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

Awkward. We all just wanted to finish our meal and go Skype with our boyfriends. We didn’t really want to sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” with Greg. This wasn’t summer camp. Some of my teammates rolled their eyes. Others applauded, seeing a way to get close to the new coach. I watched, fascinated but horrified.

Still, Portugal was fun that March. We didn’t have a lot of expectations—we were starting a new four-year cycle and a new era. I didn’t play the first game—our new goalkeeper coach, Bill Irwin, had worked with Nicole Barnhardt when she was a youth player and gave her the start, her first ever in international competition. We won 1–0. I got the next game, against Finland on March 11, 2005, my first national-team appearance since September 8, 2002, against Scotland in Columbus, Ohio, when I was a senior in college. That seemed like a long time ago. I knew that, thanks to two years as a professional player, I was a much better goalkeeper now.

Finland was surprisingly tough for us, but I didn’t give up a goal, making four saves. Two days later, I started against Denmark, recording another clean sheet and helping our team to the tournament final against Germany. We won that game 1–0. Our defense was solid in front of me, but I made a few memorable saves, and reports termed it a “coming-out” party for me.

It was definitely a coming-out party for Greg as well, though U.S. Soccer officials said they were conducting a search for a full-time head coach. I heard rumors about some of the candidates: some had worked in the WUSA, including Pia Sundhage, who had coached in Boston. Others were successful college coaches, such as Jerry Smith, who had built a powerhouse at Santa Clara. Pearcie, back home and pregnant, was supposed to be interviewing some of the candidates and passing information along to the rest of us. It seemed that the veterans favored Pia, who had been a great player. Of all the candidates, the one who seemed the least qualified was Greg Ryan. Before coming to the national team, he had coached at Colorado College, never earning an NCAA berth there before becoming April’s vanilla assistant. The consensus on the team was that we needed a fresh start, and Greg was a leftover from the past. But it seemed to me that Greg was a pawn in a power struggle. The players were in negotiations for a new contract. According to reports, U.S. Soccer officials—many of whom were portrayed as not having cared at all about women’s soccer until the 1999 team forced them to—wanted to gain more control over the women’s team. The big personalities from the past had built the team from nothing and consequently felt entitled to ownership of that. U.S. Soccer wanted a coach who would do its bidding, including clearing out the entitled veterans. That probably meant Jerry Smith, who was married to Brandi Chastain, wasn’t ever going to get a legitimate shot at the job. Greg didn’t seem to have the players’ backing, but by hiring him, the federation could send a clear message about who was boss.

We had unwittingly helped his cause. The four shutouts in Portugal were viewed as evidence that Ryan was the right man for the job and that the U.S. team hadn’t missed a beat despite the changeover.

Three weeks after we won the Algarve Cup, when I was back in Lyon, Ryan was named the permanent head coach. “Oh well,” I thought with a shrug.

II.

The needle pierced the middle of my back. “Ah!” I inhaled sharply. But I’d felt worse pain.

“Oui?” grunted the tattoo artist. “C’est bon?”

I was in a tattoo parlor in a funky neighborhood of Lyon. My French teammate Claire was with me—her friend had helped design the tattoo I was getting on my back:

Persecuted but not forsaken

Cast down but not destroyed

Here in a tattoo parlor off a French alley, I was trying to inject inspiration into my skin. Second Corinthians was a favorite of Grandma Alice’s and the passage resonated with me. Claire’s friend had sketched out a cool-looking inscription—a shadowy, edgy font for the tattoo artist to replicate. I was in an edgy period of my life.

After the Algarve Cup, Grandma Alice and Grandpa Pete came to visit me in Lyon. My adventurous grandparents flew to Portugal to support me in my starts for the national team, and now they wanted to see my new life in France. They rode the team bus to games with us and stayed in the residential housing I shared with the other Americans. We made meals in the kitchen and stayed up late playing cribbage. Grandma and Grandpa explored Lyon, even walking up the steep hill to the basilica that towers over the city. They found spiritual meaning and education in their travel.

When they left, I did my own exploring, including in tattoo parlors. I was in a post-Adrian mania. I got to know Claire’s non-soccer-playing French friends. We drank red wine and ate Nutella crêpes and regularly ran off to Marseilles or Paris. I dated a lot of men. One French girl flirted with me for months, asking, “How do you know you don’t like kissing girls if you’ve never tried it?”

“Trust me,” I said. “I know I like men.”

One night I got drunk and let her kiss me. I’d had gay teammates throughout my career—I thought maybe I should see their side of things. So we made out. Interesting but not life-changing. I was straight.

The soccer in France was frustrating. In Sweden, most of my teammates spoke some English, but it was difficult communicating with my French back line. I tried to learn the right French words, but in the pressure of a game I would resort to English. If I said “away,” they thought I was saying “J’ai”—I have it. So my defense thought I was calling for the ball. At times it