When Desmond Armstrong faced the media at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, the opening question wasn't about the remarkable feat of the USA team reaching the tournament for the first time in four decades. “Why aren't you playing basketball?” was directed at Armstrong, then a 25-year-old defender, who was about to become the first US-born black player to represent the United States at a World Cup.
“There were no congratulations, or 'how excited are you to be here?'” Armstrong tells BBC Sport. “The stereotype was 'you're an American and you're black, so you should be playing basketball'. Beyond the fact that Americans shouldn't be here in the first place, why are you here?”
“Desmond Armstrong was asked 'Why aren't you playing basketball?' at his first World Cup press conference in 1990.”
Days later, he would answer in the only way that mattered: keeping the prolific Italy striker Gianluca Vialli off the scoresheet in a brilliant man-marking display against the hosts at the Stadio Olimpico. That performance, Armstrong says, marked a huge turning point for football in the United States and for himself.
The ripples from that match in Rome are still being felt today – but Armstrong's journey to that stage began via a television set in suburbia. His family moved from the Southeast part of Washington DC when he was young and later settled in a largely white neighbourhood in Maryland, where he befriended a soccer coach's son. One afternoon, the coach called Armstrong over to the television, pointing to a Brazilian in a New York Cosmos jersey: Pelé.
“His movement reminded me of a lot of the point guards that played basketball, but he was doing it with a ball at his feet,” Armstrong says. “He was one of the few black players on the team, so that connected me.”
While Pelé was popularising a game he'd learned barefoot, much of the American grassroots version was being built on privilege. Unlike the developing youth academies of Europe and South America, where clubs like Ajax and Barcelona were putting money into talent, development in the US has long run on a pay-to-play model – creating a system that has seldom favoured those from less affluent households.
“It's kind of antithetical to what this game's all about,” says Frank Dell'Apa, who has spent 40 years as the Boston Globe's football columnist. “This is the simplest game with the easiest access. Everybody plays it around the world with no money, no soccer balls, no shoes. And here, we had just the opposite thing going on.”
Armstrong knows just how easily his story could have been different.