"I told myself this is what I want to do for the rest of my life." Charlie Davies said that about a scoreless draw between Bolivia and South Korea. No goals. Six yellows, four reds, 54,000 people in Foxborough on a June afternoon in 1994. Not exactly the stuff of sporting legend — unless you're an 8-year-old kid from New Hampshire who had never seen anything like it.
With the World Cup returning to the United States and Foxborough hosting matches again starting this weekend, Davies is thinking a lot about that day. The ex-USMNT forward, now a broadcaster for the New England Revolution and studio analyst for CBS, calls it the spark that lit everything.
A parking lot, Korean BBQ, and a life decision
Davies didn't even know what soccer looked like on a big stage back then. There was no MLS. Getting Premier League or Serie A on TV required a satellite dish — expensive, bulky, and not something the Davies family had. Soccer was something you played in a backyard, not something the country stopped for.
Then came Route 1. The traffic. The flags. The music and the face paint and the smell of food he'd never tasted. His dad Kofi, a Gambian immigrant, had gotten tickets through a friend. Davies played street soccer in the parking lot with kids from other countries, tried Korean BBQ, ate a Bolivian meat dish whose name he still can't remember but whose taste he never forgot.
"What drew me in as a young kid is the element of interacting with so many different ethnicities and languages and foods," he said. "You come into this melting pot of so many different countries and the people are so warm and excited."
For a kid who'd only stumbled into soccer in the first place — he thought the permission slip his dad excitedly signed was for Pop Warner football — the whole experience reordered his priorities on the spot.
From Foxborough to France, and back again
Davies built a real career off that childhood jolt. Boston College, the Hermann Trophy shortlist, three seasons in Sweden, two with Sochaux in Ligue 1, 17 caps and four goals for the USMNT. He was tracking toward the 2010 World Cup before a serious car accident late in 2009 ended that chapter.
He came back — Denmark, then six MLS seasons including four with the Revolution, where he made that same Route 1 commute to home games. Retired in 2017. Still in the game.
Now his twin 10-year-old sons Rhys and Dakota have YouTube and apps and every league available on demand. They'll never need a satellite dish or a stranger's parking lot BBQ to find out the world exists. But Davies is watching them closely as this tournament unfolds — the first World Cup they'll be old enough to actually remember.
"I can look back and say this is the first World Cup that they're going to remember and watch all the games," he said. "They have their little sticker books and brackets."
Bolivia and South Korea played to a 0-0 draw on June 23, 1994. It produced a career, a broadcaster, and apparently two kids with sticker books. Not bad for a match nobody remembers.
