From rags to riches, that’s a beautiful, but now very unlikely story – if it was ever much more than an American cliché. However, the one that Kevin Behrens talked about on Wednesday doesn’t sound much more likely. A good five years ago, Behrens was still playing in the regional league in Saarbrücken. Now he was standing surrounded by microphones on the terrace of the national soccer team’s team hotel in Foxborough and seemed to be amazed by his story.
“I would never have dreamed of this,” he said, not even that he would make it to the Bundesliga. And even though his American dream seemed rather unglamorous at that moment, with the view of the gray wasteland of a parking lot in front of Gillette Stadium and the equally gray side of a suburban restaurant, he added a generous dose of pathos to his descriptions: “I am incomprehensible proud of it.” In a completely grounded way, he allowed the thought that his journey from quite low to almost the very top had something exemplary. Behrens said he believes that he “can be a role model for one or the other.”
