Received an e-mail from the Los Angeles Galaxy today about roster moves the club has made.

“LA Galaxy Acquire the Rights to Juan Pablo Angel and Frankie Hejduk”

I know Juan Pablo Angel, a goalscoring machine, is supposed to be the big news here. Which is why he was listed first.

But what I am interested in … is the irrepressible Frankie Hejduk, one of my favorite soccer players. Ever.

It seems like I have known Frankie for most of my adult life. Which is not at all correct, but my awareness of the dude goes back to the run-up to the 1994 World Cup, and that’s a long time ago.

He is an interesting guy. A huge fan of Bob Marley, both in terms of music and lifestyle. That is, I am going to take a guess and suggest Frankie may have had, at some point in his life, some affinity for herbal , ah, refreshment.

Frankie grew up in San Diego, which explains a lot, too. He was, of course, a surfer, an activity he still says is great training for the rigors of the soccer field.

When it comes to soccer, you need to know two things about Frankie:

1. He is indefatigable. The guy can run forever. Back in the 1990s I remember the national team going through fitness tests down at the Olympic training center in La Jolla. It involved players running short distances, stopping, turning, and running back, with a “beep” sound to push them along. The beep rate got faster, not slower, as the test went on. Inevitably, every player ended the drill in an exhausted heap. But Frankie was an exhausted heap a lot later than everyone else. The guy is/was made out of bone and leather. He is never tired.

2. Frankie also may weigh about 140 pounds (what comes of a body-fat percentage of, like, 2) … but he’s a tough guy, inside his head. A hard man, and more than a little edgy. People have been known to run into his sharp elbows. Weird, how that happens. In the days over the past decade when the U.S. national team got a little soft, a little too cute, sometimes coaches needed to run Frankie out there just to give them a physical edge. Frankie understood immediately what he was supposed to do, almost like a scrawny hockey enforcer.

A weird aspect of Frankie is that he was a screw-up at UCLA and early in his professional career, famously missing a plane that earned him a year or two in the national team doghouse … but at the end here he has served as captain for the Columbus Crew. Yes, Frankie: leader of men.

I had a long chat with him not all that long ago … last year, in March, a day or two before a World Cup qualifying match in El Salvador. Much of that conversation ended up in a story I did for the New York Times. The surfing stuff comes up a lot. And, it turned out, Frankie scored in that match to salvage a 2-2 tie. He grinned at me as if we had successfully plotted the whole thing.

He didn’t quite make the 2010 World Cup team, which is too bad, because he’s become such a great character guy. Just fun to have around. He may not remember a lot of names, but he remembers faces, and he inevitably smiles and waves and will stop and chat. And he is honest, too, which is not a common attribute among athletes during an interview process.

Anyway, if he joins the Galaxy, and they find a place for him at one of the outside-back positions (and Bruce Arena used him there some in 2002 and 2006),  well, that’s fine with me. The Galaxy then would have my two favorite U.S. players on the same team — Landon Donovan and Frankie. One has a lot more talent than the other. But both are good guys and good players, and I would like to see them stay around as long as possible. Frankie is 36, and that’s 100 in soccer years. But maybe he can squeeze out another couple in Los Angeles.

I would regret not seeing the club play even more than I do now. Though maybe I somehow can get some sort of cable package here in Abu Dhabi that would allow me to do it.

Good luck, Frankie. Hope it works out.