Atlanta United’s Julian Gressel has two things in common with Michael Jordan, which, to be honest, are two more things than anyone might have guessed.
First: Air Jordan and Herr Gressel share an affinity for a game outside their chosen ones – golf.
In Gressel’s case, the secret is out. No more strokes for him. Golf Digest, in a recent ranking of golfers from other arenas, put Gressel atop the list of those from Major League Soccer. Being named the best golfer in MLS may be a little like being honored for healthiest lifestyle in pro wrestling. Not sure how large or interested the field is. Nonetheless, Gressel says he has shot 69 at Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club, and has become familiar with the soft underbelly of par.
He belongs to no club. With a fiancée and a career, he doesn’t really have time to devote to the selfish mistress of golf. He’s just naturally good at it.
“I try to practice two or three times a week. Go to a public driving range. It’s something you can go out for an hour or an hour-and-a-half and completely clear your head,” one of soccer’s premier golfers said.
Secondly, and this is more important in explaining Gressel’s journey from Germany to the Atlanta United midfield: There’s the teenage rejection thing that both he and Jordan have going.
While the finer points of the story are debated, an event central to the making-of-Jordan story was the day he was cut from his high school varsity basketball team. (OK, maybe he was just a youngster sent down to JV, but Jordan took it as a terrible wrong that he was eternally trying to right).
Getting cut, Gressel says, “stays with you forever.” As a 14-year-old, he was dropped from a team, too, his advancement up the ladder of German youth soccer brought to a crashing and crushing halt.
“It was a time when you start to become really conscious about what’s going to happen here (with one’s life),” Gressel said. “Is there a path moving forward in the academy, or is this now a time where I need to do something else?
“You have a lot of doubts. Thinking back, I can tell I wasn’t the guy. I was cut for a reason. Back then I could have argued with the decision, but not now. They made the right decision based on what they saw and where I was in my development.”
Most people get cut and stay cut. Message delivered. Time to put aside dreams of being the a first-round draft pick and maybe start working on a Plan B that involves spreadsheets and flow charts.
Gressel, instead, performed a soccer reboot. In his hometown in Bavaria, the Gressel name was married to soccer. His grandfather oversaw a local amateur team, one that his father coached. Gressel and his two younger brothers were the soccer equivalent of gym rats, always outside with a ball at their feet. The family even lived next to a local practice field, and it continually beckoned.
“One of the first words I spoke was, “Ball.” I always wanted to bring a ball with me, kick it. It has been in my blood ever since I was born,” he said.
So, no, he wasn’t going to stay cut.
Taking his demotion to a lower level team, Gressel thrived in the less stressful environment. He reset his priorities and added having fun to the list, rather high up as a matter of fact. By his late teens, the club that cut him was asking him back. With a small measure of satisfaction, he declined. And set off on an entirely different course that took him to the U.S. and the less prestigious platform of college soccer (Providence).
That Gressel became the MLS rookie of the year as the second draft pick of the start-up Atlanta United was a nice boost for the oft-unappreciated college game.
That he is regarded by United as such an important and versatile component – and one of the great sporting bargains at $111,000 this season, according to the MLS Players Association – may be traced in part to that day a decade ago he was told he wasn’t good enough.
“Once you sit in a room and get told as a 14-year-old boy that you’re not going to be coming back to what you want to do, my world was crushed. My dream was crushed. I wasn’t doing well there for a week or so,” Gressel said. “But life still goes on. You have to work through that; it builds toughness, I think. It built toughness for me.”
United plays its final home game of a high-gloss regular season Sunday against the Chicago Fire. On one side will be the Fire’s Bastian Schweinsteiger, a big (and long) name back in Germany, a member of the 2014 World Cup champion. On the other is the fellow cut from his youth team in Germany, Gressel. They’re equals this day.
Gressel plays all over the field – appearing at different six positions in his nearly two seasons – now settling in at midfield, right side. He has four goals this season and is tied for the team lead in assists (14). Such in-the-weeds stats like successful open crosses (he’s third in MLS) and chances created (he’s second on the team) reflect Gressel’s talent at setting up plays for the highest-scoring team in MLS.
One secret to being able to plug into so many different spots on the field seems fairly simple: Pay attention.
“A lot of it is being clued in, always,” Gressel said. “If (United manager Tata Martino) is speaking to the defenders about certain shape of things, and I’m playing right wing, I’m still listening to what he’s saying. I’m not tuning him out thinking, alright, he’s not speaking to me. I’m still tuned in. I want to see myself as a player that learns a lot from players all over the field.”
On an outfit with some dynamic goal-scorers like the record-setting Josef Martinez and the gifted Miguel Almiron, Gressel has gained the reputation of United’s most overlooked and undervalued players. But if you’re constantly being called overlooked, doesn’t that mean you’re overlooked no longer?
He has, after all, earned his own group of supporters, one that rallies behind the banner of “GresselMania.” While he’ll never sell like the big goal-scorers, he notes a few more jerseys with his name on them around town and, “it puts a smile on my face every time I see it.”
“You see Atlanta United jerseys around here so much, and I’ll look on the back to see if that’s me,” he said.
When explaining why Gressel has fit so well with Atlanta United, team captain Michael Parkhurst touches on many of the qualities that would make him a good fit anywhere. Like his versatility, his hard work, his savvy.
And then Parkhurst gets to the heart of making it work with this specific collection of talent:
“And he’s confident. I think it would be easy on this team, especially as an offensive player, to kind of shy away just because of some of the big names and the money spent. But he looks at himself as an equal to those guys – as he should. So, he’s not afraid to go out there and take the shot or make the final pass. He’s earned that now. He has the respect and confidence of everyone to go out there and make those decisions.”
Gressel, whose English is more precise than most of those born here, who has made himself into a committed fan of all Boston-related sports and will marry his American fiancée in Florida at the end of the season, has made himself quite at home in the U.S.
If he played out the rest of his career here, he’d be content, Gressel said. “I absolutely love it here,” he said.
Still: “I’ve grown up in Germany. At the end of the day that’s my dream, to play on a 3:30 on Saturday and walk onto a Bundesliga field and play there. You are so connected to that as a young guy. I’ve been away from my family for so long. It would be really cool for them if I were to go back and play basically in front of them every single weekend.”
And show them, show them all, that getting cut doesn’t have to mean the end of anything. It can even be the start of something rather grand.
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