.@WaterPoloTony 's final game representing Team USA is only 4 days away! Sunday, June 11th at 3:30pm pt. #ThankYouTony #WaterPoloWednesday pic.twitter.com/7G0H0fU7ER — USA Water Polo (@USAWP) June 7, 2017

Tony Azevedo is fluent in Italian and Portuguese. He’s also able to articulate certain thoughts during trips to Croatia or Montenegro.

“If you take me to a restaurant, I can talk food, I can talk wine, I can talk water polo,” Azevedo said. “But that’s about it.”

The 35-year-old learned such skills after leaving Stanford to play men’s water polo overseas for the past 12 years, but the five-time Olympian is calling it quits Sunday at one of his favorite spots in the world — Avery Aquatic Center.

“I took this season after the Olympics in Rio and really tried to reevaluate,” Azevedo said. “Am I ready to go another four years professionally in Brazil or somewhere else in Europe? Or am I ready to go home? And I think it became a really easy decision when my 4-year-old was missing all his friends at school. We had a lot more friends and family at home here, and my little girl was born.

“And it was just like, you know what? Even though I had a great offer to continue playing in Brazil, I just knew it’d be time.”

This past December he informed both USA Water Polo and head coach Dejan Udovicic of the decision to retire.

What was the proper way to honor a legacy left behind by one of the greatest players in history of the sport?

A light bulb went off in Udovicic’s head and he promptly contacted Stanford coach John Vargas, who enjoys a long history with Azevedo as his first Olympic coach at the 2000 Sydney Games.

The idea is rather simple and at the same time innovative, an exhibition game Sunday at 3:30 p.m. between the United States and Croatia at the pool Azevedo used to refine his craft for four years as a Cardinal.

“We’ve never done this before,” said Vargas, who took over the program in 2002, when Azevedo was a sophomore on The Farm. “But if you’re going to do it, this is the guy you do it for.”

He added: “We want to sell this place out. When Tony was here, we would get full crowds because he was so exciting to watch play. It’s really fitting that it’s here, and just one more sellout for Tony.”

Azevedo’s collegiate career at the turn of the century consisted of back-to-back NCAA championships and two runner-up finishes.

The 6-foot-1, 198-pound attacker is the only four-time winner of the Peter J. Cutino Award, the equivalent of the Heisman Trophy in water polo.

But one of his favorite memories as a Cardinal didn’t involve water polo, it was meeting his wife as a freshman.

“I really felt at home,” said Azevedo, who left as the program’s all-time leading scorer, before his mark was eclipsed in 2015 by Bret Bonanni. “I met this group of players that are hard to find in today’s sporting world, where no one cared about the scoring, no one cared about the individual accolade. All everyone cared about was winning.”

“That separates him from everyone else,” said Vargas, of his team-first mentality. “He’s an amazing offensive player, there’s no question the best I’ve seen. Everyone has tried many different tactics to stop him, and he’s always about doing what’s best for the team, so he became an unbelievable passer starting at a very young age.

“He’s that guy that made everyone better around him.”

The international résumé is the stuff of legends.

Azevedo departs as the all-time leading scorer at the World Championships, a five-time gold medalist at the Pan American Games, twice a silver medalist at the FINA World League Super Finals and a couple of years ago was recognized as the Pac-12 Men’s Water Polo Player of the Century.

But it’s hard to imagine anything transcending the silver medal he brought back from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“That was a very emotional Olympics, because we were all on the same page,” said Azevedo, a member of the national team since 1998 and the captain beginning in 2005. “No one believed in us. There was no money for us to even train and go abroad as much as we wanted, but we figured out a way to come together and make it work.”

This mindset of overcoming adversity can be traced back to his childhood, when as a 4-year-old his trachea and esophagus were severed in a backyard accident.

“For a minute and a half I was dead,” said Azevedo, who was too young to remember details. “My mom tells me stories that I was in and out — was going to die, coma, was going to live — and she told me a story that a lady in a white dress came and told me it’s my time to stay here. I don’t really remember all that stuff, but at that moment when I finally got out of the coma and everything was ready for me to leave, they said, ‘Your son is going to have to be on a machine for the rest of his life and sports is something that is probably going to be out of the question.’

“And I always think of that. It really made me enjoy every moment of playing, but it made me realize how the competitive spirit can really make you succeed over anything. They said that you can’t play sports, and that was never a question. And whether I couldn’t breathe sometimes or whether it was going to be harder on me, I was just going to prove everyone wrong.”

A month after his birth in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Nov. 21, 1981, the family moved to Long Beach, where Azevedo currently resides.

His father, Ricardo, is a key figure in his life, but Azevedo makes it clear the motivation to reach such heights in the sport is intrinsic.

“My dad never pushed me into the sport,” Azevedo said. “He never told me I needed to be a water polo player, he never told me I needed to be an Olympian. He took me around and told me how to be a good human being.”

Ricardo Azevedo coached the men’s junior national team when Jack Bowen, eventually a goalkeeper at Stanford, was a sophomore in high school in the late 1980s.

It was not uncommon to see Tony at practices.

“We all loved when he would jump in (the pool) as a little 5-year-old Tony,” said Bowen, the boys water polo coach at nearby Menlo School in Atherton. “He wasn’t intimidated by the best players in the country, who would go on to be Olympians.”

Their paths crossed again when Bowen was coming off an appearance at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, except this time it was Azevedo in high school invited to train with the senior national team.

“We’d all heard about this phenom,” Bowen said. “We were just doing some scrimmage work, and his presence with the ball, I remember it very clearly. Just the way that he attacked the goal and he had this certain look in his eye, like, ‘You’re not going to block my shot.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s a lot of charisma to have for a junior in high school coming in to play two- or three-time Olympians.’ ”

Not ready to entirely step away from water polo, Azevedo has mapped out his future endeavors.

“Unfortunately in our sport, you retire, you don’t make enough money and you leave,” said Azevedo, who thinks he’s found a way to inspire kids in the pool and revolutionize the sport. “But for me, I’m starting the Aquatic Games this summer, which will be an international youth tournament.”

The inaugural Aquatic Games will be held Aug 2-6 at Cabrillo High in Long Beach.

“I also have ideas to change the sport, especially in the United States, because I think we’re so based in California — we need to start growing it outside,” Azevedo said. “Those are the two things that I’m going to dedicate my career to, and in two years if it doesn’t work, then I’m out and I gotta figure out a job somehow.”

Before Azevedo gets ahead of himself, there’s just one matter to take care of.

Going out a winner Sunday against the 2012 Olympic champion, which finished as the runner-up last summer in Rio.

“Obviously I want to beat Croatia,” Azevedo said. “I never enter a game without trying to win. I’m way too competitive of a person, but I’m just there, I’ll play a little bit and try to look decent out there. But in the end, this is the new generation, it’s their team and I want to see them get out there and prove to the world that these guys are the future.”

“That’s typical Tony,” Vargas said. “That he’s talking about everyone else instead of him. He made such an impact on the game. You could see his play with these younger kids and they’re trying to emulate him. It’s special and it’s hard to gauge exactly what he’s done, but he’s done a lot. And it’s pretty amazing.”