Chris Tierney during his official retirement press conference. (Keith Nordstrom)
Eleven years in MLS started with one email and a glimmer of opportunity.
Forget about engraved invitations or red carpet. There were no lavish promises made. This opening — the crack Chris Tierney pushed himself through to play for his hometown New England Revolution on more than 200 occasions — arrived simply in his inbox.
Time grinded away the specific words, but the message boiled down to this: Do you want to come up and try out?
Tierney — a native of Wellesley, Mass., playing at the University of Virginia — didn’t spend much time deliberating. Sure, it was a tryout for local college kids. Most of them had no realistic shot of ever playing in MLS or even the Atlantic Coast Conference.
