Solo

by Hope Solo

  At night, lying in bed, I made up stories about running away to Seattle to find my dad. We’d eat Neapolitan ice cream—he could have all the strawberry—and watch sports and maybe even get a new sheepdog.

  VI.

  My sister, Terry, decided I needed a female influence. Ten years older than me, she was a young woman with her own busy life, but she stayed connected, driving over the mountains to visit whenever she could. When she went to New York, she sent me fashionable gifts, like a pink Swatch watch. One day she picked me up and took me back to Seattle for a girls’ weekend. I was thrilled.

  Terry is beautiful, dark-haired and stylish. When I was young, I was in awe of her looks and fashion sense. On that weekend in Seattle, she tried to spoil me and smooth down my rough country edges. She had always liked to dress me up and do my hair when I was a baby, but as I got older, I spurned her efforts and took pride in being a grubby tomboy.

  But this weekend I loved the attention. She took me shopping at Nordstrom’s department store and bought me a green dress covered in little white flowers, along with green suede shoes. I twirled in front of the mirror and admired the way I looked: I hadn’t had on a dress in years—since my mother’s wedding to Glenn. I usually just wore a dirty old Raiders hoodie, with my hair pulled back in a ponytail, my thick, dark eyebrows slashing a line across my face.

  But in that fancy downtown Seattle department store, I liked what I saw in the mirror. I felt beautiful.

  “Let me do your eyebrows, Hope,” Terry said.

  We went to a skin-care salon where I got a facial. Terry shaped and tweezed my brows. Then, all dressed up and made over, we went to the Space Needle Restaurant for dinner. The Space Needle was like our Eiffel Tower. Being there meant you were someplace important and sophisticated, high above everything else. When my father took Marcus and me there in the summer of 1989, the visit signaled that our trip to Seattle was a special event. Dinner with my sister was also a memorable night.

  From high atop the Space Needle, I looked out over the city and felt like a princess, like Dorothy in the Emerald City. I felt so lucky to have a big sister who was so kind. While the rest of the Solo children inherited our father’s hot temper and short fuse, Terry was a peacemaker and a caretaker. She knew that things were difficult for me at home, that I needed to feel safe and beautiful.

  When I got back to Richland, I was teased because my eyebrows looked too perfect. Back then adolescent girls didn’t shape their brows. But I didn’t care.

  And, besides, my best friend, Cheryl, told me I looked pretty.

  VII.

  When I was in third grade, just a few months after the kidnapping, I’d started playing on a new recreation-league soccer team. On the first day of practice, I’d met a little blond girl named Cheryl Gies. Pretty soon we were inseparable. Cheryl and Hope, Hope and Cheryl—for the next ten years.

  Cheryl was one of the only people I let get close. She was allowed into my house, inside my crazy life, an eyewitness to the turmoil. She saw it all—the screaming fights with my mother, with Glenn, with Marcus. She didn’t pass judgment or criticize. I think she knew things were weird in my house, but she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. She remained my friend, no matter what she witnessed. When I didn’t feel like a normal kid, I took solace in having a normal best friend and in her normal life. So that was something, even if it was a step removed.

  Cheryl lived on the other side of town, in a new development of large homes set back from streets with equestrian names that evoked rich leather saddles and patrician roots. Many of the homes had horse pastures and sweeping views out over the Columbia Plateau. At Cheryl’s house, on Appaloosa Way, no one was screaming or fighting. Cheryl’s older brothers didn’t torment her. There were framed pictures of her family on the walls, pleasant-smelling candles in the bathroom, no darts shooting out from behind bedroom doors, and there was no clutter in the hallway or on the stairs. Even their garage was neatly organized. Being at Cheryl’s was like traveling into an opposite universe. I started to spend almost as much time there as at my home.

  Cheryl’s parents, Mary and Dick, were kind and generous. They invited me to spend the night all the time. They could see past my tough front. They could tell I was a good kid. Their biggest concern was my risk-taking: I was always the first one to jump off a cliff into the river, to try to swim out to an island, to leap between balconies at a motel where we were staying with our soccer team. I urged Cheryl to keep up with me, to try something new.

  The truth, however, is that I’m not completely fearless. When I was a small child, I had dreams that my stomach was sliced open by pirates, and I would cry and crawl into my father’s arms upon waking. I’m scared of flying, a difficult fear to deal with, considering my job and lifestyle. And I’m terrified of sharks, so I get nervous in the ocean.

  But in general, Mary and Dick were right. I took risks; I wasn’t intimidated by much. Why should I have been? I was coping with risk and threat on a daily basis at home.

  VIII.

  In middle school, I was assigned to write a paper about what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was then that I decided: I am going to be a professional soccer player.

  I was dreaming for something that didn’t even exist. This was years before the 1996 Summer Olympics, when the U.S. women’s soccer team first entered the nation’s consciousness. This was long before any kind of professional women’s league had been established. I didn’t even know the names Mia Hamm or Michelle Akers. I didn’t have any role models. But I knew how soccer made me feel, and I knew I wanted to hold on to that feeling for the rest of my life.

  Life was calm and ordered on the soccer field. I was special. My strength and aggression were a plus—I dominated as a forward. Back then, no coach would have ever dreamed of taking me off the field and sticking me in goal. I was a playmaker. Sure, if our team needed a goalkeeper, I was perfectly willing to fill in for a half—some kids didn’t have the stomach for it, but I didn’t care. I was fearless. But I was too good an athlete to be stuck in goal. That was where the slow, overweight girls played, the uncoordinated ones who couldn’t run or score. I was a goal-scoring machine, always leading the attack. I felt free and unburdened when I was on the soccer field.

  In middle school, our soccer team jumped up to another level. The core group had been together for years—pretty much since the day I met Cheryl—with our coach, Carl Wheeler. We became a “select” team, which meant a higher level of competition and commitment. We were expected to travel to tournaments. And there were costs involved, which made it difficult for my family. I was fortunate that Cheryl was my teammate. Mary and Dick drove me to games and tournaments, took me out to eat, and never made me feel as though I didn’t have enough. My coaches, Carl and later Tim Atencio, gave me rides and helped me out, buying snacks and Gatorade if I didn’t have anything with me. Of course my mom and Glenn and my grandparents contributed, but I was getting help from others as well, though I was too young to realize it.

  Our team traveled around the state to play. We loved going over the mountains and beating the top teams in Seattle. They were the big-city kids who were supposed to win. We were the scrappy country kids, who showed up with garish blue eye shadow and T-shirts with numbers instead of fancy jerseys. When we beat the rich-kid Seattle teams, it was especially gratifying.

  One autumn Sunday, we were on the other side of the mountains for a game. It was a dark, rainy Seattle day. Cheryl and I had carpooled with another player’s family. We pulled up in the parking lot next to the field, which was located in the middle of a park, surrounded by woods and dripping trees. I got out of the car and looked around for our coach. I saw a large man, limping through the parking lot in a rumpled trench coat.

  I dropped my bag. “Cheryl,” I said, “I think that’s my dad.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Double Identity

  My heart thudded as I walked across th
e parking lot. There was no doubt in my mind who this man was, even though the last time I had seen him was about five years earlier and he’d been in a holding cell at a Seattle police station. He was stamped on my brain forever, a figure constantly invading my thoughts and daydreams.

  He stopped walking. We looked at each other and—for a beat—I wondered if he would even recognize me. I had been a small girl the last time he had seen me, but now I was on the cusp of becoming a young woman. “Baby Hope,” he said and opened his arms to wrap me in a hug.

  I stepped forward, into his embrace. Of course my father recognized me. Of course I was still his Baby Hope. It didn’t matter how much time had passed. I wanted to ask him a thousand questions, tell him a million things. But I didn’t know where to start. I felt shy and nervous, and I also had a game to play.

  “Cheryl,” I said. “This is my dad.”

  “My dad.” The words tasted funny in my mouth.

  During our warm-ups, Cheryl and I tried to impress him. Our ongoing goal was to break the team record for number of times heading the ball—usually we could get around seventy headers back and forth without letting the ball touch the ground. That day, heading to each other across a little path that led into the woods while my father watched, we broke the record, keeping the ball in the air for eighty-eight touches.

  I wanted to play the game of my life on that muddy field in Seattle. I wanted to show my very first soccer coach what a strong player I was. My father loved sports. I wanted him to see what kind of athlete I was becoming. I was like a puppy, amped up and eager to show off, and once the game began, I channeled that onto the field. In the first half, I scored on a header, and then scored two more times. In the second half, we had a healthy lead, so we rotated goalkeepers, and I went into goal. I slipped going for a ball, and my opponent chipped it over my head and into the net. My dad never let me forget that: the first time he ever saw me play in goal, I let in a sky ball.

  Happy and sweating, I went over to my father when the game ended. I wasn’t sure what would happen next.

  “Would you like to see where I live, Baby Hope?” my father asked.

  Absolutely. I motioned for Cheryl to come with me, and we followed my father as he limped down the path that led into the woods. It was wet and dark, and our footsteps were quiet on the damp earth. I wasn’t scared, just curious. To the right of the path we spotted a blue tarp set up like a tent, covering some belongings. My father stopped in front of the makeshift shelter. “This is where I live,” he said.

  My father was homeless. His few possessions were inside a duffel bag, stuck under the blue tarp to stay dry. There was no one else around; just one man’s lonely spot in the rain-soaked woods. I hadn’t had much experience with homeless people, yet I wasn’t completely shocked. My father was such a mystery, he could have flown us to the moon and told me he lived there and I would have believed him.

  Cheryl was more unnerved than I was. I think that was the moment she fully realized how different my life was from hers, that no matter what direction I turned, I wouldn’t find a normal life.

  It was time to go—we had a long drive back to Richland and even though I wanted to stay and spend more time with my father, I was just a kid. I wasn’t in control. My father promised to keep in touch.

  “Dad, come see me play basketball sometime,” I begged.

  “I will, Baby Hope,” he said. “I’ll send you some money.”

  We hugged good-bye, and I got into the car. I can’t remember anything about the ride back home, except that I was shaking and numb.

  How did my father end up at the same field where I was playing? I never found out. Maybe he saw that a Tri-Cities soccer team was scheduled for a game and thought there was a chance I’d be there. Maybe it was happenstance; perhaps one of the reasons my father had settled by that playing field was that he took joy in seeing young people play sports. Maybe it was just fate.

  II.

  That sky ball I let in while my dad was watching didn’t bother me. I wasn’t a goalkeeper. I was just goofing around, doing my coach a favor when he wanted to let the regular keeper out to play in the field after we had established a healthy lead. And that lead was usually because of my goal-scoring. I was a standout field player. When I was thirteen, I went an hour north to Moses Lake for tryouts for the Eastern Washington Olympic Development Program. Olympic development programs target the top young soccer players in each age group by area. The road to the women’s national team begins in youth ODP. But that road can be an expensive one: ODP costs a lot of money—for travel, uniforms, and coaching. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I went to Moses Lake. All the best players from the east side of the Cascades were there, their registration numbers written in black Sharpie on their arms and legs. Looking around, I realized how many strong players were in my age group, and I started to get a little worried that I might not make the team. For one of the first times in my life, I felt insecure on the soccer field.

  There was a shortage of goalkeepers—there almost always is. Talented athletes—the kind who make up the ODP programs—are reluctant to commit to the position. Goalkeeping isn’t glamorous. It’s tough and stressful and thankless. And in youth soccer, players see that the less athletic kids are stuck in goal, creating a stigma about goalkeeping. But some of the coaches evaluating the ODP players had already seen me play the position. At a club tournament in Oregon when our regular goalkeeper was injured, I had filled in, and I was good at it. I was a strong athlete, and playing basketball had honed my hand-eye coordination and leaping skills—traits that not all soccer players possessed.

  “Hope Solo,” a coach called.

  I came over to him. “We’d like to take a look at you with the goalkeepers.”

  I was game—I just wanted to make the team. I batted away shots, dove to make saves, and easily made my team. But then an older team—three levels up—decided they wanted me for a backup goalkeeper and cherry-picked me off my age-group team. That was flattering. So there I was, a scrawny little thirteen-year-old, playing on an under-sixteen team with girls who were much more mature than I was. Amy Allmann, a former national team goalkeeper who was the coach of the regional ODP team, didn’t think I was anything special the first time she saw me play. Then she realized I was playing against girls who were three years older. All of a sudden, she was intrigued.

  The older players were sweet to me. They did my hair and made me wear lip gloss, and we listened to Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine” over and over and over again on the CD player. I was their baby sister, just a lanky little thing among the tall trees. I liked the status of playing above my age group, and I was good in goal because I was athletic and fearless. But still, I didn’t want to be a goalkeeper. I wanted to touch the ball, to attack. Now I stood in the net, watching the action running away from me, waiting for my turn to do something.

  My family hated watching me play goalkeeper and let everyone—coaches, players, other parents—know it, complaining loudly. My mother and grandmother thought I was being robbed of my true talent. They were also convinced I was going to get hurt in a collision with girls who had already reached their full maturity.

  Their concern was valid. The first time I played with my new ODP team, I replaced the starting goalkeeper, who had just suffered a concussion in a collision in the net. As she was carted away in an ambulance I pulled on my oversize goalkeeper jersey and giant gloves and went into battle. My mother and grandmother covered their eyes. I was nervous, but I prided myself on my toughness and ability to rise to a challenge. And I did.

  After that, I started living a dual soccer life. For my club and eventually my high school teams, I was always a forward, a goal scorer my teammates relied upon to win the game. But at the ODP level, I was always a goalkeeper, the one my teammates needed to save the game. The two roles kept me interested and challenged and also helped my soccer development. I learned both
ends of the field. Knowing how a forward attacks is an advantage for a goalkeeper. It was as if I had a double identity—my Richland life and my expanding outside world as a successful goalkeeper.

  III.

  I wasn’t the only one surprised to see my father at a game. Marcus went to Yakima one summer to play in a summer-league baseball tournament. He looked in the stands, and there was Dad. It was the first time Marcus had seen him in several years.

  My father invited Marcus to spend the night with him in a hotel, and Marcus’s best friend, Dominic Woody, came along. My dad had been Dominic’s Little League coach, and Dominic loved him.

  In those rainy woods in Seattle, my father had told me that he would try to stay in touch. And he attempted to be true to his word. He called on our birthdays. Once or twice a year, we’d get an envelope in the mail stuffed with cash—$400 for each of us, an enormous amount of money for teenagers. One fall, he came to town to watch Marcus play football every weekend and stayed in a hotel. On one of his visits to Richland, Cheryl and I met him at the Holiday Inn. That was a big deal: the Holiday Inn was the tallest building in Richland at the time, and its nicest hotel. He treated us to lunch. He took us shopping at the mall and bought us matching brown-and-black-checked fedoras. He was generous, peeling twenties off a wad of bills to give to us.

  My dad loved talking to Cheryl and me about soccer. He was enthusiastic—he called Cheryl “Bulldog” for her play on the field. And Cheryl learned to love him. “He makes me feel like a champion,” she told me. I understood what she meant. My dad was charismatic, especially with young people. He made you believe you were capable of anything. My brother’s Little League teammates always spoke fondly of him. The Richland adults were suspicious of my dad, but not the Richland kids. It made my mother crazy; seeing my father trying to impress us and act as though he had money. Any time he was around, we were ecstatic. Still, she didn’t try to stop us from seeing him.