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

at the Olympics. I had a terrific contract. I lived downtown—exactly where I was warned not to settle. It was gritty but interesting: I lived in a hip loft, met diverse types of people, and walked to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games. That year we had only four national-team games after the March Algarve Cup, so I had a lot of time to explore my new home.

We didn’t have a dominant personality who overwhelmed the team. Chups, Tina, and I were the national-team players on our team. Jill Loyden was my backup. We had an eclectic mix. I became close friends with Kia McNeill. Brazil’s Daniela—whom I’d played with in Sweden—was our best offensive player.

One of the best things was the growing friendship between Tina and me. I’d known her for years, first at UW and later with the national team. I was scarred by the fact that she had never stood up for me in China, but in St. Louis, we bonded. I got to know and love her daughters, Mackenzie and Mya—I became their aunt Hope. Tina and I started to work seriously on soccer together: she had embraced her switch to defense and wanted to be the best defender she could be. She asked me a lot of questions. We spent hours together on the field, working on defensive strategy.

That season we finally talked about what had happened at the 2007 World Cup. “When I think back on my life, I’ll always remember that,” she said. “Of you rocking back and forth and crying in that room and me thinking, No one deserves this. I just didn’t know what to do, Hope. It was awful.” We cried talking about it. Tina and I were a lot alike, both outsiders for different reasons.

“Hope, you’re a strong person,” Tina said. “You’re a truth-teller. People aren’t comfortable with that.”

The WPS officials sure didn’t seem comfortable with it. They seemed more concerned about pleasing Puma and twisting our schedule to get a TV contract than doing what was right on the field. I was happy in St. Louis, but I wasn’t happy with WPS: they kept saying they were the best in the world, but I’d played overseas. I’d seen how other leagues operated. The officiating was terrible, the uniforms were lame, and the disparity in pay was enormous. I wasn’t terribly optimistic about the future.

II.

The most important thing that happened to my soccer career in 2009 wasn’t the launch of the WPS. It was the arrival of Paul Rogers in my life. After the 2008 Olympics, Phil Wheddon left to become the women’s head coach at Syracuse. Paul was hired as our new goalkeeper coach and came to Portugal with us that March. He had worked at Florida State for my old Philadelphia Charge coach, Mark Krikorian, and FSU made it to the NCAA Final Four two years in a row. A really great goalkeeper coach is a rarity: I knew because I’d had dozens of them by then. Paul was English, arrogant, confident, and demanding. I loved him. He immediately told me I sucked. He told Nicole Barnhart the same thing. Who is this guy? I thought, looking at Barnie.

And then Paul set about correcting our bad habits. We broke down film—not just game footage but practice film. We examined tiny technical details like our balance, our first steps, the weight distribution in our feet, how far out our elbows were. It was the kind of intricate examination I’d never been exposed to before.

Barnie and I could see all our faults, right there on film. It wasn’t pleasant. Wow! I thought. We really do suck.

But then Paul set about building us back up. He worked at a different level than anyone who had ever coached me: he could spot little things, like balancing too much on my toes, or exactly at what spot in my dive my arms started to reach out. Barnie and I started to get better. I was thrilled. I had a gold medal, but I also had new goals. I knew there was so much more I could do, and I had finally found the coach who could take my work ethic and desire for instruction and push me harder than I had ever been pushed.

In that first tournament with Paul, I had three shutouts in the Algarve Cup, and was named the MVP. Later, when I was named U.S. Soccer female player of the year for 2009, I made sure that I thanked Paul “for helping me think about the position in a more sophisticated way, both technically and tactically.”

When I got back from Portugal, I told Jeff that Paul was the best goalkeeper coach I’d ever worked with, and Jeff hired him right away. Jeff wanted what was best for his players—all the more reason to be loyal to him.

III.

That spring we finally spread my dad’s ashes, close to the anniversary of his birthday. As a family, we hiked to waterfalls up near the Snoqualmie Pass that I always hated to drive alone. We all came: Marcus and Debbie, with Johnny in a backpack, Terry, Jeff, and their son Christian, Mom, and Adrian. We took turns carrying Johnny. We had Blue and Leo with us, and we hiked through the spring snow to a bridge over a swollen mountain stream.

In the months after my father died, we had learned more about him. Marcus had gone through his papers and requested his naval records. My father had been in the navy during the Lebanon crisis in 1958. A year later, he received an honorable discharge because he contracted tuberculosis; he was treated with chemotherapy, and received full disability. While he was on disability, he worked as a machine operator at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Dorchester, Massachusetts. There was proof that he had played semipro football in Massachusetts. When he was twenty-six, he requested a name change from Beyers to Solo. And then the trail stopped.

Why did he change his name?