The thing about this interview with Cyle Larin is that he would really rather not be doing it. You can tell even over the phone that the 21-year-old Canadian Orlando City SC striker would sooner occupy himself with just about anything else.

He is trying to be into this thing, laboring to come up with adequate responses to my questions, but talking about himself is just so unnatural to him. He is too polite not to answer or to give me short shrift. But he is also too uninterested to really commit.

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It all feels like pulling teeth – for both of us, I’m sure. Larin will say a few words so quietly I’ll have to ask him to repeat them. And then he’ll mumble something obviously shorter than the first time he answered the same question, leaving me to wonder if he’s changed his mind and settled on saying even less.

When I ask him what he does for fun, Larin talks about going to theme parks with his teammates. Or going shopping. Then he lists “getting some rest” as his other hobby.

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I try to get him to open up about some new tattoos I heard he had gotten. Tattoos are a favorite subject of most any pro athlete. He got a stamp on his spine, a blade in a heart that says “Love” on his neck and back and some patterns on his hand. That’s all he’ll say.

“I don’t usually tell stories behind my tattoos,” Larin finally explains, after I press him.

At length, I crack up. “I have the impression you don’t enjoy talking about yourself very much,” I say.

He laughs at this. “I try not to,” he says.

“Why is that?”

“I guess I grew up in a humble house,” Larin offers. “I don’t know. My mom taught me not to, I guess.”

He gets it from his mom. All of it – to keep quiet. To keep his head down. To just keep working. To plug away. To get ahead with his actions, not his words. It seems like his silence is both a credo and a defense mechanism. He steers well clear of most questions from reporters by saying more or less the same thing about working hard.

Larin, who stands 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds making him sizable for a pro soccer player, has been nicknamed the “Silent Giant” since his youth soccer days in Brampton, just outside of Toronto. He’s always been like this.

“I don’t speak out a lot,” he says. “I keep it in. Sometimes when I score, I’ll celebrate really hard. But I tend to keep quiet. I don’t know why. I guess my mom’s like that, too.”

There may be no young striker in the world with a higher ratio of potential to volume. In his rookie season, in 2015, the target man pulverized Major League Soccer’s rookie scoring record of 11 by getting 17 goals, for an expansion team no less. His goals were scrappy, pretty and savvy alike, reflecting his rare blend of athleticism and finesse.

“He’s a man,” says his college coach Ray Reid of UConn. “To be honest, I don’t want to be insulting, but I still to this day don’t think he knows what he has, how gifted he is. He’s very technical, very physical. He’s like a freight train at times.”

In 2016, Larin scored 14 goals, staving off a sophomore slump until the tail-end of the season – he scored 13 times in his first 24 games and just once in his last eight. In September, MLS named him its top player under the age of 24. Larin has already been linked to Benfica, Sporting Lisbon, Lazio, PSV and Corinthians.

And still, he barely talks about his accomplishments. Whereas most strikers of his promise and track record would be brash, or at the very least boisterous, Larin is neither.

“It’s certainly not the norm – usually the strikers are the ones that have the big ego and a whole lot of selfishness and I don’t see that in him,” says Orlando City head coach Jason Kreis, once a fiery striker himself and the first man to score 100 MLS goals. “He’s a very quiet character, that’s for sure. He’s quiet. He’s an introvert. He’s someone that’s thinking about the game quite a bit – he’s a thinking man.”

But this is hardly the only way in which Larin is unusual. For starters, he is arguably the best young striker north of the Equator in the Western Hemisphere, but he’s also Canadian, a country that has struggled for generations to turn out international-level talent. And he’s a rebuttal to the route top prospects are supposed to take now.

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