COBI ERA COMING TO END? GALAXY VET FACES FINAL HOME MATCH.

Byline: BILLY WITZ

Staff Writer

The dreadlocks still flop around on his head and the teenage girls still shriek whenever his name is announced, but Cobi Jones is no longer the spry, energetic poster boy for American soccer, the Little Engine That Could.

He is 37 now and most days it feels as if there is no end to the uphill climb when he trudges solemnly off the practice field, usually alone, carrying his cleats in his hands.

Jones is still very much a contributor for the Galaxy, the only founding member of Major League Soccer who remains with his original team, but all the trips to the training room -- where he has his own table, he jokes -- and the days he sits out practice haven't eased the chronic pain in his Achilles' tendon or the torn cartilage in his hip.

"Even with the treatment, I play in pain every training session and every game," Jones said. "I've learned to cope with it. But you wonder how long you want to do that. And as the pain increases, how much can you take?"

That's why when Jones walks off the field tonight after the Galaxy's regular-season home finale against the New York Red Bulls, it could be his last game in Los Angeles, the city he moved to when he was 3 months old.

Jones, who will be honored by the team tonight, announced prior to the season that this would be his last, and despite some waffling last month when the Galaxy was stuck with the worst record in the league, he seems more firm now as the team's fortunes have reversed.

"People have talked to me about coming back, but it would have to be something strange," said Jones, who grew up in Westlake Village. "If it did happen, it would be coming out of retirement talk. My plans are that I'm retiring."

When Jones does walk away, he'll be closing the door on a generation that ushered soccer from the backwaters of American sports culture to, at the least, the fringes of the mainstream.

Jones is the last active American who played in the 1994 World Cup, when many in the United States were surprised to learn that soccer wasn't just played Saturday mornings by kids who ate orange slices at halftime.

Two years later, Jones was among a group of players from that team, including Alexi Lalas, Marcelo Balboa and Eric Wynalda, who returned from foreign leagues -- where they played against better competition and often for more money -- to be the cornerstones for the fledgling Major League Soccer, the latest stab at a domestic pro league.

"We'd talk about it whether it was in the back of busses, in hotels, on planes," said Lalas, now the Galaxy's president and general manager. "We were talking about a period in soccer history that was going to have, hopefully a positive effect, but at the very least was going to be a monumental time. We all knew the World Cup was going to be big. None of us knew how big it was going to be and how it was going to impact us individually."

The impact on Jones was dramatic.

By virtue of his bouncing dreadlocks, bright smile, his energetic play on the right wing and status as a rare African-American soccer player, Jones immediately found himself in demand -- from the English Premier League to MTV.

In an era when it was rare for Americans to find jobs in Europe or Latin America, Jones signed with Coventry City of the EPL, then a year later moved to Brazilian club Vasco da Gama. Meanwhile, he landed a guest spot on Beverly Hills 90210 -- a stamp of Generation X approval -- and was flooded with products to pitch.

"At the age of 23, I was doing anything and everything to try to make a buck," Jones said. "The younger players weren't making a whole lot. I was on some menial cash, something like 30 grand a year. Anything that was coming my way, I'd do it."

The exposure did something that was hard to imagine for someone who never expected to play soccer after high school, who walked on at UCLA and was cut twice from the Olympic team.

It made him, for more than a decade, the face of soccer in America.

He is the only Galaxy player whose first name is on the back of his jersey. And judging by the screams of the crowd at the Home Depot Center, he is by far the most popular player next to David Beckham. When European fans were asked last summer at the World Cup to name a player for the United States, Jones' name rolled off several tongues -- even though he hasn't played for his country since 2004.

"There isn't a place we go that Cobi isn't recognized," said Peter Vagenas, a Galaxy teammate of Jones for the past seven seasons. "I don't think we can (overestimate) how important that was for all of us. He was the first person to transcend this sport. Whether you're a teenage boy, a teenage girl, an adult, a male, a woman -- you know who Cobi Jones is."

To a 12-year-old growing up in Redlands at the time of the 1994 World Cup, this was an important development.

"I didn't watch soccer games in Europe, I didn't know anything about the national team, I didn't know anything about how soccer worked," said Landon Donovan, the four-time American player of the year. "Watching the World Cup and finally having heroes to look up to like every other athlete does in every other sport -- looking up to Jordan, Bird, Magic and Gretzky -- it was good to have people to idolize, finally. Without '94, we're not where we are today."

Jones has left his stamp in the record books as well.

He's played in 164 games for the United States, more than anyone else. He is second all-time in assists and was the U.S. Player of the Year in 1998. He's played in three World Cups, including having a key role off the bench in 2002, when the United States beat Mexico 2-0 to advance to the quarterfinals.

Blessed with sprinter's speed and a keen understanding of how to use space, Jones developed enough skill with the ball to become a classic winger. In his prime, he'd be given the ball on the flank and everyone else would clear out and wait for a cross into the box.

In that way, Jones, is something of a relic. As players have become bigger and faster, the field has become more crowded. This has forced the most skilled players -- such as Ronaldinho, Cristiano Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane -- out on the flank, where they have more room to operate. This is even happening in MLS, where players like Chivas USA's Sasha Kljestan operate wide.

As the United States has poured more resources into developing soccer players over the past 15 years, would there still be a place for a player like Jones today?

"Intelligent athletes like Cobi are going to have success no matter what," Lalas said. "Our generation made it up as we went along to a certain extent. I think we'd just do that much better given better coaching, better facilities, more resources -- all the stuff kids have today."

When Jones was 5 years old, he was determined to follow in the footsteps of a cousin who played soccer. Soon, little Cobi was at the foot of the stairs in his house, kicking the ball onto the second, fifth, ninth stair -- whichever one he was aiming for -- trying to get it to stick.

"We had to childproof the whole house," said his mother, Mada.

The perseverance that would become a defining trait, Jones is quick to acknowledge, was passed down. His father, Dr. Freeman Jones, received his doctorate in pure organic chemistry and developed several patents relating to the early development of liquid crystal displacement, the technology behind LCD monitors and televisions.

His mother, a former schoolteacher, regularly marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s.

While Freeman and Mada are both products of the segregationist South, they said their experiences growing up in Mobile, Ala., weren't too much different from Cobi's growing up in Westlake Village -- with the rather sizeable caveat that they didn't intermingle with whites.

"Mobile was much different than the South," Freeman said. "We grew up in pretty much a middle-class setting. We lived among teachers and professionals.

"There was no ghetto. The only negative we had was the dividing line called segregation."

So, just as the importance of education was impressed upon them, Freeman and Mada raised their four boys, of whom Cobi is the youngest by six years, the same way: Educate yourself, then think for yourself.

That helps explain why Jones, while attending UCLA, majored in environmental studies, a subject that interested him. Or why he began wearing dreadlocks, which is also more fashionable now. "It was low maintenance," he said. Or why he is a reading nut, with a book as his constant companion on the road and a library at home full of fantasy books and adventure novels.

Or why he hosted a fitness show on MTV, posed for a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, juggled a ball in his underwear for a sportswear ad -- and still considers himself "a bit of a dork."

"I've never pigeonholed myself into being just a soccer player," Jones said. "Growing up, I was never the guy who would watch 100 soccer games. There were definitely people I knew who were like that who were playing with me. I have many interests. I've always enjoyed different things.

"My parents gave me the strength to stand up for myself. Every kid is picked on, and I obviously looked different than most people so I got a lot of (racial) comments from other kids, so I had to be strong. I've always been someone who's not too concerned about others' opinion of me."

Tonight, though, may be different.

Jones will take the field in a 27,000-seat stadium built just for soccer, the type of which didn't exist when he began his career. He'll notice all the No. 13 jerseys in the crowd, he'll listen to the crowd chant his name, and it's hard to imagine the Little Engine That Could won't look back from where he stands and enjoy the view from the top.

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2 photos

Photo:

(1) Cobi Jones, who grew up in Westlake Village and has played in MLS since its inception, will be honored by the Galaxy tonight.

Jeff Gross/Getty Images

(2 -- color) JONES