by Hope Solo
FRONTISPIECE
DEDICATION
TO MY MOM, THE TRUE CHAMPION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I was young and things in my life got crazy, I would think to myself, “I’m going to write a book someday.” This book is my story, one I’ve waited years to tell. It is my opportunity to share my life, in my own words, from my own perspective. The events and people I describe to you in the book are portrayed the way I experienced them. The conversations in the book all come from my clear recollections of them, but as a general rule they should not be taken as word-for-word recitations. In all instances, though, I have remained true to the essence, mood, and spirit of the exchanges.
—Hope Solo, June 2012
CONTENTS
Frontispiece
Dedication
Author's Note
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
Life Behind the Smiley Face
CHAPTER 2
God’s Second Paradise
CHAPTER 3
A Double Identity
CHAPTER 4
Somewhere—Anywhere—Far Away
CHAPTER 5
Bare-Branched, but Ready to Bloom
CHAPTER 6
The ’99ers
Photographs
CHAPTER 7
“I Should Have Died a Long Time Ago . . .”
CHAPTER 8
An Arm Like Frankenstein
CHAPTER 9
Made in the WUSA
CHAPTER 10
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
CHAPTER 11
“Only a Daughter Cries Like That”
Photographs
CHAPTER 12
Shadows
CHAPTER 13
“You Can’t Go by a Gut Feeling”
CHAPTER 14
Stepping into Liquid
CHAPTER 15
“Don’t Let the Devil Steal Your Joy”
CHAPTER 16
The New #1
CHAPTER 17
Pretty Damn Sweet
CHAPTER 18
Unprofessional Professionals
CHAPTER 19
Seattle’s Finest
CHAPTER 20
It Just Takes One
CHAPTER 21
The Silver Lining
CHAPTER 22
Bare-Ass Naked on a Lawn
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
I don’t believe in happy endings, but maybe my mother did back when I was born. She had known a popular older girl in high school named Hope who had been nice to her; for her the name was imbued with a sense of friendship and belonging. My father said he viewed my birth as a fresh start, a chance for him to leave something good in a world that had brought him mostly trouble and bad luck.
Hope.
But my family doesn’t do happy endings. We do sad endings or frustrating endings or no endings at all. We are hardwired to expect the next interruption or disappearance or broken promise.
Case in point: September 27, 2007. I sat on the bench in China, at the Women’s World Cup. I had been the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. national soccer team for three years. We needed to win the most important tournament in soccer to reclaim our international dominance and prove to ourselves that we were of the same mettle as the 1999 World Cup champions—the greatest women’s team in American sports history. We were incessantly compared to them, the team that had changed women’s sports forever during the summer following my high school graduation. Not just a great athletic team, those players had molded a reputation of overwhelming goodness, the girls next door who kicked butt on the soccer field. They projected an image of best friends—their closeness mythologized by a Nike ad campaign in which all team members announced to their dentist that they “will have two fillings,” in support of a cavity-prone teammate. The ’99ers cast a long shadow, one we couldn’t escape.
My father had died unexpectedly two months before the World Cup. I was emotionally fragile, even though I was strong between the posts. We won our group and trounced England in the quarterfinals. I dedicated my growing string of shutouts to my dad: three consecutive World Cup games without allowing a goal.
Yet for the semifinal game against talented Brazil, I lost my job. My coach, Greg Ryan, called me into a meeting two nights before the game. He wanted to replace me with a popular former starter, Briana Scurry—a ’99er who had been in goal for that championship and who had also shut down Brazil in the 2004 Olympic gold-medal game. But that was the past; Bri had barely played for three years, while I had ascended to the top spot. Yet Greg decided she would do better against Brazil based on those long-ago results.
Only a few of the old guard remained, but Greg claimed that one of those legends, Kristine Lilly, along with Abby Wambach, a younger player who had allied herself with the ’99ers, had suggested the change. I felt betrayed, especially by Abby. It was a bitter disappointment, but not a complete shock.
II.
Fate, like some coaches, plays favorites. On the soccer field, I expected to be judged by my hard work and performance. Soccer made me a star in my hometown. It insulated me from hurts and harsh judgments. It lifted me out of eastern Washington and set me on a trajectory that only a few ever get to experience. It gave an anchor and order to my life, which too often had been defined by drama and chaos. But even the wins on the field, the growing success, couldn’t overcome my fatalism, the sense that life was beyond my control. My father’s sudden death—after he had finally found a calm place in his life after years of erratic, self-destructive behavior—was all the evidence I needed.
Being benched in Hangzhou was still more proof that hard work and talent might not be enough. Devastated, I thought of my father: I had spread a little of his ashes inside the goal at every game until this one. He had planned to be here, watching his youngest child. He always called me his Baby Hope.
I thought of my family—my mother and brother, my grandparents and aunt, my best friend’s parents, my boyfriend, and my brother’s fiancée—who were sitting in the stadium. They had traveled around the world to support me. They were wearing black armbands in memory of my father. I had wanted to be strong and courageous for them, but now that chance was gone.
The game was a disaster almost from the start. Bri looked rusty, colliding with Brazilian forward Formiga as she came out on a free kick. In the twentieth minute, U.S. defender Leslie Osborne dove to head away a corner kick and ended up knocking the ball past Bri and into the net.
An own goal, the most demoralizing play in soccer. We were trailing 1–0.
Seven minutes later, Marta—the most feared player in the world—dribbled down the right flank and was fouled by one of our defenders, who grabbed her shorts. Marta wriggled out of the grasp and blasted a shot into the lower right corner of the net. Bri dove and got a hand on it, but couldn’t keep the ball from slipping past her. On the television broadcast, former U.S. women’s coach Tony DiCicco told viewers at home that it was exactly the kind of shot Bri had once always stopped. “If she’s on her game, she makes this save,” he said.
We were down 2–0, and it was about to get worse. In stoppage time of the first half, Shannon Boxx received her second yellow card of the game for taking down Brazilian forward Cristiane. It was a questionable call, but there’s no appealing the referee’s decision. Boxx was sent off, and our team was going to have to play the entire secon
d half a player short—ten versus eleven, for forty-five minutes.
I didn’t feel vindicated by what was happening. I was distraught. I couldn’t believe how poorly our team was playing—at every position. I knew we were so much better than this.
Watching from the bench in the second half, I witnessed the complete collapse of my team and our four-year dream. Eleven minutes into the second half, our defense was out of position and Cristiane flicked in another goal. Brazil 3, U.S. 0.
I sat at the end of the bench, stunned and pissed, and my face broadcast those emotions to everyone watching. It usually does. I don’t try to sugarcoat bad news. At that point—in the midst of the worst loss in our team’s history—smiling happily seemed pointless and fake.
At one point, my teammate Natasha Kai leaned over and nudged me. “Hey,” she said. “The cameras are on you.”
“I don’t care,” I told her. Was I supposed to act pleased as our dream derailed?
The last blow came in the seventy-ninth minute with one of the most beautiful goals in World Cup history, a dazzling play by Marta who flicked the ball over her shoulder, caught up with it, and spun past our defense to make it 4–0.
An eternity later, the whistle finally blew. The Brazilian players celebrated wildly at midfield. I had just one mission—to make my way over to where my family was sitting in the stands, to thank them for their support. As I crossed the field, Abby Wambach approached me. She looked me straight in the eye. “Hope,” she said, “I was wrong.”
I looked down and nodded. What could I say? The hard evidence was lit up on the scoreboard. Abby gave me a quick, hard embrace, and we walked away in separate directions.
At international soccer games, players exit the stadium through the “mixed zone,” an area where reporters gather for postgame interviews. They line up on one side of metal barricades and the players walk through on the other side. Our press officer, Aaron Heifetz, stuck next to me. When someone reached out to me across the barrier, Heifetz announced in a loud voice, “She didn’t play. You only want to talk to people who played the game.”
One thing I’ve learned in my life is that I can speak for myself, that I can fight my own battles. I don’t like anyone telling me how I’m supposed to feel or think or what I’m supposed to say. If I had meekly accepted what others told me, my life would be radically different: I would have gone to a different school. I never would have reconnected with my father. I would be estranged from my mother. I would have viewed myself as a failure.
I turned to Aaron. “Heif, this is my decision.”
I stepped toward the microphone and, in an instant, broke an unwritten code that decrees female athletes don’t make waves. We don’t criticize. We don’t dare wander beyond political correctness. Our hard competitive edges are always smoothed down for public display. “It was the wrong decision,” I said, my voice shaking with emotion. “And I think anybody who knows anything about the game knows that.”
I was speaking into a microphone, but I was talking directly to Greg Ryan. “There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves,” I said. “And the fact of the matter is, it’s not 2004 anymore. It’s not 2004. It’s 2007, and I think you have to live in the present. And you can’t live by big names. You can’t live in the past. It doesn’t matter what somebody did in an Olympic gold medal game three years ago. Now is what matters, and that’s what I think.”
I turned and walked away, an angry Heifetz on my heels. He reprimanded me harshly for speaking out as we boarded the team bus. I told him that if he didn’t want me to answer questions, he shouldn’t have taken me past reporters.
I got on the bus and went to my usual spot in the back, where I always sat with my closest friends on the team. The mood was grim; everyone was in shock. We hadn’t lost a game in more than three years. The conversation was muted.
“You guys,” I told them, “I just did an interview.”
They asked what I had said.
“I said I believed I would have made those saves.”
Someone said, “Uh oh, Hope,” but it was in kind of a joking way. Carli Lloyd said, “Hope, I’m sure it’s fine.” Other teammates had no reaction. The bus started up, taking us back to our hotel. I thought that was that, the end of a bad day in U.S. soccer history.
But it was only the beginning.
CHAPTER ONE
Life Behind the Smiley Face
My first memories are a kaleidoscope of happiness: A small red house surrounded by a wooden fence; my free-spirited mother, Judy; my big, outgoing father, Gerry; my older brother, Marcus; and me, Baby Hope.
On the outside of the fence, for everyone passing by to see, was a giant yellow smiley face. On the other side was a yard with a sandbox and a jungle gym. An English sheepdog named Charlotte. Rabbits and turtles and kittens. Out back we played Red Light! Green Light! and had Easter-egg hunts and birthday parties. Inside the house, my mother, a budding photographer, set up a darkroom to develop film, as well as a workout room where she practiced karate. I snuggled with my parents in their bed and watched TV. The cozy kitchen was where we had family spaghetti dinners.
Smiley face on the fence, happy people in the house.
But as with so much of my life, the truth is a little more complicated. Clutter—plastic toys, yard equipment, bikes, an old jalopy—filled up our side yard. The neighbors complained, so my parents were forced to put up a fence to hide all our crap. My mom didn’t like thinking the neighbors had won some kind of victory, so she painted that garish yellow happy face as tall and as wide as the fence would allow. The smiley face wasn’t a reflection of internal happiness. It was a big “Fuck you” to our neighbors.
II.
How did we all arrive there, in a tract house on Marshall Street in Richland, Washington?
My mother came for the same reason most people settled in Richland: because of the nuclear reactors. Richland, Washington, looks like a normal American town, with neat rows of streets along the banks of the Columbia River. But behind that unremarkable facade is a complex history, a town created in the dark shadows of the American dream. During World War II, the U.S. government searched for an isolated swath of land with an abundant water supply and plenty of electrical power where it could hide a highly classified extension of the Manhattan Project. They found what they were looking for in an arid stretch of emptiness two hundred miles southeast of Seattle. Hanford is in the high desert, on the confluence of the Columbia and Yakima Rivers, not far from the Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams. It had water, electricity, and not much else. It was the perfect place to build the world’s first plutonium production reactors.
The U.S. government forced the relocation of about 1,500 residents from the small farming community of Hanford, which became the 586-square-mile site of the nuclear campus. Workers were imported and housed in tent barracks, and later, in small tract houses in nearby Richland. Within a few months, the workforce swelled to 51,000, and three nuclear reactors were producing the plutonium that, once shipped to Los Alamos, was used to build some of the first atomic bombs. Most workers had no idea what they were helping develop. No one was allowed to speak of it: husbands and wives weren’t even permitted to tell each other what their jobs were at Hanford. Residents had phony mailing addresses in Seattle, hung blackout curtains at night, and spoke in whispers inside their own homes. There were signs posted in public places: CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES.
Old-timers tell stories that have been handed down over the years, of neighbors seen chatting in public before abruptly disappearing without so much as a good-bye. The secretive origins of Richland seem to have filtered down into the dusty riverbanks of the Columbia and infiltrated our ordinary lives.
Ours was a patriotic place. In 1944, every employee of the Hanford Works donated one day’s pay to buy a bomber—a B-17 that was christened Day’s Pay and flew more than sixty missions over Germany. There’s a huge mura
l of the aircraft on an exterior wall at my high school: we are the Richland High Bombers. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, was filled with Hanford plutonium. Six days later, the Japanese surrendered and World War II ended. Around most of the globe, that victory, manufactured on the banks of the Columbia River, is viewed as an apocalyptic moment for mankind. But in my hometown, that incineration is still celebrated. The logo of my high school is the nuclear mushroom cloud—it’s painted on the floor of our basketball court, emblazoned on T-shirts and the backs of varsity jackets and defended vigorously by Richland citizens against periodic attempts to change it to something more politically correct. The Richland motto is “Proud of the cloud.”
We don’t do politically correct in Richland. When I was in high school, one of our school cheers was “Nuke ’em, nuke ’em, nuke ’em till they glow!”
My family didn’t help manufacture the annihilation of Nagasaki. My grandfather, Pete Shaw, was in the navy during World War II and went on to become an electrical engineer in the nuclear industry in Southern California during the 1950s and ’60s. But Hanford stayed busy throughout the Cold War, so in 1969 Grandpa Pete and Grandma Alice moved to Washington with their four children. Their oldest daughter, my aunt Kathy, lasted only a few weeks. She left Richland as soon as she turned eighteen. My mother, the second oldest at sixteen and about to start her senior year of high school, was so distraught about the move that she had tried to run away beforehand, concocting an adolescent fantasy of escaping with a boyfriend. But the plan only lasted a few hours—the boyfriend was interested in someone else. When Judy Lynn Shaw looked out the plane window at the brown barren landscape below her, she groaned in despair, “What is this place?”