"I'm just enjoying it," he said. "I guess, because I'm ready to retire and haven't had any second thoughts about it. It's all fun, from here on out."

The 33-year-old Pope will play for the home crowd one last time tonight when RSL takes on the Houston Dynamo in an otherwise meaningless home finale at Rice-Eccles Stadium. RSL has been eliminated from the Major League Soccer playoff race for the third straight season, but the team will hold a pregame ceremony to honor Pope and Jason Kreis - who retired early in the season to replace the fired John Ellinger as coach.

"Eddie's contribution to this organization is putting it on the map," new general manager Garth Lagerwey said.

Certainly, acquiring Pope as one of its first players was a major move for RSL.

After all, Pope already had established himself as probably the greatest defender in American soccer history. One of the original members of the league, he's a 10-time MLS All-Star who won three league championships with D.C. United and starred for the United States in three World Cups.

But the nonstop pace of his career has caught up with him, even though he already has started more games (25) and played more minutes (2,104) for RSL this season than he had in all but one of his previous 11 years in the league.

That's mostly because Pope retired from international competition before this season, allowing him to avoid shuttling between his professional and national teams with little time off - something Pope believes took a few years off his career.

"It takes a toll," he said.

That's why he was able to resist Kreis' attempts to persuade Pope to play one more season.

Pope said the former teammates had a couple of discussions about the possibility, but that - knowing how he feels now - he feared for his ability to stay healthy enough through another long season to really help the team.

"I don't know that that's possible," he said.

Instead, Pope is pursuing some front-office job opportunities, one of which could keep him within the RSL family as an executive. Nothing is certain yet, though, leaving Pope to concentrate on the final two games of his soccer career - tonight and in the season finale at Colorado on Saturday.

"It may be a little bit odd, a little bit strange," he said. "But I'm ready to move on to some other things." As for highlights?

Pope said he could not pick any one out of a career full of them, but that he's especially proud of having risen from a modest upbringing as a black man in a small town in rural North Carolina to succeed at the highest levels of a sport often considered the province of affluent white suburbanites.

"That's a big deal," he said. "To be able to come from such a little country hometown and be playing in Europe and things like that, the World Cup. That's not something I could have imagined would have happened. . . . I've been very, very fortunate."