COMMERCE CITY — On Wednesday night, Rapids defender Drew Moor will get to savor one of the greatest thrills a professional athlete can experience: being introduced with his league’s all-stars in front of an adoring home crowd.
There was a day last August when he didn’t feel like an athlete at all, though, let alone an elite one. It happened after he had reconstructive surgery to repair the ACL and meniscus in his right knee when his then-fiancée (now wife), Shelby, implied he’d gotten a little ripe having not bathed in the five days since the operation.
“She told me, ‘Hey, you have to take a bath,’ ” Moor recalled last week. “I was sitting in the bathroom and she was bathing me, basically. I was looking in the mirror and I thought, ‘This is a professional athlete that I’m looking at right now?’ That moment I thought, ‘This is as low as it gets.’ “
WATCH:
That explains why Moor became so emotional 10 days ago when he learned of his all-star selection. Rapids broadcaster Richard Fleming set up a video interview with Moor and, with the camera recording the moment, Fleming asked Moor to read from a script sight unseen.
“I am delighted,” Moor read, “to have been chosen to play in front of my home fans as part of the 2015 AT&T MLS All Star team.” Before those last four words, . After finishing the reading, he wiped tears from his eyes and had to compose himself.
“My emotions kind of swept me away,” Moor said. “I think it showed me that maybe being an all-star meant more to me than I would have predicted or realized.”
Moor got a different sort of recognition, but one that was very touching, in the immediate aftermath of the injury, which occurred in a game at D.C. United on Aug. 17. The greatest American player of Moor’s generation, Landon Donovan, reached out to wish him well.
“He was one of the first text messages I got, which meant a lot to me,” Moor said. “He’s the superstar, the face of U.S. soccer for so long. For him to take some time to send me a text on a very tough day for me was pretty special.”
“He’s been fantastic”
This is Moor’s first all-star selection in his 12th MLS season. Rapids coach Pablo Mastroeni got to pick half the all-star team, and he chose Moor essentially as a career achievement award. The Rapids are 5-9-6 this season.
“It hasn’t been an all-star year for any of us, right?” Mastroeni said. “Therefore selecting a player that has brought a lot to the club, the guy that has bled and sweat for this club for many years, who has won a championship and held the trophy over his head, it was a good selection for the organization, the club. A selection from a bigger-picture perspective. And the last five or six games, he’s been fantastic for us.”
Growing up in Dallas, Moor was 12 years old when MLS began play in 1996, two years after the U.S. hosted the World Cup. Like the Rapids, the Dallas Burn was one of the original 10 MLS teams.
“My dad took me to a couple of the World Cup games in 1994, and we went to Dallas Burn games all the time in middle school and high school,” Moor said. “I never really pictured myself being a professional soccer player until college.”
Moor played at Furman, where he was a teammate of Clint Dempsey, now a star for Seattle and the U.S. national team. He transferred to Indiana and was drafted in 2005 by his hometown team the same year the Burn was renamed FC Dallas. He became a regular during his second year with FCD but was traded to Colorado in 2009, moving right into the starting lineup for the final eight games that season. Initially he was “disappointed” by the trade.
“It was out of the blue,” Moor said. “It was a tap on the shoulder on a Monday morning, a plane flight out the next day and playing for a new team that Saturday night.”
The following season, the Rapids beat his old team to claim the MLS Cup. In 2011 Moor set an MLS record for field players by playing the full 90 minutes in his 69th consecutive regular season match. In 2013 he succeeded Mastroeni as team captain.
The blown-out knee he suffered last August was the first major injury of his career.
Healing process
“I don’t think I realized how painful — not just physically, but mentally — the whole process would be,” Moor said. “I’m so lucky that I had my fiancée with me, right by my side the entire way. If she wasn’t there, it would have been so much more difficult. I don’t understand how people who deal with injuries like that don’t have somebody with them. You literally can’t do anything the first couple days after surgery.
“There’s days when you wake up and you feel great and you feel like you’re moving in the right direction. Then there’s days you wake up where you can’t see yourself ever being back to the level you were before.”
It would have been hard to envision making this all-star team back then.
“I’m certainly going to enjoy it and do everything I can to represent this Rapids organization well,” Moor said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’ll take lots of pictures, I’ll answer lots of questions and I’ll have a lot of family and friends here as well. We’ll have a very nice cheering section.”
John Meyer: jmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnmeyer
