Solo, Hope Solo [best non fiction books of all time .txt] 📗

his mother worked as a maid. As a kid, he had taken a swing at his vice principal, and had been in and out of reform schools. But he was resilient.

When my father met Adrian, they had an immediate connection, a recognition of mutual street smarts. My dad tested him, tried to get Adrian to do him favors like cash his check or give him a ride somewhere. Adrian called him on his bullshit, and a respect developed. They talked sports and joked around.

For a long, long time Adrian and I insisted—to outsiders and to each other—that we were just friends. We were strongly attracted to each other, but we were in denial about it, both so wrapped up with our own lives and busy schedules. We were afraid to commit, pushing each other away every time we got too close, establishing a pattern that would last for years.

II.

In 2001, before my junior year of college, I was named to the preseason list of candidates for the Hermann Trophy, the award given to the nation’s outstanding collegiate soccer player. Just making the list was an honor—goalkeepers were rarely considered for the award. Lesle made sure that everyone—on our team, at UW, and on the outside—knew that the nomination was a testament to how important I was to the Huskies.

The season before, UW had won its first-ever Pac-10 conference championship. Eight of our games had been decided by one goal, and five of those were shutouts. That team had been special, a blue-collar group. We had great senior leadership in Malia Arrant, Theresa Wagner, and Tami Bennett. I looked up to those upperclassmen and followed their lead. I may have stopped a lot of shots, but it was a collaborative effort. We finished the season ranked number three in the nation. UW soccer was on the map, and I had helped put it there. That was a great feeling.

Also on the Hermann Trophy list was my good friend Aly Wagner and a relatively unknown player named Abby Wambach from the University of Florida. Abby was a year older than me but hadn’t yet been in the national-team pool. She was a raw, powerful player whose first significant national-team play was in the Nordic Cup in 2001 with our under-twenty-one team. Our coach, Jerry Smith, Brandi Chastain’s husband, picked her. I didn’t know much about Abby before training camp for the Nordic Cup, where we were roommates. She was rough around the edges but had great athleticism. At the Nordic Cup, she made an instant impact, scoring three goals but also drawing two yellow cards, which forced her to sit out our championship victory over Sweden. That was Abby in a nutshell: great ability combined with a power and force rarely seen in women’s soccer. She sometimes ran right through opponents and intimidated them with her strength.

That September, Abby and I were among April’s call-ups for the Nike U.S. Women’s Cup training camp. The team was a blend of veterans, who had just finished their inaugural WUSA season, and young players. Five of us were interrupting our college seasons to play for the national team: a sign that the national team was serious about targeting the next generation of players and giving us meaningful playing time. I felt a bond with those other collegiate players who were being pulled out of school to play for the national team. Unlike my UW teammates, they lived the same dual life I did and understood the aspects of college life that we surrendered—the football games and parties and the ability to make weekend plans. Like me, they were packing up textbooks along with their cleats, saying good-bye to boyfriends and best friends, again and again. For us, soccer wasn’t just a fun pastime. It was also our job.

I’d been in camp a few weeks when I tore my right groin in training. I flew home immediately to start my rehabilitation. I’d already missed two UW games and wanted to be ready to play for the Huskies for the rest of my junior year. Doctors told me the injury would keep me out for three weeks, but I didn’t miss a game. It was the first significant injury I had suffered during college, the first time I had a Toradol shot to combat the pain. But I didn’t want to miss any more UW games. I taped up the injury and played out the rest of the season, even though I was unable to kick with my right foot. The good news was that I found out I had a pretty decent left foot.

Despite my limited mobility, I had another good season. I made sixty-eight saves and helped the Huskies to a 12–4–1 record, second place in our conference. We were a good team, with a talented freshman class and more top recruits in the pipeline. One of our new players was Tina Frimpong, who had been a Washington high school sensation, one year behind me. Though Lesle had recruited Tina hard, she committed to Santa Clara. When she became pregnant at eighteen, Santa Clara was no longer an option, and she opted for UW, closer to her hometown of Vancouver, Washington. She missed the 2000 season and her daughter MacKenzie was born in March 2001; six months later, Tina was playing for us. MacKenzie’s dad, Brad Ellertson, transferred to UW from Washington State, and they were working hard to be a family. I had so much respect for the way Tina was juggling her life to keep playing soccer despite the difficulties. We weren’t particularly close then; I never could have predicted that a decade later she would be one of the most important people in my life.

Our team lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament that year, bounced yet again by Christine Sinclair and Portland. I didn’t win the Hermann Trophy, but I got a consolation prize: I was named the Pac-10 player of the year, the first Washington player