell would you even agree to do that?’ It was pretty stupid, yeah.”
The photos seemed to come out of nowhere. After the shoot, Vriens-McGrath sent his images to the Times while the U.S. team broke camp in Cary and traveled to South Korea, where they focused on prepping for the their first game, against Portugal.
“The first time I heard about the shoot was about seven in the morning at our hotel in Korea,” recalls Kammarman, “when I started hearing hollering and laughing and stuff from the hallways. And I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ That was the first time I heard anything about how it happened.”
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Keller remembers it well, too. NY/NJ MetroStars goalkeeper Tony Meola helped lead the mockery. “Doesn’t he look pretty?!” shouted Meola as he held up Keller’s photograph.
“It was just everybody laughing at each other,” Keller says, chuckling. “It was like Cobi’s would come out and then everybody would be aghast, then they’d see Landon’s came out and people were dying, and then Pablo’s came out, then Brian’s — it was just like one after the other. It’s funny because it was like going through a horror movie where you keep putting your hands over your eyes and then you open them again and there’s something else coming at you.”
“I think somebody might have showed us a copy, or we saw it online,” says Mathis. “We were dying. We all were judging who looked the worst, it was pretty funny. But let’s just say it was way more comical for everybody who wasn’t in the shoot.”
A George Vescey dispatch in the Times a day after the release sums up the response to the photos fairly well:
“The seven players were receiving feedback from teammates, fans, friends, family and perhaps even a voice or two within the staff that the clothing and the poses were, how can one say this, a trifle short of masculine.”
A team staffer describes Arena in a state of confusion, “walking around with a hand on his head.”
Donovan, a relative newcomer, probably got the worst of the ribbing.
“Landon was young back then,” says Friedel. “He and DaMarcus were really, really young, so they may have gotten it a little bit worse than some of the older guys.”
The photograph would follow him around for the rest of his career, blown up and displayed in MLS stadiums, hurled at him as a cheap insult or playfully parodied by former teammates. For some fans, the photograph validated their perception of “Landycakes” Donovan as soft, effeminate, a pretty boy — playground taunts that veer toward the homophobic. Others have been even less veiled in their derision. “Soccerball’s poster boy is the master of homoerotica,” ran one 2008 headline.
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Donovan would go on to build a career as one of the most successful American soccer players of all time, a veteran of three World Cups and the all-time leading goalscorer for the men. He displayed a depth of emotional intelligence that is rare in professional sports, at least in public. In 2013, he took time away from the game and spoke candidly about his own mental health issues. To many who mocked him for the water fountain photo, it was just another reason to take a potshot; to others, it was a refreshing change of pace.
The photo continues to resonate. Donovan was recently named manager and GM of San Diego Loyal, the USL team of which he is a part-owner. “Surely their first tifo has to be the water fountain pic,” teased someone online.
Vriens-McGrath got his own blowback for the shoot. After our first conversation, he looks back through old contact sheets and negatives at his office, and sends me an excited text when he comes across the motherlode: dozens of outtakes from the shoot, including a series of elegant, understated portraits of Donovan, McBride and their teammates. He drops them in the mail shortly thereafter. I lay them out on a light table when they arrive at my office; in their full, untouched state, they are breathtaking.
“I actually just looked at the pictures again and I’d forgotten that I think the Times was pretty shocked themselves,” he says. “The problem is always — whether they are movie stars, soccer players, race car drivers or whatever — when you portray a man in a sexy way, it will be immediately stamped as ‘homoerotic.’ And that’s what happened here. That is something I have fought with over my entire life. Because after all, certainly now even in almost 2020, what does ‘homoerotic’ even mean? It means nothing. It’s a 19th century piece of crap. This is just a sexy man. But a lot of people look at these pictures and say, ‘Oh my god, that’s so fucking gay.’”
Vriens-McGrath’s reflections speak to why the images have not been forgotten over the years. It’s beyond argument that his photographs of Donovan, Mastroeni and their teammates buck the trend of traditional sports photography and portraiture, in particular the way that male athletes are usually photographed. They are not stoic, one-dimensional, easy to read. In the black-and-white portrait of Mathis, for example, there is an emotional layer not typically present in this branch of photography.
On the other hand, the photos would be right at home in a fashion magazine. Indeed, if you populated these photographs with models instead of soccer players, nobody would bat an eyelash.
“I would say that in all the cases, the men are very much pictured as the passive, coy object of an active sexual gaze,” says UC-Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle, whose work touches on the visual arts, literature and queer theory. “They are in positions that look more like something you’d associate with a teen magazine, with fantasies about teenage girls. So yes, this would make some people uncomfortable. It might surface a confrontation with effeminophobia — a discomfort with, or fear of, effeminacy.”
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In this respect, they are especially ahead of their time.
“In this day and age,” notes Arena, “you don’t comment on the way Landon Donovan and Pablo looked in those pictures.”
“Especially up to right around that time period,” Doyle says, “the photos are breaking some codes from expectations in regards to presenting the masculine body, how you present the male athlete.“
Doyle’s analysis of the photographs echoes the artist’s understanding of why they caused such an intense reaction.
“Of course there’s sexuality in a certain stretch of my photographs of men, but there’s also vulnerability,” says Vriens-McGrath. “And I think there is — as stupid as it sounds now — a possibility, to a lot of people, that seeing a ‘macho’ man portraying a certain amount of openness and vulnerability immediately leads them to perceive that behavior as effeminate.”
It’s a worthwhile exercise to compare Vriens-McGrath’s photos of the USMNT with some of his other photos of athletes during that period, in particular his Dieux du Stade calendar in 2003. That calendar — filled with nude portraits of players from French rugby club Stade Français Paris — is similar, thematically, to his unused portraits from the USMNT shoot, but it’s also more overtly sexual. And yet the French rugby players seem more comfortable in front of the lens than the American soccer players, perhaps in part because of the differing attitudes towards masculinity in Europe.
“It was a night-and-day difference, those two shoots,” remembers Vriens-McGrath. “I felt a reluctancy with some of the soccer players. The French guys were so into body culture, the guys are so proud of their bodies, so narcissistic. Within the structure of the United States, there is this puritanical reluctancy to show flesh while at the very same time there’s this obsession with sex and pornography. It is such a huge, fascinating contradiction.”
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There is also the issue of the place of soccer in American culture. The chance to bring a little glamor to the game was one reason Vriens-McGrath took the assignment. And the sense of duty to grow the sport was what motivated the players to go along with the shoot even if they found it outlandish.
“I remember when it first came out and Bruce said something like, ‘How did you guys not just say no?’” says Keller. “I think some of it was that there was just this… maybe this idea that we needed to do our part to just help promote the game and the team. It wasn’t in our DNA to say no to something like this, if I’m being honest.”
“The American perception of men’s soccer, historically, has been that the game itself is not from the right wing, not manly enough, not properly American, all of that,” says Doyle. “So when I see the photographs, I do see them in relation to that conversation. They look kind of like ‘Eurotrash’ in those images; that’s the kind of thing that — if I were in a room having a conversation with people about the production of those images, it wouldn’t necessarily be, ‘Do these look gay?’ It would be, ‘Does this play to the kind of nationalist, homosexually-panicked bullshit that circulates (in this country?)’”
It’s a bit of an oversimplification, then, to say that the photos were mocked because they were “stupid,” or because the players looked “ridiculous.” Drill deeper and you’ll realize they cause discomfort in other ways, ways some viewers may not be comfortable confronting.
In Korea, Kammarman took responsibility for the shoot, and even years later he’s quick to take the fall. He’d set it up and chosen not to supervise it, a decision he now calls a learning experience. In the years since, he has personally supervised every USMNT photo shoot. He also felt like he’d been played by both the photographer and the New York Times, feelings that simmer to the surface in the present day.
“Let’s be totally honest,” he says. “(Vriens-McGrath) had an absolute agenda. So did the New York Times. And they never told us about it once. To this day, I’m disappointed and frustrated. It was totally unprofessional. They absolutely blindsided us. So much so that I asked after the photo shoot whether I could see the photos — and they said, ‘No, we want it to be a surprise.’ The editor said that to me.
“Needless to say, it was a surprise.”
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Klein, who wrote the Mathis profile that appeared alongside the fashion shoot, wasn’t surprised that Kammarman didn’t get an advance look.
“The Times never, ever, ever shows pictures or text to the people they’re profiling ahead of publication,” he writes in an email. “That’s strictly forbidden — the decision about what to publish always stays totally in-house. The last thing the Times would countenance is a story’s subject having some kind of say or veto power over what appears in the paper.”
“If not for a really good sense of humor, my trip to Korea may have been cut short by a few weeks,” says Kammarman. “Landon didn’t talk to me for two days after the photos were released.”
Yet, strangely enough, the release of the photos — and all of the shrieking, and guffawing that came with them — had a galvanizing effect on the team. The shit-talking, the taking of the piss, it was all part of the team’s character, a huge part of what made the group so successful in Korea. Members of that team didn’t just play for their country, or themselves, or the fans — they played for each other.
“I think in a lot of ways, in order to be brave, a lot of times you have to be vulnerable,” says Mastroeni. “Looking at everyone else’s photos, I was like ‘is this what we wear every day? Are these poses we make every day?’ No. But I think we were comfortable with ourselves and that team in particular was a team that really checked their egos at the door and we were willing to work hard for each other and represent the country the best way we could. And so I think that shoot was a reflection of that, we were all in the same boat, we all had pictures in there and regardless of what the people on the outside were saying, we felt comfortable and in a lot of ways it did bring us together.
“The guys were actually super about it,” adds Kammarman. “It was a really good group of guys. When we talk about 2002 and why we were so successful, part of it was the camaraderie and spirit in the locker room. These were really great dudes and they were super tight. So something like (the photo shoot), it was just something that everybody rolled with and had fun with as a group… except maybe for some of the subjects.”
Years later, every player polled seems to have a sense of humor about the shoot, as though time has made the photographs more palatable.
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“I do remember that Pablo Mastroeni, he, a year or two years ago, reached out to me on Instagram,” says Vriens-McGrath, “and it was great. All of those guys look 20 years older now and I’m sure looking back at these pictures and seeing themselves in their full glory, they’re just going ‘fuck, I look like a hot dude. Thank you.’”
“A buddy sent the photo to me today and said ‘you were a good looking soccer player back in the day,’” says Mastroeni. “And I don’t know if he was just messing around, but I looked at it and said ‘you know what? Yeah. I looked pretty good back in the day.’ I smile every time I see the photo. At the time I was in my mid-20s, representing the U.S. and that picture brings back amazing memories of our World Cup run. When I’m looking at it at age 46, sure, maybe it looks a little silly… But at the time? I was living my best life, man.”
The shit-talking persists, though — especially when it comes to Donovan’s portrait.
“The water fountain photo is the worst one,” says Keller. “For sure. 100%. Pablo’s is second with his ass in the air on the bench, but the water fountain is by far the worst. I think we all have specific thoughts on the water fountain photo.”
“Landon is the one that’s most talked about,” adds Kammarman. “It’s still not out of the realm of possibility that that photo would get blown up and seen in a stadium somewhere, even though Landon isn’t playing anymore.”
I ask Mathis for his thoughts on the photo in question. He pauses, laughs, and offers up his own snap analysis:
“I’m just happy I’m not the water, man.”
I sit in my car and watch the sun continue its descent in the Carolina sky. When the magic hour arrives, I set up a tripod and a pair of reflectors. From the other side of an empty parking lot, a security guard pulls up. He asks what the hell I’m doing. I tell him I’m just here to take a portrait of a water fountain. He stares at me for a few seconds and drives away.
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The SD440 should be on any shortlist of American soccer monuments. We’ve thrown so much of our history away, and I can’t help but feel a bit somber about this stupid little water fountain. For years, it has sat unappreciated and unnoticed.
After I photograph it, I whip my phone out and locate a trophy shop not far from WakeMed. When I tell the helpful employees at Crown Trophy that I need a plaque engraved in the next hour, and that it’s to commemorate a soccer player drinking out of a water fountain down the street, they look at me like the psychopath I probably am, but they also get to work quickly. They suggest that I have my message engraved on U.V.-resistant plastic — the fountain may continue to deteriorate, they say, but this plaque will not.
Back at the park, I affix the plaque to the fountain with double-sided tape. I’m careful not to damage it with screws or a more powerful adhesive. In my mind, a groundskeeper will stumble upon the plaque and do the right thing: carefully drill a couple of holes in it and fasten the plaque in place for eternity.
It’s a simple statement, not meant to sum up any of the complexities of the photograph, which will likely continue to crop up in the coming years.
“People will always remember these photos,” says Keller “I’ll meet, for whatever reason, like, a new group of friends. They’ll usually know something about me, that I played, all of that. … Inevitably, this photo shows up somewhere, on an email from one of these people. Like, ‘Oh my god, where the hell did this happen?” It must’ve been four or five years ago, and (Portland Timbers owner) Merritt Paulson emails me the fucking photo and is like, “Holy shit, where did this come from?”
“Look, I’m not going to pat myself on the back too much,” says Vriens-McGrath. “But this is probably the one photo shoot these guys probably all remember. How many photo shoots have they done where they got nice pictures out of it, but they don’t even remember them now? So, in that sense, there’s a certain importance to these photos. It’s nice trickery, to play with masculinity and sexuality like that, especially with soccer stars. It’s great. How many photos of soccer players are taken that are still talked about almost 20 years later? Can you even name one?”
Cobi Jones gets it.
“It’s going to be interesting when we’re all like 80 and they still show these photos of us,” he says, just before ending our call. “I mean, I don’t even care, man. I’ll be saying, ‘Look how good I looked back then!’”
Epilogue
In the years that followed the release of this piece, that stupid little water fountain at WakeMed Park became a bit of a pilgrimage point, in the world of American soccer at least. Once a month or so, I’d get tagged in someone’s Twitter post after they’d made the trek to Cary, North Carolina, to pay their respects to the SD440. Some of their photos were selfies, others just photos of the fountain. A few lacked a photo at all — they were just messages, letting me know that yes, the fountain, and the plaque I’d affixed to it, were still safe.
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I loved all of this. The bubbler, which had taken part in a photoshoot that was so widely derided and mocked, had now become a fountain of joy. Nobody who made the trek was mean-spirited about it — they drank from the fountain as a way to celebrate the weirdness of American soccer, or pay homage to one of its great players.
Naturally, I was troubled in April of 2022 when Twitter user Josh Weber alerted me to its disappearance.
🚨 🚨 paging @MLSist 🚨 🚨
The Landon Donovan water fountain is no more! Placard is gone and it’s gotten a makeover. @Joshplaysdrums and I still drank from it anyway.
Cc: @landondonovan @MLS pic.twitter.com/4AKdpwq4Kh— Josh Weber (@SalisburyUnited) April 9, 2022
I’d affixed the little plaque to the fountain to allow fans to easily identify it, of course, but I’d also made that inscription in the hopes that someone at WakeMed Soccer Park would recognize the historical value of the fountain. In a bit of a panic, I picked my phone up and called the facilities manager there, David Crotts, leaving him a voicemail. I was immensely relieved the next day when an email from him landed in my inbox.
“Sorry for the late response,” Crotts wrote. “I wanted to get you a picture of the water fountain in its current resting place. So… I can confirm that the fountain is safe and still at WakeMed Soccer Park.”
Crotts, and others at WakeMed, had read my story and had long been aware of the fountain’s place in American soccer lore. The town of Cary had simply replaced the fountain because it was falling to ruin and it lacked some more modern amenities like a water bottle spout, or a bowl at the base of the fountain for a dog. But the staff knew to spare the fountain from an ignominious death in a scrap yard. If I could find a suitable home for the fountain, Crotts said, the city would let go of it.
What to do, then, with this relic? My first thought was to take it to the National Soccer Hall of Fame’s archives in nearby Hillsborough, North Carolina. I called Djorn Buchholz, the hall’s president, to ask if they’d store it there. Buchholz did not want it in the archives, he told me. He wanted it in the hall of fame itself. Maybe, he said, they could even get it working again.
“We are excited that this piece of history is now safe,” Buchholz wrote in an email, “and we look forward to creating the appropriate way to display it to all visitors of the National Soccer Hall of Fame.”
On a Thursday afternoon in May of 2022, I headed to Cary and picked up the SD440. The fountain would be my passenger on a 2600-mile round-trip to Texas.
I’d realized in 2018, while writing this piece, that the SD440 had been manufactured by Most Dependable Fountains in Memphis, Tennessee – conveniently along the route between Cary and Frisco. So I decided I’d make a little pit stop, bringing the fountain back to its place of birth. I showed up unannounced, but Connor McGrory, the owner’s son (and also a long-time employee) walked me around the factory floor, where employees were busy welding, powder coating and assembling new units. In one corner stood a brand-new, gleaming fountain in the style of the Donovan one. I found myself wondering if any future soccer stars might someday drink from it.
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A few years ago McGrory and his father wanted to give their employees a way to pass the time during lunch breaks or after work. So they laid down a bunch of sod in the field behind the factory and threw up a couple of soccer goals. On the pitch behind Most Dependable Fountains, American soccer is practiced in its oldest form — by factory workers, playing for the love of the sport and nothing else. Their team may not rival Bethlehem Steel’s, but who knows — maybe we’ll see MDF SC in the Open Cup some day.
McGrory laughed when he saw the fountain in my truck, and laughed harder when I showed him the Donovan photo. He’s thrilled to see the Hall of Fame take the fountain in, he says, and he even offered his help, potentially, in restoring the thing.
I arrived at the Hall of Fame in Frisco the following day and dropped the fountain off in the facilities office there. I walked through the hall itself, a treasured collection of jerseys, balls, trophies and other items from nearly a century-and-a-half of women’s and men’s soccer in this country.
What the hall might lack are relics that fall outside the lines of traditional history, items from the game’s cultural history that have remained out there in the ether of American soccer for years. The water fountain is one such item, and I’m thrilled The Athletic could play a part in its preservation. Hopefully they’ll get it up and running, and fans from all over will once again get to take a sip.
(Top illustration by Clare Shipley)
