by Hope Solo
The source of my father’s money remained a mystery. He was no longer in a tent or on the streets but seemed to be living with the same woman we had seen in the hotel in Seattle when he kidnapped us. She was well-off and appeared to be supporting him. One Christmas Marcus and I went to Seattle to see him at that lady’s fancy house. The visit was awkward. The woman had a daughter who wanted to play board games with us. She called my father Dad, which made me furious. She didn’t look like us: she had red hair and wasn’t athletic, and I refused to believe she could possibly be related to us. I just wanted her to leave and let us be alone with our dad.
Eventually that woman must have kicked my father out, because one day he showed up at Terry’s door in Kirkland. He was clearly living back on the streets and in need of a shower. Terry, who was married by then to her husband, Jeff, let Dad in, gave him something to eat, and allowed him to stay a few days. Then one morning he was gone.
From then on, he appeared at Terry’s door sporadically, staying for a week or two, leaving his duffel bag of belongings at her house. Sometimes I visited him there. But we never knew when he’d show up or where he was the rest of the time.
IV.
By the time I got to Richland High, I already had a target on my back. I was a standout soccer player. I was a Solo. I wasn’t going to blend in. As a freshman starter on the varsity soccer team, I scored seventeen goals and got attention from reporters who loved making puns out of my name: I was trying to win games “solo” or was giving my team “hope.”
One afternoon, we were playing Eisenhower High. It was a nasty, physical game, and our opponents were double- and triple-teaming me, pushing and elbowing. A girl punched me, I pushed back, and a brawl erupted. I was on the ground being pummeled, and no one—not the referee or the coaches—did anything to stop it. My mother ran onto the field, screaming, “Stop it, stop it.”
Our athletic director, Mr. Potter, stepped in front of her. “Judy, get off the field,” he demanded.
“If you were doing your goddamn job, I wouldn’t have to do it for you,” my mother screamed at him.
“Get off,” Potter shouted.
“Hey,” shouted Marcus, coming up behind them, “don’t you talk to my mother like that.”
The athletic director kicked them off the field. I was ejected from the game, along with the girls who were hitting me. Marcus had to go to the principal’s office for shouting at the athletic director.
The Solos had a reputation.
Marcus was a senior when I was a freshman. He’d been in trouble a lot through high school—fighting, drinking, driving under the influence. His coaches and some of the teachers at Richland loved him, but others hated and feared him. The same was true for the students—there was no middle ground with Marcus. When I got to Richland High, I sensed teachers and administrators eyeing me, thinking, Oh no, here comes another Solo. I, too, split people into camps: they either loved me or hated me, even though I wasn’t a troublemaker. I got good grades. I made the honor roll every semester of high school and kept my grade point average at 3.8 for four years.
But Marcus’s reputation was unavoidable. Guys wouldn’t ask me to dance at school dances because they were afraid of my brother. One night, I tried to sneak out of my house to meet an older boy. Marcus found out, and he and Glenn ambushed the boy with baseball bats, trying to intimidate him. It was a bonding moment. Another time, down by the boat dock, Marcus beat the shit out of an older boy who was calling my grandparents’ house in the middle of the night, looking for me.
Marcus was my protector, but we still battled. As I got older, his insults got worse. He used my soccer prowess as a weapon against me, calling me a “golden child,” a selfish bitch who thought I was better than everyone else. Our fighting didn’t let up. Still, we were a team. At the homecoming dance in my freshman year, my brother asked me to dance. I was so proud, a little freshman dancing with my cool senior brother.
V.
My mother’s drinking was getting worse. I suspected she was drunk when she showed up at my basketball and soccer games. Once, cops found her passed out in her truck. She blacked out all the time, never remembering what had happened the night before. One day Marcus and I broke our grandparents’ Ping-Pong table; the next day, when my mother asked what had happened, we told her she had done it. Her face dropped—she couldn’t remember whether or not that was true. We were being cruel, but I wanted to hurt her: I thought that maybe if she were embarrassed enough, she would stop drinking.
I always knew where to get booze for a high school party. I could just steal a bottle of rotgut vodka from underneath the front seat of my mother’s truck. It didn’t matter how many times I stole one; another bottle always appeared.
Our fighting escalated. I had little respect for my mother or Glenn, so I refused to acknowledge their rules. One day Glenn had enough of my defiance. “If you don’t like it, get the hell out,” he shouted at me.
“I will,” I screamed.
And I did. First I went to my grandparents for a few weeks. Then—encouraged by my forgiving Grandma to give Mom and Glenn another shot—I went back home. But it was still unbearable.
“Cheryl,” I cried, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t live with them.”
“Why don’t you come stay with me?” Cheryl said.
She checked with Mary and Dick, who, as always, welcomed me into their home. At the time, Mary and Cheryl’s middle brother had moved to Iowa for a few months for Mary’s work, and her oldest brother was in college. So it was just me and Dick and Cheryl. Cheryl was sad that her mother was gone and was more than happy to have my company. So was Dick.
In those months that I lived on Appaloosa Way, Dick made us breakfast every day. Those mornings were sweet: Cheryl and I listened to music while we got dressed and did our makeup for school, like two normal sisters in a normal family, singing along to Sheryl Crow.
All I wanna do is have some fun.
I’ve got a feeling I’m not the only one.
After school, we did our homework in the den while Dick puttered around in the kitchen. When he asked us to be home by a certain time, we complied without argument. When he asked us to help with the dishes, we didn’t complain. No one was drinking. No one was fighting. The police didn’t come to the door. It was a vacation from my real life.
But eventually I went home. I knew who my family was. I knew where I belonged.
VI.
The night before Marcus graduated from high school, my father came to Richland. He and Marcus stayed up all night talking. He told Marcus a long story about working for a loan shark in Massachusetts and being involved in a shootout while trying to collect money, and having a friend who was able to get him a driver’s license under another name and a plane ticket to Seattle. He said that he had two sons in Michigan. He hinted that his last name was really DeMatteo. When Marcus relayed all this new information to me, I was more confused than ever.
“I don’t even know what my name is,” I cried to Cheryl one night while I was staying at her house. “It might not even be Solo. I don’t even know who I am.”
I was a teenager. I was self-conscious. I was embarrassed that my father was homeless, that my mother was a drunk, that my brother was in constant trouble with the police, that I wasn’t even sure of my last name. I didn’t talk about it to anyone, except sometimes to Cheryl.
But inside, I told myself that all this bullshit was making me tougher. I was perversely proud of all these challenges, fiercely protective of my strange family tree. I was a survivor.
CHAPTER FOUR
Somewhere—Anywhere—Far Away
One evening, my mom and Glenn called me into the living room and told me to sit down.
Oh shit. What had I done this time?
“Hope, we don’t think you can play ODP this year,” Glenn said.
I stared at him in shock. I was in high s
chool and I’d already been playing in the Olympic Development Program for years. I was in the regional pool. I was being scouted by top college coaches.
“It’s just very expensive,” my mother said. She looked unhappy. My mother had been laid off from Hanford. The economy in Richland rose and fell with every election cycle and federal budget fight, and Hanford was dependent on government funding, leading to a seesaw of hirings and layoffs. My mother was a victim of the latest round of job eliminations, and Glenn was on disability. They were about to file for bankruptcy.
I understood that finances were a strain. What I didn’t understand was how they could think about taking away the most important part of my life. Soccer was my way out, how I was going to make it in the world. Between club soccer and high school soccer, I played seven days a week, and as soon as the fall soccer season ended, I played varsity basketball. In the spring and summer, there were ODP tournaments. I was working hard with a goal in sight—a college, one far away. The recruiting letters were filling up our mailbox. I loved counting them, eager to accumulate more and more. They validated all my sweat. I kept the letters in two big binders—one black and one white—and I often shut my bedroom door and flipped through them, envisioning my escape. I imagined what the schools were like, what I’d look like in the team uniform, how it would feel walking across campus somewhere far, far away, like North Carolina or California. I would leave Richland behind.
And now they wanted to take it away from me. “You can’t do this to me,” I shouted. “This is my life. This is how I’m going to go to college.”
Glenn and my mom looked at each other but didn’t say anything. I think they were surprised at the intensity of my reaction and realized, maybe for the first time, the depth of my passion and commitment. I ran into my room, slammed the door, and sobbed. If I couldn’t play ODP, if I couldn’t get a college scholarship, I was going to be stuck in Richland my entire life. I was probably going to end up working at Hanford, cleaning up nuclear waste.
My fears were unfounded. I lived in a community that was proud of its athletes. Without my even knowing, several people in the community had already helped me out financially, chipping in over the years to make sure I could play soccer for the Three Rivers Soccer Club, pay the tournament fees, stay in hotels, and travel to away games. My first coach, Carl Wheeler, helped out. So did Tim Atencio, who aided me in raising money to play ODP. After that conversation with my mother and Glenn, I set about fund-raising. It was humbling—soliciting money at local tournaments and asking my club for help. But people seemed to take pride in giving me a hand; my Richland neighbors were invested in my athletic success.
I was able to keep playing. And, eventually, the state and regional programs found money for me. My soccer career wasn’t going to end.
II.
It was a good time to be a female athlete. The summer before my sophomore year, the Atlanta Olympics were dubbed the Women’s Games. American female athletes—including the U.S. women’s soccer team—stole the show. This success showed how well Title IX—the federal law passed nine years before I was born and that I was only vaguely aware of—had worked. Title IX, enacted in 1972, bans gender discrimination in institutions receiving federal funds, which opened up collegiate and high school athletics to girls. Now the first generation to grow up under Title IX was winning fistfuls of gold medals.
The U.S. soccer team drew capacity crowds that summer as they made their gold-medal run. That was the first time most people had ever heard of players like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Michelle Akers, and their popularity was rooted in soccer-playing kids like me all over the country.
But Title IX didn’t make things easier inside my house. Money continued to be a touchy subject; I felt like my soccer was making things harder on my family.
After being laid off, my mother started her own business as a handywoman, doing fix-it jobs around town. Her best clients were older men and single women who didn’t want to let a stranger in their homes. But her drinking got in the way, and she lost customers. It was the first in her string of odd jobs: working at a health club, running a secondhand store.
Marcus had been a good defensive lineman in high school and was planning to play football at Walla Walla Community College, just as our older brother, David, had. But he got in a car accident, breaking his ribs and suffering a contusion to his liver. So instead of playing football, he spent his first full year out of high school partying and raising hell. One night he borrowed our mother’s tricked-out red Nissan Maxima and went to a friend’s house to get loaded. Coming home the next morning—still drunk—he took a turn too fast and totaled the car. He tried to run away but was arrested. Because he had a suspended license, he was facing jail time. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two months in jail plus forty-five days of house arrest, during which time he had to wear an ankle bracelet tracking device.
Marcus was released from jail in time for football training camp at Walla Walla, but because Walla Walla is in a different county, he couldn’t live there while he wore the bracelet. So my grandma and grandpa drove him there and back, ninety minutes each way, every day for forty-five days—a round-trip trek of unconditional love.
III.
My first serious boyfriend was a guy I’ll call Tom. I’d had a boyfriend when I was younger—his parents were friends with Mom and Glenn, and we camped and snorkeled and played sports together. I had also dated some older guys—I never had a problem getting a date or earning the attention of boys I liked. But Tom was special. He was a year ahead of me. Tom was handsome and he played football and basketball. He was the new guy and all the girls were interested. He quickly became attached to the popular group, but was dating me. He was my first love, although I wasn’t ready to sleep with him.
I didn’t hang out with the popular girls. I was too busy playing sports to play their social games. I couldn’t keep track: friends one day and backstabbers the next, who was wearing the right clothes, who was on the outs. I was good friends with the athletes in the group, the ones who knew me as a teammate, but a lot of the popular girls saw me as a threat. They didn’t like the fact that the boys they liked liked me. And dating a guy like Tom made them hate me even more.
I was traveling a lot for soccer, missing parties, dances, and weekend outings. After I got back from one trip, I heard that Tom had cheated on me with a cheerleader, one of the popular girls. I was devastated. Late in the summer, a few weeks later, Cheryl and I walked through the dusty entrance of the county fair in Kennewick. Coming out the exit was the cheerleader who had slept with Tom. Cheryl prayed I wouldn’t notice her, but I did. I made a beeline toward the girl, cutting through the stream of carnival goers.
“Hey,” I said, stepping in front of her. “You’re a fucking slut.”
She smirked at me. “Tom’s pretty good,” she said. “You should give him a try.”
I punched her in the face. Cheryl grabbed me. “Come on, Hope,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
We fled into the county fair, trying to lose ourselves in the crowd. I was shaking and furious. Like Marcus, she had sliced into my tender spot, and my instinct was to fight back as hard as I could.
The fallout was huge. Her parents wanted to press charges. I spent every morning in the counselor’s office for weeks when we got back to school in the fall. Her parents also called my mom, who—in her blunt way—asked if they knew why I had punched their little darling.
Just another incident for the Solo family file.
Liz Duncan was my other best friend. Cheryl and I had been children when we became friends, but Liz and I had a friendship that had grown out of mutual interests. She was a year older than me and also played both basketball and soccer. Liz was also an amazing track athlete. She was fiercely competitive but dorky and funny off the court. She was beautiful and dated the best football player at our high school, but like me she wasn’t locked into the popular g
roup. I looked up to her and was happy when she went out of her way to befriend me.
Liz was a midfielder and assisted on many of my goals. Off the field, we were a team as well—two jocks dating football players that all the popular girls wanted. We were both nominated every year for Homecoming princess but seemed destined to never win. It was our standby joke—we thought the hoopla and banquets were stupid—we’d rather have been running suicide drills at practice than parading around in plastic tiaras. But, her senior year, Liz won. A year later, I did too.
Cheryl and Liz and I weren’t angels. We did regular teenage stuff. I sneaked out with my mom’s car before I got my driver’s license. We would party down by the river—often with my mother’s horrible vodka. But we weren’t troublemakers, and I was just as happy kicking the ball around with Cheryl on a Saturday night or shooting hoops with Liz as going to the in-crowd party.
Cheryl and I went to soccer tournaments together. Mary and Dick drove us to Colorado for one and to Long Beach, California, for another. In Long Beach, Cheryl and I went for a walk in search of Snoop Dogg—we knew he was from Long Beach and that the “Gin and Juice” video was filmed there, so we wanted to find the house. We found ourselves in the ghetto, and Mary and Dick were not pleased when we came back to the hotel escorted by the police, who had let us know we were in the wrong place. As usual, I was blamed for orchestrating the outing. “You are the fake angel,” I told Cheryl. “You do everything I do, but you never get caught.”
Our high school soccer team had become a force. We made it to the state championships twice, losing in the semifinals my sophomore year and winning it all my senior year. I finished my high school soccer career with 109 goals, 38 scored in my senior year. As our soccer team became more successful, our games became events. The parents and players helped construct a new soccer field next to Richland High, so we didn’t have to travel across town to play. The football players dragged couches from Goodwill out to the field and sat on them, wearing matching yellow shirts, proclaiming themselves the Bleacher Bums. When we made it to the state finals, it seemed that our whole town drove over the mountains to Seattle to attend, caravanning in buses and cars. Students were allowed to miss school for those two days.