Sounders star forward Clint Dempsey remembers his first big rivalry games from when he was just 9 years old.
Dempsey was a fifth grader playing for the Texas Longhorns youth soccer club in Dallas, part of a three-team Classic League that included the equally powerful Dallas Texans squad. The two sides inevitably battled for the championship every year, so any regular season or tournament games between them took on added importance in the feeling-out process.
“It was never life and death in terms of people trying to kill each other, but it was just that you knew they would be good, competitive games,’’ said Dempsey, who wound up switching to the Texans as a high school freshman and going equally hard after the Longhorns side.