The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  He shook her hand enthusiastically and then, as quickly as he appeared, he left. He ran back to his car and drove off.

  It was a whirlwind encounter that would become increasingly common to her. In the days after the tournament, she’d be stopped by as many as a dozen people every day, a change of pace from the very sporadic fan encounters she’d had before. For the first time, many of the fans approaching her were grown men.

  “People would buy me lunches and dinners and come up to me and say, Oh my gosh, you’re Scurry!” she says. “We knew we were doing something amazing, but all we were trying to do was win that final. I don’t think we really understood how many people had seen it and how it impacted people.”

  Among the team’s fans was the First Family of the United States. After their victory, the players went to the White House to be honored, and Hillary Clinton made an offhand comment about a shuttle launch in Florida she was headed to and asked if the players wanted to join her on the trip. The players turned to Aaron Heifetz, their press officer, for permission. He said their schedule was free, and they turned back to the First Lady and said, “Okay!”

  So, off the U.S. women’s national team went for a flight on Air Force Two with Hillary Clinton and a group of female senators.

  “I think we looted the plane. Everything that wasn’t bolted down—little boxes of M&M’s to the napkins with the presidential seal—we took,” says Shannon MacMillan with a laugh, noting she recently came upon the boxes of M&M’s she had saved from that trip some 19 years later.

  The tournament and the frenzied attention surrounding it introduced the players to a new lifestyle at a time when neither soccer nor female sports had been in the public consciousness much. Suddenly, they were all celebrities.

  The team took up entire floors of hotels and had to use code names for their hotel rooms. Julie Foudy chose the name Julia Gulia, after a character from the movie The Wedding Singer. Shannon MacMillan was Gina Von Amberg, after a character on the soap opera Day of Our Lives. Kate Markgraf was Stifler, named after the American Pie character who tended to say inappropriate things. Some code names weren’t so much names as inside jokes. Mia Hamm chose “How You Doin’,” which was Joey Tribbiani’s catch phrase on the sitcom Friends. Michelle Akers was Pig Farmer.

  Without such code names, fans could’ve easily called players by asking for them at hotels—and they probably would have. Tiffeny Milbrett remembers that shortly after the World Cup, her home phone in Portland, Oregon, rang and, when she answered, it was the voice of what sounded like a teenage girl.

  “Is Tiffeny Milbrett there?”

  “Yeah, this is Tiffeny.”

  “OH MY GOD! It’s you!”

  The girl started crying. Although Milbrett was flattered, she changed her number and made sure it wasn’t published after that. She also learned to brace herself before going out.

  “You realized every time you stepped out that someone might recognize you,” Milbrett says. “Every time I stepped out in public, I remembered, there is going to be one or multiple people who will know you and they’ll be watching, and it was that way for years.”

  Eric Wynalda, the striker for the U.S. men’s national team that came in last place at the World Cup one year prior, now credits the women’s team with saving soccer in America. The men embarrassed themselves at the 1998 World Cup in France and made American soccer look like a joke, but the women in 1999 made it something everyone wanted to be a part of.

  “Nobody ever says this out loud, but I’m going to: Not until Brandi Chastain saved it in 1999 did we have a good feeling about this sport,” Wynalda says. “The boys had blown it.”

  * * *

  Brandi Chastain remembers vividly the first time she saw the Sports Illustrated cover. It featured what is now a famous image: She was on the grass field of the Rose Bowl, shirt in hand, muscles flexed, celebrating her winning kick at the 1999 Women’s World Cup.

  Days after the World Cup had ended, she was in New York City for an event Nike held near Times Square with the streets blocked off, and as she stood on stage, someone handed her a huge blown-up image of the magazine in a frame. Chastain, who had been nicknamed “Hollywood” by her teammates because of how dramatic she could be when appealing to refs, was speechless.

  “Never in my wildest imagination was this happening in my future,” Chastain says. “In a way, I feel really proud about that because I never once put on a pair of cleats or put on my uniform with this underlying goal of being famous. That was never a part of it. I fell in love with soccer and sports as a young girl and I just loved playing.”

  But that visual of her celebrating in her sports bra took what was already a big moment and turned it into a cultural phenomenon.

  Suddenly, Chastain became the world’s most famous bra-wearing athlete and, with that, she found herself in the middle of a conversation about female sexuality in sports. Everyone wanted her to weigh in, and it was bewildering to her.

  “I became a person who got asked a lot about sexuality in sports, or can you be feminine and be athletic?” she says. “These were discussions that, gosh, prior to those questions, I never spent very much time thinking about. What we all collectively consumed ourselves with was, how can I personally improve so I can help my team? The sexualization of sports or the defeminization of women in sports never crossed my mind.”

  Men ripped off their shirts to celebrate goals all the time in soccer. It was so common that a couple of years later FIFA passed a new rule that removing a shirt during a goal celebration would be an automatic yellow card. But a woman doing it sparked a debate. It got its own “hot topics” segment on The View and became fodder for late-night TV.

  In an article titled “U.S. Women Win World Cup and Promptly Tarnish It,” one columnist in Indiana wrote that Chastain “was the worst the U.S. had to offer.” Another column in Iowa, “Stripping Down to Sports Bra No Big Deal,” fired back to the outcry: “Well, you would think she mooned the queen the way this has been reported.”

  That moment, for a time, could’ve defined her. It followed her around, and there was no escaping it. But she refused to feel burdened by it.

  “There’s no doubt that every interview I did for a very long period of time included that moment,” she says. “And understandably so, because never before had a women’s sporting event garnered that many fans in one location or around the world watching. So, it makes sense that would be a lead question or a follow-up question.”

  “I always reminded myself: That question allows me the opportunity to walk through the door, answer the question, and then give more information about women’s soccer than I had ever been offered before.”

  In 1999, the American public and the sports landscape itself still seemed unprepared for the rise of a team of female athletes. Individual female athletes—tennis players, gymnasts, and figure skaters—had captured America’s attention before, but for the first time, a team of women was commanding the spotlight. Yet, the soccer was almost secondary at times.

  During the tournament, Christine Brennan of USA Today asked Brandi Chastain: “If you were all ugly, if you were not wholesome, attractive—words that have been attached to you—would this team be as popular?”

  Chastain didn’t scoff or tell the columnist to take a hike. Instead, she had little choice but to answer this like any other question: “There are those people who come purely for the soccer. There are those people who come purely for the event. And there are those people who come because they like us, to look at us. Those are three great reasons to come.”

  Just by the virtue of being female athletes who competed with the same passion and competitiveness of the men, the players of the national team were redefining what it meant to both be a woman and an athlete. For many of the fans, including young girls, who followed the team’s journey, it was a new way to look at what women could do, an expansion of what it could mean to be athlete.

  “Up until then, there were limited gender-appropriate wa
ys to express yourself as a female,” says defender Kate Markgraf, who broke into the team in 1998 after graduating from Notre Dame. “For the most part, our team fit into that traditional female look, but in terms of our personalities on the field and how we expressed ourselves and how we joked around and how we weren’t quiet, that was at odds with some of the lessons of how females were supposed to be.”

  “That’s where I think those questions were coming from,” she adds. “No one had the culturally appropriate language for women who were bucking the norm.”

  The players’ looks became a topic all its own. A small sampling of newspaper headlines in 1999:

  • U.S. Women’s Team Looking Good: Sex Appeal Part of the Story (Boston Herald)

  • Uncover Story: Soccer Has Sex Appeal (Chicago Sun-Times)

  • Get Real: Sex Appeal Does Count (Washington Times)

  • Talented, Athletic, Sexy—That’s U.S. Soccer Team (Memphis Commercial Appeal)

  • Talented and Sexy: U.S. Team Has It All (Orlando Sentinel)

  • Success of the ’99 Women’s World Cup Is . . . Looking Good (Los Angeles Times)

  • The Babe Factor In Soccer Team’s Success (Scripps News Service)

  The debate teetered between whether sex appeal was driving the team’s popularity and whether the players’ traditional femininity—wearing makeup and posing in magazine spreads, all while being strong competitors on the field—was feminist or not. One columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, like others, was unable to reconcile the team’s girls-next-door image with its athleticism—writing that the 1999 Women’s World Cup was played “like the talent competition in the Miss America pageant, rather than as a sporting event.”

  Chastain landed herself in that conversation not just because she celebrated in her bra, although that became the biggest flash point. Just before the 1999 World Cup, she posed for Gear magazine covered with nothing except some strategically placed soccer balls. That photoshoot—not anything she did on the field—prompted David Letterman to invite her on his late-night talk show before the 1999 World Cup started. He displayed her photo to his audience and remarked: “Soccer moms? Soccer mamas!”

  While much of the national team’s attention came after the Women’s World Cup had started, Letterman was ahead of the curve, and he was credited by organizers as helping drum up excitement for the tournament. But he seemed less enthralled by the soccer than by the women themselves.

  After Chastain’s segment, Letterman told his audience: “The U.S. team—and this may come out wrong, but I’ll just say it and forget about it—is Babe City, ladies and gentlemen. Babe City!”

  Whether it was sex appeal or not, the national team was connecting with men in a way it never had before. That didn’t come as a surprise to the 1999 Women’s World Cup organizers, though. Marla Messing, the CEO of the organizing committee, says everyone assumed their target audience would be “soccer moms,” but they instead targeted men who had daughters who played soccer.

  “Back in ’98 and ’99, the image was a soccer mom in her minivan—it was a whole cultural thing,” Messing says. “But we decided that, back then, it was men who bought tickets to sporting events, and this was an opportunity for them to do something with their daughters.”

  Men showed unprecedented interest in the team, whether they had soccer-playing daughters or not. According to ESPN, two-thirds of the TV viewers who watched the Women’s World Cup were men.

  The players certainly noticed, and Shannon MacMillan recalls seeing more and more men at their practices asking for autographs.

  “The older guys would be like, It’s for my granddaughter, and I’d say, Oh, what’s her name?” MacMillan remembers. “They’d say, Oh, don’t put her name on it—I’ll put it on later.”

  MacMillan laughs because she knew there was no granddaughter. She would joke back to the men: “We can sign it for you—that’s fine. You don’t have to come up with a story.”

  But just as quickly as the excitement was building around the team, critics were quick to write off their success as a one-off—a big event but hardly a blueprint for sustained interest in women’s soccer.

  Shaun Powell, a columnist for Newsday, summed up the sentiment in the bluntest of terms: “For those living in the good ol’ male-dominated sports world, fear not. By tomorrow, you will reclaim the sports pages. You can turn on ESPN and not mistake it for the Lifetime Channel. No more athletes with first names that end with ‘i.’ And from now on, you only get Hamm between rye and Brandi after dinner, thank you. Hey, the Women’s World Cup was nice. But, please. It’s time to be realistic, at the risk of sounding chauvinistic. The whole event was overhype at its best, or worst, whichever you prefer.”

  While that sort of rhetoric could be dismissed as run-of-the-mill sexism, the players undoubtedly faced a major uphill battle. Suddenly, millions of Americans were aware they existed for the first time, and the lingering question was: What comes next? There was no blueprint for what the players needed to do to sustain their careers.

  What was clear, however, was that it would be up to the players to try to figure it out. Otherwise, it would become increasingly difficult for them to keep playing. For all the fanfare surrounding the players and the prestige they brought to the U.S. Soccer Federation and FIFA, their rewards were relatively small.

  The players earned bonuses of around $50,000 each for winning the World Cup. Most of that payout came as an unplanned gesture from the organizing committee, which made off with an unexpected profit, and U.S. Soccer offered $12,500 per player.

  FIFA didn’t offer any prize money for the Women’s World Cup. Meanwhile, one year earlier, FIFA had given awards to the U.S. men of around $25,000 each for simply qualifying for the World Cup. If the men had won, they would’ve gotten $388,000 each, but instead, the U.S. men lost all three group-stage games, came in last place, and FIFA still rewarded them.

  For the women, who earned small salaries at the time, a onetime bonus wouldn’t be enough to sustain their careers. They had proven in front of record audiences that they were serious athletes—but money, air time, and respect in a crowded sports landscape weren’t a given.

  The players had to fight for it. They had already proved they could do it on the field, and they were about to show they could fight off the field, too.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Oh S***, These Women Are for Real”

  On the morning after the national team won the 1999 World Cup, the celebrations continued. While the players were off to do a victory parade at Disneyland, officials from the U.S. Soccer Federation opened the sports pages of local newspapers, eager to see the coverage of the victory.

  The Los Angeles Times used the headline “America the Bootiful” alongside a large photo of Briana Scurry’s penalty-kick save. Some of the U.S. Soccer brass probably cracked a smile at the pun. But when they turned to this page, they saw a different headline—one that would touch off a bitter dispute and mark a permanent change in the relationship between the players and their boss, the federation. It was on a full-page advertisement for an indoor victory tour the national team players had scheduled for that fall.

  Hank Steinbrecher, the secretary general of U.S. Soccer, was shocked. The players were calling themselves the All-American Soccer Stars but essentially planned to travel to 12 cities as the World Cup–winning U.S. national team to play exhibition games against an all-star team of world internationals. Robert Contiguglia, the president of U.S. Soccer, was furious.

  But if the heads of U.S. Soccer were shocked, as they claimed, it was only because they hadn’t been paying attention—not just to notices the players gave them about the tour but to the players’ demands for more respect in general.

  It was only one year earlier the players had to get their new lawyer, John Langel of Ballard Spahr, to chase down bonus payments they had been owed for more than a year. He first agreed to represent the players on a pro bono basis and met with them in September 1998, about 17 months after the na
tional team won all six games and sold out three in a Nike-sponsored tournament. Langel was stunned to learn the players were still waiting for the $3,000 each they were owed by U.S. Soccer for that tournament.

  “To women who weren’t making a lot of money, $70,000 collectively, or about $3,000 per player, was a lot of money,” Langel says.

  He and the players decided they should come up with a list of grievances and bring all their complaints to the federation. Much of the list came simply from looking at what the men’s team had and comparing it to the women’s. Did they have physical therapists? How many? What about massage therapists? Did the men have equipment managers? Across the board, the men’s team had more.

  While the women carried their own equipment, the players on the men’s team didn’t have to worry about such things. While the men’s team traveled to games in luxury buses, the women traveled in vans. The men stayed in better hotels and had better accommodations for flights, too.

  “We were staying in hotels that had cockroaches in them, and we had to drive to games in hotel shuttle buses. We actually went to a game on a Holiday Inn shuttle bus once,” Julie Foudy says. “I’d take pictures of us in every single middle seat going up the plane. Back then they had the smoking section, and our seats were always the ones before smoking—we were sitting 10 hours in smoke-infested quarters on long flights. Little things became big things.”

  At one team training session in Florida in 1998, Langel visited the team and noticed Kristine Lilly wasn’t there.

  “Where’s Lil?” he asked.

  “Oh, she went to get us some bagels and fruit because we have two-a-days,” the answer came. “Our nutritionist says we should eat an hour after our first training and an hour before our next one.”

  Langel was again stunned. The players had double training days, and in between sessions, a player had to run out and get food because U.S. Soccer didn’t provide catering like they did at the men’s training sessions. That went on the list, too.