FC Dallas coach Luchi Gonzalez’s first memory of meeting Fernando Clavijo was guest-playing in a men’s league game in a South Florida park.

That should be no surprise. Clavijo’s journey in American soccer started in a park, too, in New Jersey, where he was discovered after leaving behind his professional career in Uruguay. That rec-league game in New Jersey would spur one of the great careers of American professional soccer in the 80s and 90s, spanning across indoor and outdoor leagues and eventually to the World Cup. That he found his way back to the parks after his playing career is no surprise either.

Clavijo’s “Charrúa blood” fueled his love for the sport—and on occasion it flared up in his competitiveness on the field.

“He was so competitive he was suspended a few times,” Gonzalez said Monday, laughing as he recalled the men’s league games with Clavijo’s team. “You can connect the dots.”

Clavijo’s competitiveness never faded. Not across his playing career, nor his coaching stops in New England and Colorado. It was ever-present in his job as technical director at FC Dallas. Even during a five-year battle with multiple myeloma, a rare form of blood cancer, Clavijo’s competitiveness showed in his devotion to his work, as he would often take weekend calls for updates from the academy game fields during his treatment.

Clavijo died Friday at the age of 63. He left behind a legacy across American soccer that extended from the park fields of his own history, to the academy fields in Frisco, Texas, the trophy room at FC Dallas and the National Soccer Hall of Fame, where he was a 2005 inductee.

“You have generations of players that will sign here that had a relationship with Fernando,” FC Dallas president Dan Hunt said. “His attention to and care for the academy is a forever-lasting imprint of what we have going on here. He made it what it is.”

Clavijo’s professional career began in Uruguay, where he signed with Atenas de San Carlos at the age of 16. He spent six seasons there, but left Uruguay with his childhood sweetheart and wife, Martha.

For a 2017 feature on Fernando, Martha told the FC Dallas website that he was considered a “golden egg,” a player who could not be sold under Uruguay’s restrictive player movement rules.

“One day, we were married, I was 18 and he was 22, he had a steady job but he saw that his career as he wanted it and as he had envisioned it was not going to go anywhere because he saw that the team was not ever going to sell him,” Martha said. “He said, ‘You know what, Martha? I quit. I won’t play soccer anymore, let’s go someplace else.’”

The family settled in New Jersey, where Clavijo worked as a busboy. But he continued to play in men’s league games, where his play landed him a tryout with the New York Apollos of the American Soccer League. From then, like many players of that era, Clavijo bounced around the volatile American professional soccer landscape. He spent two seasons with the Apollos before moving to the New York Arrows of the Major Indoor Soccer League in 1981. He would star on the indoor circuit over the next decade, becoming a 12-time All-Star. Clavijo also spent two seasons with the Golden Bay Earthquakes in the NASL, earning All-Star honors in 1984.

Clavijo became a naturalized citizen in 1987, and he joined the U.S. national team in 1990. He accrued 61 caps over the next four years, appearing in games at the 1994 World Cup for the U.S. Despite being one of the senior members of the squad at 38 years old, teammates on the World Cup team remember him for his pace and his ability to cover the entire side of the field from his fullback position.

“I don’t remember too many people who could outrun him,” said U.S. teammate Frank Klopas. “He was like a deer. Light on his feet. It was effortless.”

Hunt remembers watching him train with the U.S. team in 1991 and getting a lesson that he would later recall to Clavijo, whom he would hire as technical director two decades later. Hunt was watching the session with his father, Lamar Hunt, and they were discussing the naturalized citizens who had joined the team.

“I said something like, ‘We’ve got to continue to improve American-born players,’” Dan Hunt recalled. “And my dad said, ‘Fernando is no less American than you or I. Just because he wasn’t born here doesn’t make him any less American. He is proud to be a citizen and represent our national team.’ That was a life lesson I took from my father, and Fernando was at the core of that.”

Fifteen years later, Clavijo put together an FC Dallas roster that would lift the U.S. Open Cup trophy with Lamar Hunt’s name on it.

Clavijo’s playing career ended in 1994, but he would stay in the game as a coach.

He coached indoor with the Seattle SeaDogs and Florida ThunderCats. He was an assistant to ex-USMNT coach Bora Milutinovic with the Nigerian national team at the 1998 World Cup and then with the New York MetroStars in 1999.

He became head coach of the New England Revolution in 1999 and led them to a playoff berth and a U.S. Open Cup final in the ensuing two seasons but was fired midway through his third season in charge. He worked as head coach of the Haitian national team through World Cup qualifying in 2003 and 2004, and was hired by the Colorado Rapids in December 2004. He resigned as coach in Colorado in 2008, and worked as an agent with Traffic Sports USA before eventually being hired by FC Dallas in 2012.

It was in Dallas that he built his best-known project in MLS. Clavijo would hire Oscar Pareja in 2014, and the two would build a franchise best known for its integration of the academy with the first team, signing homegrowns like Kellyn Acosta, Jesse Gonzalez, Reggie Cannon, Victor Ulloa, Alejandro Zendejas and Chris Richards, as well as developing Schalke standout Weston McKennie.

“He was somebody who knew there were plenty of ways for us to compete, fight and be competitive and use all the resources that we could,” said longtime FC Dallas assistant Marco Ferruzzi, who recently moved into a front office role as director of soccer operations. “That goes back to his character. Of being somebody who was always trying to win, trying to do it in a good way, but never disrespected an opponent or backed away from one. We’ve done that as a club.”

FC Dallas would win the double in 2016, taking home the U.S. Open Cup and the MLS Supporters’ Shield. Despite not spending to the levels of teams like Atlanta, Seattle and the LA Galaxy, FC Dallas has almost always remained in contention in the Western Conference on the back of a model that put academy spending as the top priority.

Clavijo was the backbone of those teams, and as one of the few Latinos atop the hierarchy in the front office he stood out as an example to other Latin-Americans around the league.

“He represents what’s this country’s all about, which is opportunity,” said Luchi Gonzalez, whom Clavijo first hired as an academy coach in 2012 before he was named head coach of the first team this past December. “Emigrating because of a tougher situation in his former country. My father went through that. I grew up in Miami with a Peruvian father and an American mother. I think Fernando is a big, big hero in that way for all of our young Latin Americans that are trying to play this game at the highest level, or coach, lead and manage it at the highest level. He’s a big hero for all of us to know that the Latin-American profile is important for a diverse country and game.”

Said Ferruzzi: “He came here and he made a huge impact. Nothing was given to him. He didn’t take anything away. He gave it all back.”

The connection to the academy, and to its families, fit the personality of a man who was known around the organization for his devotion to family. Dan Hunt said he would often see Clavijo talking on FaceTime with his nephews or sisters back in Uruguay. He was married to Martha for four decades and had two sons, Nico and Jonathan, as well as two grandchildren, Lucas and Sofia.

Ferruzzi said the majority of his conversations with Clavijo were about family and fatherhood rather than soccer, and that Clavijo spoke often about how proud he was of his sons.

“As amazing of a soccer person as he was—a player, coach, technical director, scout—he was just such a better human being,” Hunt said. “He was really, really good at his job, and we had success here, but he was just a better human.”

(Photo by Steve Dykes/Getty Images)