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Members of the United States national team wished Clint Dempsey well after his brother wrote that the Seattle Sounders forward was set to have a second heart procedure. A tweet from Ryan Dempsey asked for people to pray for his brother as he undergoes treatment for an irregular heartbeat. Both the tweet and the account were subsequently deleted, though an image of the tweet was captured. A Sounders spokesperson declined to comment, but support soon came in from Dempsey's international teammates. Dempsey, 33, was initially sidelined by heart-related symptoms last month, but returned to light training with Seattle on Sept. 14. Sounders GM Garth Lagerwey said at that time that Dempsey had undergone an unspecified procedure in an attempt to address the condition, and that he was "cautiously optimistic" that the U.S. international would return by the end of the regular season, though he declined then to give any kind of timetable. But Dempsey then stopped training a week later, and on Sept. 27, the team announced that it was shutting the U.S. international down for the remainder of the MLS season. "We simply haven't been able to get to a point where we felt comfortable that there was a realistic chance [of him playing]," Lagerwey told reporters that day. "As we said in the first round of comments, we are not comfortable putting any kind of pressure on this. His return to play is not important relative to his health, both short term and long term. And we feel that ruling him out today puts us in the best position to eventually get him back, hopefully for the 2017 season." Lagerwey said then that no further updates are likely to come until training camp next season, though he did shed some light on the process Dempsey has gone through over the last month. "Dempsey had been getting some tests over the course of a couple of months," he said. "We got some data that showed an irregularity. We then took him out and proceeded to begin this evaluation. That process is still underway. "It was something that we had found over the course of him playing for us, and we had been tracking him and monitoring him over time and it popped up. It's something we have to take care of and we can't take any risks with something as serious as this. We started monitoring him, I don't know, two months ago. The monitoring then picked up some irregularities with the heartbeat and that's what we've been trying to address." Dempsey is in his fourth season in Seattle, and recorded eight goals and two assists this year. All told, Dempsey has 37 goals and 23 assists in 82 regular season and playoff appearances. Dempsey has also played for English sides Fulham FC and Tottenham Hotspur, as well as the New England Revolution of MLS. He is the United States' second all-time leading scorer with 52 goals in 130 appearances.
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