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

Amy’s tutelage and my time with the national team, I was becoming a much better tactical goalkeeper. I learned how to read my opponents’ runs toward goal, how to position my defenders, how to see the angles. I learned when to come off my line and when to stay back, how to start a counterattack, how to anticipate and predict what was happening in front of me.

Amy—all five foot four of her—had to know the game to compete as a goalkeeper on the national team. She taught me that side and how to incorporate it with my athleticism. The intellectual side also made goalkeeping so much more interesting. It wasn’t just ninety minutes of waiting for my defense to make a mistake. It was ninety minutes of tactics and strategy. The personality traits that had been shaped by my childhood—resilience and toughness—were assets at the position.

It had taken eight years, but I was finally a real goalkeeper.

VII.

In February of my senior year, Adrian and I flew to Atlanta for the WUSA draft. The professional league was starting its third season, and I was among the top players in the country, invited to attend the draft in person. I had already chosen an agent, Richard Motzkin, who represented high-profile players on the men’s side, such as Landon Donovan and Alexi Lalas. And I had a deal in the works with Nike.

I knew I would have to leave my West Coast comfort zone to play in the WUSA. As expected, my friend Aly Wagner, who played at Santa Clara, was the first pick, going to San Diego. I knew the next three teams choosing were all on the East Coast. Christie Welsh went to New York with the second pick. The buzz in the draft room was that Boston—with a new coach Pia Sundhage—would select me with the third pick. But the Breakers took another player from Santa Clara, Devvyn Hawkins. My name was called on the fourth pick—I was going to play for the Philadelphia Charge. Philadelphia, Boston—it was all the same to me. I would have to move to the other side of the country. Away from my family, and away from Adrian.

I was now a professional soccer player. The fact that there was a professional league for women seemed like a natural development in a world where the 1999 World Cup had sold out NFL stadiums, where fans crushed against fences to see Mia Hamm, where girls like me had been rewarded all our lives for working hard and playing well. It seemed like a natural step—but for me it was still a scary one. “Oh my god, Adrian, I have to move to Philadelphia,” I said. “I’m really going to miss you.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” he said.

I thought he was kidding. “Would you really?” We were just friends, right? Really good friends.

He said, “When you love someone as much as I love you, it’s not even a question of whether I’ll come.”

My breath caught in my chest. It was the first time he had said he loved me.

VIII.

I went back to Seattle and finished my classes, and then I was done with school. I went into the athletic building to say good-bye to Lesle and Amy and felt a wave of emotion. Going to UW was the best decision I ever made. If I had followed my original vow and gone as far away from home as possible, I might have never gotten to know my father, never improved my relationship with my mother, never learned as much about goalkeeping, never had coaches who would be role models and lifelong friends.

It was only fitting that I missed one more thing at UW because of soccer: my graduation ceremony. While my classmates donned robes and mortarboards, I was riding the bench for the Philadelphia Charge.

CHAPTER NINE

Made in the WUSA

The ball caromed off the crossbar, and Abby Wambach pounced on it, sending a rocket into the corner of the net. She was on fire; it was her third goal against us. But I couldn’t do anything but watch, because I wasn’t in the game. I was sitting on the bench while the Washington Freedom, a team that starred Abby and Mia Hamm, manhandled my Philadelphia Charge team.

Professional soccer wasn’t turning out to be what I expected. The launch of the Women’s United Soccer Association in 2001—the first professional soccer league for women—seemed to me like a natural evolution, not a revolution. Women’s sports were growing stronger and more important every year. Why shouldn’t we have our own league? When I was drafted by the WUSA, I thought I was joining the big time. I’d been in college and wasn’t paying much attention to the league’s growing pains or the dire forecasts. When Philadelphia drafted me, I felt I had arrived—a professional athlete, in the same category as Shaq or A-Rod. But by early May, I was learning the hard truth—women’s professional soccer wasn’t anything like the NBA or Major League Baseball. I had joined a league fighting desperately to stay alive. Corporate sponsorships weren’t panning out, crowds were nowhere near as big as projected, and television ratings were abysmal. The league was in a downward economic spiral; I had barely unpacked before I was asked to take a pay cut, dropping my salary from $35,000 to $30,000.

I didn’t understand the big-picture economics of the WUSA, but I could see we were running a bare-bones operation. We played our games at Villanova Stadium, training on a field of ancient and unforgiving Astroturf, and my back started to pay the price. This wasn’t anything close to my beautiful training facility back at UW. Worse, we didn’t have a goalkeeper coach. I went from working with a high-level coach, to basically training on my own. And it didn’t take long to figure out that decisions by the coaches were often made for political reasons. Philadelphia was my first lesson that talent doesn’t