Garth Lagerwey has traveled a path from being about as irrelevant as he could be to being more relevant than he ever thought he'd be, from being a player nobody wanted to a builder of a title contender.

The fates of soccer dragged him through some dark corners, leaving him there for years, and then, in part, but only in part, pulling him back out -- into the brightest possible place in the American version of the game. He did his fair share of hauling, too.

The shrouding started from the outset.

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Lagerwey, growing up near Chicago, blew out of there when he was 17, heading for Germany to keep goal for an amateur club in Freiburg, a fourth-division team. It was the equivalent of an aspiring film director going to Hollywood to head the A.V. club at Beverly Hills High. He lasted one season before tearing his Achilles tendon.

He limped home before experiencing a positive, playing at Duke, where he had three opportunities to win national championships, but they were blocked by Bruce Arena's team, the Virginia Cavaliers.

Thereafter, he went back to Germany to train, test his skills, and try to attract the interest of a pro team. He did, all right: the Kansas City Attack, a low-budget indoor team for which he disliked playing. "I hated it," he says.

He assisted at his alma mater for a year until he was drafted into Major League Soccer by D.C. United before the league's inaugural season in 1996, becoming the 150th selection in a 160-player draft. "I was the Mr. Irrelevant of MLS," Lagerwey says. "I was always the lowest pick left on the teams I played on."

Arena, then the coach at D.C. United and now the coach of the L.A. Galaxy, says the following about Lagerwey: "It's my fault he ever had a pro career."

He was impressed enough with the keeper to trade him to Kansas City just three days after drafting him.

Although Lagerwey started 27 games as a rookie, he was dumped six days after the season ended. Ron Newman, the K.C. coach, told a reporter: "We would have won the championship if we had a goalkeeper."

"That was devastating," Lagerwey says.

He subsequently was cut by Columbus.

He played for a minor league team nobody's heard of.

He caught on with Dallas for a season, but then was cut.

He went to the Colorado Rapids' camp, and ... uh-huh.

He was picked up by Miami, but ... is there an echo in here?

About that time, law school sounded like a good idea. And because Lagerwey was a better keeper of the books than of the goal, Georgetown accepted him in 2001. He finished in 2004, but not before reconnecting to soccer by building a broadcasting portfolio, providing color commentary on some D.C. United games and doing a regular radio show.

Over that span, he decided he wanted to become a pro general manager, but had no clue how to pull it off.

For three years, he worked at a large law firm in Washington on matters involving equity funds, mergers and acquisitions, and he even helped one client purchase a billion-dollar floating oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

"It was brutal," he says. "Long hours, 12 to 18 a day, and it was the best training I could have had. I spent a large portion of my life thinking I was pretty smart. But now I was around really smart people. It was humbling, the things they could do, the problems they could solve."

When a client successfully bought into the St. Louis Blues, the attorney came to the attention of Dave Checketts, who happened to be in the market for a new GM for RSL. Real coach Jason Kreis had played with Lagerwey at Duke and in MLS, and the two championed similar soccer philosophies, leading to the desired career shift for Lagerwey.

Since taking over in September 2007, he has scrambled RSL's roster, trading for Yura Movsisyan on his first day. Only a handful of the club's players remain from that original group.

"It was clear that it was bad enough here that we weren't going to make it any worse," Lagerwey says. "We needed to do something."

They did a lot of things.

And because of that, RSL not only will play for the MLS Cup today in Seattle, but a man who once had been irrelevant suddenly seems pretty significant in American soccer and could become more so, fates willing.

"We have a real good chance to win it," Mr. Relevant says. "It's up to the players and coaches. I'm just a proud papa right now."

GORDON MONSON hosts the "Monson and Graham Show" weekdays from 2-6 p.m. on 1280 AM The Zone. He can be reached at gmonson@sltrib.com .