In what was “supposed to be an article about how (Zak) Ibsen, a 37-year-old guy, represented the United States as it attempted to qualify for this autumn’s FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup in Dubai,” the New York Times’ Jack Bell ends up chronicling the journeyman’s surprising story about “how crystal meth helped end his M.L.S career in 2002, then left him homeless and living out of his van.”
Leaving the league after winning two championships and playing for five different teams in seven years, Ibsen “managed to stay clean for finite periods of time, long enough to play for the United States in the 2006 and 2007 beach soccer championships (both in Rio de Janeiro), before descending back into a drug-induced maelstrom that few people ever escape from.”
After multiple stints in rehab, Ibsen is now clean and sober, living in San Francisco with his wife and two-year-old daughter, and although he and the U.S. Beach Soccer team missed out on a trip to the world championship in 2009 after an upset to El Salvador in the qualification semifinals in June, Ibsen remains a fierce competitor on the pitch. “It’s the only job, the only life skill I have,” he said. “I really don’t know how to live life beyond soccer.”