Curtis Pride never considered being deaf as a handicap. In fact, he felt it gave him some advantages over other athletes.

“I felt it helped me a lot,” he tells the Guardian, adding that that it allowed him to focus at the task at hand “and not let the noise bother me. It has given me like a sixth sense and to be able to anticipate better. It also gives you motivation to prove to others that I can do it just as well.”

As a teenager, Pride had proven that – in triplicate and then some. He attended the College of William and Mary on a basketball scholarship. He was an accomplished baseball player, being able to chase down fly balls in the outfield while becoming a pretty decent hitter. And he was a lethal forward for USA as a standout at the first Under-16 World Cup in China in 1985, at a time when not many American players were starring on soccer’s world stage.

At the tender age of 17, Pride made a career-defining decision, choosing baseball and embarking on a remarkable 23-year professional career in the minor and major leagues. Baseball’s gain became soccer’s loss.

Many soccer observers, coaches and officials have asked the question: what if Pride had chosen soccer?

“Believe me, he’s definitely going to be missed by the game,” Angus McAlpine, the former US U-16 coach, said in 1987. “He provides personality to the game.”

Who could have blamed Pride? US pro soccer was enduring its darkest days. The North American Soccer League went out of business after the 1984 season. The USA had not qualified for a World Cup since 1950, the awarding of the 1994 World Cup wouldn’t happen until 1988 and Major League Soccer wouldn’t kick off until 1996.

“There was no future in soccer,” Pride said at the time. “It was the money. Soccer [on the professional level] is not popular and is declining in America.”

Pride actually wanted to participate in yet another sport, but he wasn’t allowed to play tackle football after a year of flag football. “My dad wouldn’t let me because of the high risk of injury. so I played soccer instead,” he says. His hero was Pele. “I was always trying to emulate him scoring [in different ways],”.

While attending John F Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, the 6ft, 210lbs Pride became the first basketball player in school history to score more than 1,000 points. A four-year starter on the baseball team, he batted .509 and hit five home runs in 16 games as a senior. On the soccer pitch, Pride was named a 1986 Parade Magazine High School All American.

His speed and athleticism caught the eye of McAlpine. The USA qualified as the 1983 Concacaf U-16 champions, but since that squad was over-age for the 1985 competition, a new team was needed. “He would pick up the ball and show tremendous quickness,” McAlpine told this reporter in 1987. “Not only that, he had another dimension – quick feet in the box.

“If you looked at the boy on the field, you’d think this guy can’t play. He was so unpredictable technically. The ball would be out in front of the goal and he’d hit the corner flag with it. He seemed to be lost out there, but the more and more I looked at him, I liked him. As for as skill off the ball he seemed to be in the right place at the right time. I call it build-in radar in his mind.”

Pride went through a series of tryouts and made the team. “He was a great guy,” says former team-mate Lyle Yorks, the 1987 Gatorade National Player of the Year and two-time NCAA Division I champion at the University of Virginia, who eventually became a player agent. “There was a basketball hoop in Beijing in our set-up. We were doing a little pickup game of basketball and he was dunking the ball. He was such a great athlete.”

The USA lost to Guinea, 1-0, in the second game of the tournament-opening doubleheader before a capacity crowd at Worker’s Stadium in Beijing on 31 July. “He just was so strong and explosive,” Yorks says, remembering how opponents tried to tear Pride’s ear piece out in the heat of play. Pride wore a headband to keep the sweat out of the device.

On one play, Pride was offside by inches. “There was over 80,000 at our opening game,” Yorks says. “The refs blew the whistle and he didn’t hear anything. He went the whole half of the field, took a shot on goal. Everyone else had stopped playing. So just thinking about the hurdles he had to overcome to play at that level was pretty inspiring and pretty special.”

Pride demonstrated how special he was against favored Bolivia and future national team star Marco Etcheverry, who became a DC United legend.

In their second group match, on 2 August, the US shocked the South Americans, 2-1. After Etcheverry scored, Pride took center stage, setting up Larry McPhail’s 51st-minute equalizer and scoring the game-winner in the 64th. “I felt that from winning the game we had a legitimate chance to advance to the next round,” Pride says.

In a must-win game two days later against the hosts, China, USA lost 3-1 with Pride scoring in the 78th minute. “We lost a tough game,” Pride says. “They were just too much for us.”

To his surprise, Pride was selected as one of the best 15 players in the world at his age level. “I was shocked because I know there were many, many top players in the world,” he said. “But just to be named one of the top 15 players was really an honor and humbling. It gave me more confidence.”

When Pride returned to the States, other challenges awaited. At William and Mary, he was named to the Colonial Athletic Association all-rookie basketball team in 1987 and to the CAA’s all-defensive team twice.

Soccer coach Al Albert tried to coax him to play in the fall. “We always drooled over Curtis,” he says. “I would see him in the fall and we’d talk about soccer. He was good friends with a couple of kids on the team. He always said ‘I’d like to play soccer, but obviously I’m here to play basketball on a full scholarship.’”

But Pride did play one spring in a seven v seven tournament along with two W&M football players who were soccer enthusiasts – Steve Christie, who kicked the longest field goal (54 yards) in Super Bowl history (XXVIII in 1994) for the Buffalo Bills, and Michael “Pinball” Clemons, who played for the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL and for the Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League before becoming a team executive with the latter.

“We had three of the best athletes in the school who had been soccer players and managed in that one seven-a-side tournament to get them to all play. It turned us into an extremely athletic team that weekend,” says Albert, who added that he had a good laugh with Walter Chyzowych, the former US national coach who was Wake Forest coach. “These guys weren’t just raising us to the level of athleticism of the better college soccer teams, they were taking us into professional athleticism, the players were so fast and strong.”

Albert says that Pride’s “touch wasn’t great then. He hadn’t played much, but he was a handful.”

“I don’t remember much of the details about it except that we won. We walked away thinking if we could get these three guys on the field for us next year it would be a pretty good team,” he adds. “I think they all would have rather played pro soccer.”

Despite his his international soccer success, Pride decided to pursue a baseball career after he was selected by the New York Mets in the 10th round of the 1986 draft.

“Soccer was my best sport, but not my favorite sport to play,” he says. “I always loved playing baseball. If I had to start all over again, and we were in this generation when soccer has now become popular, maybe I would have taken a different path and gone overseas.”

Pride toiled for seven-plus years in the minor leagues, before making his major league debut with the Montreal Expos. A lesser man would have given up the dream many years prior.

“Well, I always believed in my ability and I was very determined ... and tried to stay in the game for as long as I could because I knew I could play in the majors,” he said. “It was a matter of a team giving me an opportunity. I enjoyed the camaraderie and being able to experience different cities and traveling and meeting a lot of people.”

His most memorable moment came when Pride collected his first major-league hit, a double in Montreal’s 8-7 win over the Philadelphia Phillies, during the pennant race in September 1993, “I had a five-minute standing ovation,” he said. “It was a very emotional experience.”

In 1996, Pride enjoyed a career-year, clubbing 10 home runs and driving in 31 runs while batting .300 in only 267 at-bats for the Detroit Tigers.

By the time he retired in 2008, Pride had played for six MLB teams: Montreal, Detroit, Boston, Atlanta, New York Yankees, Los Angeles Angels. His career hitting statistics certainly were not Hall of Fame quality, but definitely respectable: 20 homers, 82 RBI, .250 average in 796 at-bats and 421 games.

He was named coach at Gallaudet University, a college for deaf and hard of hearing students in Washington, DC for the 2009 season. Transforming the baseball team would take time. “I have enjoyed coaching at Gallaudet,” he says. “It was a long and difficult process because I came to change the entire baseball program.”

The team improved, winning a record 25 games in 2012, missing the North Eastern Athletic Conference title by a game. This year the Bison have struggled. Pride figures the program “may be one or two years away,” from reaching the NCAA Division III tournament.

“This year has been difficult,” he says. “It has been a difficult and challenging year for us because we are a very young team and going through a learning experience and making a lot of mistakes. But we will be a better team next year along with several high quality recruits coming in. So I am excited about next year. I think it may be the year where we finally get into the NCAA tournament.”

For soccer’s sake, it’s too bad Pride never got an opportunity to play in its NCAA tournament and on the professional side as well.

“It’s interesting. Times have changed,” Yorks says. “I am flying to Europe today to work on a bunch of deals and the opportunities these kids have today. ... Who knows what he would have been doing if he had came through today? Maybe he would have gone a different route.”

Adds Albert: “He certainly had that one moment in China and made the all world team. That’s pretty good. ... Who knows how high he could have gone? We’ll never know. We can only surmise.”