Awful incidents cropped up seemingly weekly throughout Europe last season, with the ugliness including racist chants in the stands, bigoted signs waved by spectators and bananas thrown at black players. There was also the much-scrutinized criminal trial in England involving Chelsea’s John Terry, who admitted to using racist language toward an opponent during a game in 2011.

“We’re all human, and we all make mistakes, but at the end of the day, John Terry has to live with that,” Altidore said. “That’s the biggest punishment. You only get so many ways to define who you are, and that is never going to go away for him.”

On Jan. 29, Altidore was targeted by fans during AZ’s Dutch Cup match at Den Bosch. Teammates told him they had heard the monkey chants early in the game, but it was not until Altidore chased a pass into the corner near one particular section of the stands that he became fully aware of what was happening. Then, after he was awarded a penalty kick and converted it, the monkey chants and racist taunts grew louder.

The episode hurt Altidore on multiple levels. First, he was stunned simply by the overt nature of the hate. Second, he was crushed because he had come to adore living in the Netherlands, having built a network of friends there. He had favorite restaurants and cafes. He loved his apartment.

“It was like moving into a new neighborhood and you’re getting along with everyone and then something happens and all of a sudden you feel like an outcast,” he said. “The referee asked me if I wanted to stop the game, but I said no. I can’t fight 8,000 people. I can’t. I didn’t want to stop because I didn’t want them to see that they hurt me.”

The episode was hardly Altidore’s first encounter with racism, although the intensity of the experiences has varied. At age 7 or 8 in Florida, he said, a neighboring child told him and his sister that they could not ride their bicycles home from school on a particular road because “black kids aren’t allowed to take that shortcut.” At a youth tournament in Ireland as a teenager, he was confronted for the first time with large-scale racism as he heard hateful chants from a group of Irish fans.

While he played in Europe, there were more low-profile occurrences — “you know, things at restaurants or whatever,” Altidore said — but the biggest test of his patience surely came in the Netherlands.