It was a uniquely American soccer career, spanning the arc of the sport’s development stateside in the last two decades, careening from plodding and often-folding minor league teams to championships in Major League Soccer and Mexico’s Liga MX.

It was a Vegas career, too. One of endless chances taken, with plenty resulting in nothing but many more paying out. A career forged in defiance to preposterously long odds, so unlikely that to even call it a rags-to-riches story would be to diminish it somehow.

Herculez Gomez, an occasional United States men’s national team striker, lately of the Seattle Sounders, who thrived in the Mexican Liga MX and became the first American to lead a major foreign league in scoring there, announced his retirement on Tuesday. He is joining ESPN as an analyst.

And so ends a soccer life that took an unknown, unrecruited, unheralded teenager from Las Vegas through 16 semi-pro and professional teams in three countries and to a World Cup over 16 years. The game never gave Gomez an entirely fair shake. So he stubbornly thrashed and struggled and bulled his way in anyway. Until he’d had his fill.

“There comes a time for every athlete when you realize there’s a certain shelf life, there’s a certain period where you’re productive, and there’s a time when it’s appropriate to move on,” he told Yahoo Sports. “I felt mine coming. I love the game so much. And, to be honest, I could have played another year or two, but it would have been just me being stubborn. In my final years, injuries have taken their toll and I haven’t been as productive. It just wasn’t something I was willing to continue to do.”

Gomez sees the young players coming up. And he recognizes that some are better. He wants to clear the path. He’d rather not stand in their way on account of what he was, rather than what he is.

“Sometimes I felt like because I did what I did and I was where I was that I would maybe get the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “And those are insecurities that I don’t like creeping in.”

He has had three surgeries on his right knee. On a lot of days, his body still feels pretty good, though. It’s just that he’d sooner not be a role player. He’d rather jump into his new career in television and settle down in Connecticut with his wife, Elsie, who was a reporter for the Televisa channel and a school teacher when they met during his time in Mexico.

The game gave him nothing. It was all earned. But he still got so much more than anyone thought he would. He doesn’t feel like he can, in all decency, make it give him more.

“I’m your classic overachiever,” Gomez said. “I was never supposed to get this far. I was never the biggest, strongest, fastest or the most clever on the field. I didn’t have an extremely high skill level. But I’ll be damned if anybody outworked me. I feel very fortunate to have gotten as far as I’ve gotten, to see what I’ve seen.”

“I look back at it and feel a sense of gratitude and appreciation,” Gomez continued. “I wasn’t recruited out of high school; I wasn’t the best in my age group growing up. The chips have kind of just fallen for me. I don’t want to say I’ve been lucky, but I’ve been very fortunate, taking advantage of every resource given to me. It kind of just happened for me.”

When he grew up in Vegas in the 1990s, the place was hardly a soccer hotbed. “There weren’t enough teams,” Gomez recalled. “There weren’t enough kids.”

His travel team had to play up an age group or two just to get some competitive games. The only reason he got to play at all was that his team was funded entirely by the father of a teammate, who owned a successful business.

If you wanted to try out for the Olympic Development Program, you needed $100 to play in a mini-camp. Gomez, the oldest of five in a family he describes as “very working class,” didn’t have $100. Nobody from a college ever came to look.

View photos Gomez scored a co-league-best 10 goals for Puebla in 2010. (AP Photo) More

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