Sometimes, when a fellow journalist publishes or posts a story one wanted for himself, the knee-jerk response is annoyance. But Tom Hindle’s fine September piece on former U.S. Men’s National Team luminary Lee Nguyen, for goal.com, brought a genuine smile to my face — despite the fact that I was poised to write Nguyen’s story myself. Back in 2009!

Sports Illustrated had agreed to commission that feature, and full disclosure: In the end, I was the one who pulled the plug. What’s more, once the Texas-born Nguyen had returned to the U.S. in 2011, following his extraordinary goal fest in the Vietnamese first division, he subsequently enjoyed 8 productive years in Major League Soccer. Today, it’s altogether fitting that his remarkable journey — now even more fulsome, thanks to a promising coaching strint with the NWSL’s Seattle Reign — has finally been given its due.

Still, since 2009, these milestones have felt, to me, like downstream developments to my story!

Here’s why:

Early in the first Obama Administration, I was living with my family in Ho Chi Minh City, where my media company had lots of clients to gather and service. Folks in North American might not recognize Vietnam as a footballing hotbed, but this nation of 90 million LOVES its soccer, and the country’s first division, The V League, was just coming into its own in 2009. I followed the league in the English-language press but only casually — until I noticed Lee Nguyen’s name attached to a small club in the highland region known as HAGL.

Last I’d heard, Nguyen’s career had stalled after being loaned out by Dutch giant PSV to Danish Super League club Randers. But the move to Southeast Asia made cultural and competive sense: The U.S. attacking midfielder was the son of a Vietnamese refugee — one of the so-called “boat people” who fled South Vietnam in wake of the American evacuation in 1975. Nguyen’s dad settled in Texas, where Lee emerged as a legit wunderkind – the only 17-year-old on the 2004 U-20 national team, for example. Dutch legend Gus Hiddink is the one who brought him to PSV in 2006.

Lee Nguyen goes ‘home’

HAGL stands for Hoáng Anh Gia Lai, a real estate conglomerate in the midst of constructing giant apartment blocks all over Ho Chi Minh City. Yet the club it sponsored, known simply as HAGL, was based in the small, highland city of Pleiku. Rich in cash and ambition, the club offered Lee Nguyen a league-record contract, tendered through the American’s father back in Texas.

Looking minutes and the opportunity to reset his reputation/market value, the son signed in January, halfway through the 2009 season. From the get-go, he couldn’t stop scoring goals: 13 of them, to go with 16 assists in 24 appearances that half season.

To say the Vietnamese people wared to Nguyen is an understatement. They are well aware that millions fled the country after 1975. Millions more have emigrated to the U.S. and other countries in the 50 years since. These so-called Viet Kieu, or “overseas Vietnamese,” remain very attached to the mother culture. They return all the time to visit family, to participate in an economy growing at 7 percent annually. So far as the modern Vietnamese population is concerned, the feeling is mutual.

In this context, it’s easy to understand how Lee Nguyen took the VN futbol culture by storm. Even clueless, cloistered expats like myself couldn’t help but notice this phenomenon.

While this was a no-brainer of a story. I reckoned it had not penetrated the global footballing zeitgeist. Certainly not the U.S. soccer press, where I had some contacts. ESPN.com had just published a big two-part feature of mine on “FulhAmerica,” the increasingly red, white and blue contingent there in the SW6 section of London. My editor at ESPN had left to do PR for Liverpool FC, but he graciously pointed me to Jonah Freedman, a Soccer Plus editor at Sports Illustrated, for which I’d also freelanced in the pre-internet age.

Pleiku is not exactly a backwater. It’s a city of three hundred thousand people where, in 2009, Vietnam Airlines flew twice a day from HCMC and Hanoi. In every other way, it’s definitely the middle of fucking nowhere. Famously, during the Vietnam War (what Vietnamese call The American War) Pleiku was the last outpost of South Vietnamese control in the remote Central Highland region, close to the Cambodian border, over which the Viet Cong ruled the roost.

Reality of Modern Media Market intrudes

I reckoned this story assignment would produce a killer weekend adventure with my 12-year-old son: We’d nip in for a couple nights, catch a match, and chat with Lee Nguyen about his comeback-cum-cultural immersion. I reached out to the club, which had responded enthusiastically and hospitably, in English, about making its star player available.

I’d even made arrangements to bring a friend and work colleague, Tran Thanh Duc, with us to Pleiku. Also a refugee who landed in Texas, Chef Duc had returned and still owns a couple wildly successful restaurants in the resort town of Hoi An. I reckoned Duc would be a great interpreter and interlocutor.

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens in the freelance world, the whole thing fell apart once SI revealed the budget realities. This once-vaunted guardian of sports writing excellence — which had paid me $2.50 per word for a 2,500-word feature in 1997 — was only willing to pay $300 for the Lee Nguyen story. Not even enough to cover expenses.

By 2009, I’d been freelancing actively — mainly in the golfing press, but often for soccer magazines and websites — for 12 good years. Until about 2006, I’d made some pretty good money, at least a buck a word, or more. Things went rapidly downhill after the Great Recession. Today, young readers might not even realize that Sports Illustrated was once something more than a source of click-bait, or where the New York Red Bulls happen to play.

I remember the Lee Nguyen story that never happened as the straw the broke the camel’s back, in terms of my serious entertainment of freelance gigs. I still accept and pitch them occasionally, but the subject and the money must be compelling. I try not to be bitter about this less-than-sanguine development. Sixteen years down the road, it gives me genuine pleasure to write, “Great piece, Tom. I hope they paid you fairly.”