Call him Memphis. Not
Memphis Depay. Or worse, just Depay. It's Memphis. And if this sounds
like arrogance from a young star, insisting his budding brand already
justifies a mononymous existence, it isn't. The 21-year-old Manchester United and Netherlands forward has good reason to ditch his last name.
"You get reactions like: ‘What's that boy thinking? That he's a star?' " Memphis told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant in 2013. "But those people don't know what's going on."
"It's very tricky for me,
because you'd prefer to play with your last name on your jersey, like
everybody," he said. "But the rift with my father is irreparable. I
don't speak to him. I have no contact with family on my father's side.
And I never will again."
Memphis doesn't wear his father's name because, as he puts is, "He hasn't earned it."
Figuring out United's
30-odd-million-dollar mega-signing is something of a jigsaw puzzle. He
isn't talkative and mostly shuns the media. But piece together the
scraps from rare interviews, almost all of them given in Dutch in the
last year and a half or so, and the outlines of a picture emerge.
Memphis was born to a Dutch
mother and a Ghanaian father on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Theirs was a
bad neighborhood, rife with crime and the occasional riot on New Year's
Eve. When he was four, his father left them. His mother took up and
moved in with another man, who already had 15 children. Memphis was the
16th. It was an unhappy time.
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