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

We got back to Philadelphia from Carolina and had a team exit meeting at the Villanova field. I drove my Chevy Blazer—already packed with all my belongings—to the meeting, and as soon as I was cleared to leave, I hit the road, heading west. I didn’t even stay for the team party. Maybe I was being a lousy teammate, but I was incredibly homesick. I missed Adrian. I drove nonstop—pulling over only to power-nap in rest areas—back to Seattle where Adrian waited for me.

It had been a rough rookie season. I vowed to myself that my second season in the WUSA would be better.

II.

Sofia looked at me and laughed. “Your jeans, they’re too . . .”—she made a big gesture with her hands—“I don’t know the English word. Wide?”

We were having coffee on a cobblestoned street in Haga, the three-hundred-year-old neighborhood of Göteborg, Sweden. I was wearing jeans that were too wide from the knee down—not skinny jeans like the kind everyone in Europe was wearing. I had on white tennis shoes, which also made Sofia laugh. I might as well have stamped AMERICAN on my forehead.

“Come on, Hope,” Sofia said, standing up. “We’re going to go shopping.”

We went down the street and walked into a stylish boutique. An hour later, I had skinny jeans, a ropey woolen scarf, and a pair of ankle boots. Thanks to Sofia, I looked a little more Euro. Which was a good thing, because I was now living in Europe. I was still a professional soccer player, but I was playing in Sweden.

Thirty-seven days after I played my last game for the Philadelphia Charge, the WUSA folded. Though I’d known the league was struggling, I was shocked. I got the call at the apartment in West Seattle I was sharing with Adrian. I plunked down hard on the couch, listening to a conference call announcing the death of the league just six days before the World Cup games were to begin. The players in the national-team pool were all distraught, particularly the ’99ers who had helped found the league. We were all cast adrift. The WUSA had made a lot of mistakes along the way. Probably the biggest was assuming that the passion and power of the ’99 World Cup could sustain an eight-team league. But Mia Hamm couldn’t be on every team. The San Diego Spirit versus the San Jose CyberRays wasn’t exactly a must-see event, especially when most members of the target audience—teenage soccer girls—had their own games to attend. The WUSA blew through its five-year budget in the first year, trying to create the illusion of big-time professional sports, with offices in New York, expensive travel, gratuitous perks, and too many league executives.

As I sat on my couch in Seattle I contemplated my future. How was I going to support myself? I was twenty-three and had been told for years that I had potential, potential, potential. But did the national team even have a spot for me? I was sick of hearing about my potential. I felt I was going backward. It was 2003, and I wasn’t any further along than I had been in 2000. I hadn’t played in a national-team game for over a year. What was I going to do?

I wasn’t the only one worrying. The vibe for the ’03 World Cup was nothing like it was in ’99. The crowds were smaller and less enthusiastic—the roar in ’99 had turned into a whisper. Because the games were in September and October, they competed with college football and the NFL, so no one paid attention. The stench of the failed WUSA seemed to cling to everything.

On October 5, the United States lost 3–0 to Germany in a semifinal game in Portland. There wouldn’t be any repeat championship. I sat in the stands with Adrian, watching my teammates openly weep on the field. My good friend Cat Reddick fell to the ground and lay there sobbing until a veteran came over and pulled her to her feet. It was a depressing end to a sad summer for women’s soccer.

While I figured out what to do with my life, I kept coaching kids. My friend Malia had become the coaching director of one of the biggest clubs in Seattle and she hired me as a goalkeeper coach and connected me with parents looking for private training. Thanks to Malia, I coached all around the Seattle area that winter—boys, girls, young and younger. I found the work fulfilling and felt that I connected with the kids, but I hated driving back and forth across Seattle and being in the cold and wet all day. Coaching in the Seattle winter is tough duty. I wasn’t prepared to call that my career.

I spent a lot of time with my father during those months, curling up on his couch to nap between coaching gigs. I felt I could tell him anything—what I was thinking, how I was feeling. We talked about sports, about the future. Our relationship blossomed without the stress of the streets. But you could never take the streets out of my dad. One day we drove through a lousy neighborhood and stopped at a red light, where a bunch of tough guys, obviously up to no good, were hanging out on a corner. All of a sudden, my dad flashed a switchblade at them through the window, a warning not to mess with us.

“Dad,” I yelled, and started laughing. He was forever the tough son of a bitch.

Adrian and I enjoyed living in West Seattle, near Alki Beach. We played beach volleyball and prowled our neighborhood cafés. As always, our time together was special, but we kept it casual. I was just staying at his apartment: no serious commitment. That’s what we said, but we liked living together.

Around the holidays, my agent called. A First Division Swedish team, Kopparbergs/Göteborg, in southern Sweden, had offered me a contract. Why not, I thought?