Sooner or later, the sun must shine on Cory Gibbs' soccer career.
With perhaps the exception of Danny Karbassiyoon's injury-ravaged spell at Burnley, no experience of an American abroad comes close to matching this softly spoken 26 year-old's cycle of bad luck.
When Hamlet spoke of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, perhaps he had foreseen the Fort Lauderdale-born athlete's curiously ill-starred saga since he left Brown University in 2001, bound for Hamburg.
The five clubs in as many years, two relegations and two crippling knee injuries that followed might have made an ordinary player lose heart, but then he is no ordinary footballer.
"Definitely I take it all as a real blessing," Gibbs told YA. "I don't see this latest injury as something to haggle me throughout the rest of my career. It has just been a short stint for me but I am happy to be here and can't wait to get playing."
Gibbs' latest setback, a knee injury sustained in May playing for the USA against Morocco, ruled him out of a World Cup he would surely have figured in, so was painful in more ways than one, but this Floridian has a thick skin and has seen it all before.
His first two and a half seasons in Europe, with cult Bundesliga team St. Pauli, saw him suffer successive relegations.
Having been invited to join the US camp prior to the World Cup warm up game against Germany in Rostock in 2002, he might even have staked a late claim for a spot in the finals in Korea, but chance intervened again as he picked up a hamstring injury and had to withdraw.
A successful MLS spell with Dallas in 2004 led to a return trip across the Atlantic a year later and a happy season under Ruud Gullit at Feyenoord, before the Fates started spinning again in May of 2005.
Having established himself as one of the National Team's key defenders following his break out in the summer of 2003, Gibbs was selected for the US' 2-1 defeat by England in Chicago, but exited Soldier Field with damaged left knee ligaments.
After almost eight months on the sidelines, the Floridian returned to Rotterdam to find he did not figure in new coach Erwin Koeman's plans.
A loan spell with ADO Den Haag followed, then in May of this year Gibbs landed in England with Charlton, where he is set to make his Premiership bow having debuted for the reserves on November 20th, his knee now healed.
This most recent blow seemed the cruelest yet. All set to start for the US in Germany, Gibbs went the 90 in a friendly with Morocco in Nashville in May and came through unscathed.
"My injury must have happened during the game but I didn't notice it," he recalls calmly. "There was nothing I could pinpoint during the game but after when I was in the locker room taking a shower, the swelling began."
At first he did not realize the magnitude of the situation and continued as normal before the full extent of his injury slowly manifested itself.
"It was actually the day before the second game of our three-game run leading up to the World Cup," said Gibbs. "I was planning on starting (versus Venezuela in Cleveland) and the day before the game I had an X-Ray and an MRI and they spotted it."
"The cartilage behind the right knee cap had worn down, the knee cap was hitting against my thigh bone and that lubricant area where the cartilage is had just worn away."
"They thought it was better for me I got the operation done to see what was going on inside the knee and that it would not have been smart of me to go to Germany in that shape. It was devastating to be honest."
American fans were distraught too, and Gibbs' long-awaited return to first-team action will be one that is cheered loudly throughout the US soccer community.
"I am really looking forward to getting back with it and there's a lot of excitement not just on my behalf," he says, acknowledging the hammer blow that his injury struck to US World Cup hopes a month before the tournament.
We should not have worried about Gibbs though, as he is so well schooled in adversity he knows only too well that the only solution is to remain optimistic.
"At the time when the World Cup started I was at my momma's house and was back to my normal self. I had a positive mentality," he cheerfully admitted. "My focus was just to get started again, and that you know that these things happen."
Even what appears to have been a huge negative he happily turns into a positive.
"It has kind of worked out in my favor," he curiously explains. "Now that I am back in training I am really excited for the next camp and to get back with the boys and see who the new coach will be."
"World Cups come around every four years so I have a bit of time to get ready in the Premiership, where it has always been my dream to play."
And off-field, Gibbs feels fortunate to have no complaints about his new surroundings.
"It has been a real easy change for me," he says from his apartment overlooking London's revamped Docklands district.
"It is by far the best city in Europe I have played in. Hamburg and Rotterdam were really nice, but London, the culture is similar and I feel like I am at home. Every day I speak to my mother in Jamaica and the rest of my family I talk to a lot."
"I live in the same place as Jonathan Spector, same building, everything. I see Spector maybe once a week so it has been good to catch up with him. It's real nice, everybody's back together again - Bease, 'Los, Clauds and McBride's here also so that's good!"
But his Dutch experience is one he will not quickly forget.
"I had a great experience in Holland," he confirms. "I loved it. I don't regret any of it, but to be honest the Dutch league was about four or five hard games that you would encounter throughout the season, whereas in the Premiership you never know who is going to win."
"The intensity is up and either side could win on any given day. It was just time for a change, and from day one I have always told you guys and everybody else the Premiership was my dream, so I am kind of living my dream and I just want to get fit to fully live my dream on a consistent basis now."
Yet as if the gods had not tired of tormenting this happy soul, Gibbs will return amid a team trapped in a relegation struggle, one point off the foot of the Premier League with almost half the season gone. Iain Dowie, with whom Gibbs established a good rapport, was recently fired as coach after only 12 games in charge.
"His attitude was great towards me and the team as a whole," says Gibbs of his first English boss. "He was a guy who was always about football and when you have a manager like that you can't ask for anything more. But we are a club who have to move on whoever the manager is."
We have just had a bad start, a very unlucky start," he continues. "There have been games we played with ten men. We had a streak of three or four games at the beginning of the season where we had eight to nine men injured at one time. It was just real unlucky."
Now the team's healthy and last few games we have not given up a goal so we just need to put some in and we should be OK."
He spoke these words before the Addicks were pummeled 5-1 at Tottenham on December 9th, a result which confirms they have a dogfight for survival ahead of them.
"It is really hard for me because the Premiership is where I want to be," he insists. "I have watched them train day in and day out and I see myself here so it has been frustrating, but I just have to be patient and my time will come."
Good things come to those who wait, and Gibbs has done more than his fair share of waiting. With the best wishes of all US fans behind him, he is about to embark on the next chapter in his challenging career.
Cory Gibbs is certainly no quitter, and for all his apparent ill fortune, he correctly identifies his life as a lucky one, and as far as his future soccer exploits go, he would do well to remember the ancient Roman maxim that fortune favors the brave. |
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