Jonny Steele got his first tattoo at 16, his name across his shoulder blades.

"Got your number on there, too?" Steele is asked.

"Nah. I've got it right here," he says, lifting his sleeve to show his No. 22 in Roman numerals on his left biceps.

The 21-year-old may be the Carolina RailHawks player with the brightest future -- if he can move beyond a past as much a part of him as his tattoos.

The RailHawks are his seventh team, indoor and outdoor, since 2004. All of them have been tantalized by his speed on the left flank and the deft touch of his left foot. Few have been able to tame the rest of him.

His last team cut him loose with two games to play after an argument with his coach.

"He's the type of kid who can go from zero to 100 pretty quickly," says Anthony Maher, a RailHawks teammate who befriended Steele when he arrived in North America four summers ago.

Raised Catholic in a Protestant area of Northern Ireland, Steele crossed the Atlantic at 18 to begin a career marked by the quick temper that helped him survive as a teenager and the skill that proved to be his ticket out.

For the RailHawks, who host the Vancouver Whitecaps at SAS Soccer Park at 8 tonight, having Steele on the roster is an act of a different kind of faith.

"He's a real mature person, but at the same time on the field he can be real immature," says RailHawks coach Scott Schweitzer, a former teammate of Steele's. "At the same time, everything he brings, you can't take that away from what he is and who he is, because that makes him what he is on the field."

Across the Atlantic

Steele grew up in Larne, a town in County Antrim on the coast of the Irish Sea, a hotbed of sectarian violence that spawned the colloquialism, "Keeping your head down like a Larne Catholic."

In 2000, when Steele was 14, a Catholic advocacy group documented more than 160 attacks. His family was perpetually under siege, and he spent much of his time trying to keep his three brothers out of trouble.

"Pretty tough," Steele says. "Lot of sectarianism. Very bad, you know. ... I grew up in about an 85 percent Protestant area in a well-known Catholic family. Me and my family and my friends, a lot of them were forced out of my town."

Steele escaped to spend two years with the youth team of a mid-sized club in England. But when it came time to offer him a pro contract, he was cut loose. A tryout with the Dallas Burn of Major League Soccer led to a spot with the Syracuse Salty Dogs of the United Soccer Leagues for the 2004 season.

RailHawks general manager Chris Economides, then the GM of the Rochester Raging Rhinos, noticed Steele immediately.

"When he first came over to this country, he took the league by storm. Who was this kid on the left-hand side?" Economides says. "After Syracuse folded, I made it a priority to sign him for Rochester -- a heck of an offer to play in Rochester. Whether there was a little bit of a maturing process, it's hard to say. He was an 18-year-old kid. I have shoes older than him."

Trouble fitting in

In Syracuse, his older teammates saw a cocky kid who walked into the team in the middle of the season. They didn't hesitate to show him his place, even as his arrival helped spark Syracuse's best soccer of the summer.

"Gamesmanship, I'd call it," Maher says. "They tried to hold Jonny back, get under his skin or go in a little bit harder with tackles on Jonny."

Over the next two seasons in Rochester, Steele also chafed under coach Laurie Calloway, who moved with Steele from Syracuse to Rochester after his first season. Steele went home abruptly in the middle of the 2005 season but returned in 2006.

Next page >