Jon Lester was offered a pro soccer contract
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| Photo via Parade.com |
Managing Editor
When you think of dual sport professional athletes there are a few names that come to mind immediately: Deion Sanders, Bo Jackson and Herschel Walker. But every now and then there comes an individual that defies the logic set in place to define a dual sport athlete - a logic that begins at a later age. For Red Sox ace Jon Lester "logic" is just a word. It can't control him, not anymore.
Lester recently told WEEI.com that at the age of 13 he was offered a contract to play... wait for it, wait for it... soccer. While traveling around Italy with his soccer team Lester was approached by an Italian football club about the possibility of playing professionally with the organization.
“My mom went on that trip with me,” Lester remembered. “Two years before that I went to Denmark and Sweden. Then going into my eighth-grade year I went to England and Italy. There were a bunch of teams from all over the world playing in this tournament. So they offered me a contract. I don’t even know how much it was. They talked to my mom through a translator. They said they wanted to offer me a pro contract, but we said no.”
So Jonny boy turned down a contract to play on a professional Italian soccer team? Damn. That's a gutsy move by the Lester family and a good thing too. Could you imagine if the Red Sox ace decided to trade his glove for a pair of soccer cleats? I could't imagine Lester running at all (in all fairness he doesn't have to do much during the game), but apparently he was quite the speedster.
“Believe it or not, I was fast. But their big thing was how tall I was,” he said. “That kind of was the main attraction. Then they saw I could run. I wasn’t the best soccer player. Obviously I never dreamed of being a pro soccer player,” Lester said. “My dream was to make it in whatever sport I was playing at the time.”
I'm glad he decided to change that last statement because Red Sox fans would've been watching Lester run on a pitch and instead of pitching from the mound.
Follow Scott Levesque on Twitter at @scottlevesque.
