The Lights play in a minor league baseball park a few miles from the Strip. Pitcher's mounds remain along the sidelines. It's Las Vegas but feels more like Albuquerque. Under the guidance of Jose Luis Sanchez Sola, the former Mexican League manager known as "Chelis," last year's team employed a pressing, high-energy style. Adu was at least 10 pounds overweight when he signed, and that's being gracious. He was supposed to use the prolonged scrimmages during practice sessions to work himself into game fitness. Instead, he'd wait to receive passes that almost never came. Still, he showed flashes of brilliance, enough of them so that a one-month trial became a full season.
"A normal player might touch the ball 50 times during one of those scrimmages," said Isidro Sanchez, Chelis' son, who coached the club when his father was suspended for eight games after an altercation with a fan, and then again after Chelis gave up and returned to Mexico. "Freddy would take the ball two times. Literally two times. But those two times!"
By the end, Sanchez believed that Adu was finished as a player. "He was a body without a soul," Sanchez said. "Without spirit, without hunger. You'd see him walking, he had no energy. He said, 'I want to return to MLS. I want to do it.' But he walked like an old man. Like an ancient body."