by Hope Solo
“Hey, Hope, how are you?” asked a friendly voice. I looked up. It was Jesse Bignami, our equipment manager. He gave me a big hug, my first real welcome. A second later, Abby walked into the room. “What’s up, Biggs?” Abby said to Jesse.
I was still invisible.
We had our first team meeting. Pia talked a little bit about the schedule going forward, her plan and philosophy. Then she pulled out her guitar, explaining that English wasn’t her native language and that she would sing us a song.
She started to strum her guitar and sing, “Come gather ’round, people / Wherever you roam . . .”
Our new coach was singing Bob Dylan’s anthem of transition. We listened in amazement as she finished up with the main chorus:
“For the times they are a-changin’.”
I smiled. I love it.
When Pia finished, she asked us: “Do you want to win?”
“Yes!” came the loud response.
“Well, to win you need a goalkeeper,” Pia said. “I don’t expect you to forget. But I do expect you to forgive. The Olympics are right around the corner, so let’s get to work.”
Meeting adjourned.
III.
I felt like shit on the field. I knew I wasn’t playing well, that my lack of comfort and confidence was showing every day in practice. Pia came up to me during every practice to check on me. “How you doing today?” she’d say.
“I’m OK, Pia,” I’d tell her.
During the four-day camp, Pia met with many players and heard many sides to the story. She listened. She observed. She saw how isolated I was. Toward the end of camp, she sat down with me and asked questions. “I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know if I want to know what happened,” she told me. “But in the end, we move on. I’m not making the choice for you. You have to make the choice whether you’re on board.”
I didn’t have much to say. She could see for herself how I was struggling.
“I want you to trust me, Hope,” she said. “Let’s look forward instead of back. As long as you keep playing well, it makes my job easier.” Pia said I needed to “keep” playing well, though we both knew I wasn’t performing like a starting goalkeeper. But she was giving me an opening.
The team came back together in early January to prepare for the Four Nations Tournament in China. Word was out that Lil was pregnant with her first child and would miss the entire year, including the Beijing Olympics. That meant that one more of the ’99ers was gone, at least for the immediate future. I was happy Lil was moving on with her life; a major hurdle had just been moved out of my path. I felt the shadow beginning to fade.
But even without Lil, the veterans were still trying to control our new coach. I found out through the grapevine that several veterans—even ones who were no longer on the team—had told Pia I wasn’t ready to play, that I needed to learn how to sit on the bench and be a team player. But I was learning to trust my new coach. Pia seemed like someone who made her own decisions. She was looking at the big picture, thinking about who she would need in Beijing in August. She named me to the Four Nations roster, and in China I started two out of three games: Bri got the other game. Even though I didn’t feel I had earned the starts, I played well enough. I kept to myself, sharing a room with Carli. I took my friend Stacey’s advice: “Fake it ’til you make it.” I smiled. I gave a few high-fives. I yelled, “Good job,” from the bench to my teammates. Faking anything went against my basic philosophy of life, but I could genuinely applaud a good play or appreciate a skillful move. I concentrated on moving forward.
Pia started bringing in new young players like Tobin Heath and Lauren Cheney. They didn’t share our recent tortured history; they had fresh eyes and fresh attitudes. Pearcie had taken over the captain’s armband from Lil. She was a confident, thoughtful leader; I remembered that in the hotel room in Shanghai, she had been the only veteran to try to move forward, and that on the celebration tour she had been the only veteran to stop and speak to me. She didn’t just talk about leadership; she showed it.
A few weeks after we won the Four Nations, we headed to Portugal for the Algarve Cup. Bri was left off the roster—Barnie and I split the four games. We played well, and for the first time in almost a year, I felt relaxed and happy with my team. Maybe it was the mild Portuguese weather and the beautiful surroundings. Maybe it was because the veterans’ circle had shrunk in size and power. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood. After we won, we all—Pia included—went dancing.
The calendar between the World Cup and the Olympics was condensed and intense. We were a different team than we had been just a few months ago, with a different coach, who wanted to play a different style. There wasn’t time to dwell on hurt feelings. The schedule was full: after Portugal we headed to Mexico to qualify for the Olympics, which we did with three wins and a tie.
While in Southern California for training camp, I was getting closer to Jesse, our equipment manager. I still stayed in touch with Adrian all the time, but he was busy with his own life. Jesse worked for U.S. Soccer and had had his own run-ins with Greg Ryan; he knew so much about the politics of my situation that I could turn to him for advice and support. He made me feel special and loved, something I needed at that low point. I still was feeling that my life was in flux. When I went home, I missed my father terribly. When I looked in the mirror, I felt I needed a change.
“I’m going to dye my hair brown,” I told one of my Nike reps.
“We’ve already shot our Olympic campaigns,” she said. “We want you to be recognizable. You’re going to be one of the faces of the team.”
So I stayed blond.
After our trip to Mexico, we had a handful of friendly games in the United States: two with Australia, in North Carolina and Alabama, and another with Canada in Washington, D.C. At those games, I took some abuse from Scurry fans. I heard boos behind the goal, and heckling.
“You’re no Scurry.”
“You’ll never be as good as Bri. You suck, Solo.”
“Get off the field.”
I pretended that I didn’t hear them.
As we edged closer to the Olympics, the press started to pay more attention to the team. How, reporters wondered, could this broken team heal? They started asking hard questions, ripping off the Band-Aid and seeing what was underneath. In Washington, D.C., Grant Wahl from Sports Illustrated sat down with both Bri and me separately and asked us to revisit the details of 2007.
“I guess Sports Illustrated is doing a story,” I said to Bri later.
“Yeah,” she said.
We decided we should talk. For eight months, I’d been dreading this conversation, but at a café near our hotel, Bri and I talked for more than two hours. There was no anger. I apologized again, and she said she forgave me. We spoke of our fathers. Bri told me she had always thought I was a good kid before the World Cup. “I still think you’re a good kid,” she said.
We hugged. The scar was always going to be there, on both our careers. But the wound seemed to have finally healed.
IV.
When the Olympic roster was named in June, Barnie and I were the goalkeepers. Bri was the alternate. It was the first time she wasn’t on the roster for a world championship since the 1991 World Cup. An era had ended, and I felt it was time to mark the start of a new one. I had worn number 18 since college, when I still hoped to be a field player. But that was so long ago—I was a goalkeeper now, one of the best in the world. Goalkeepers traditionally wear number 1. Even though Bri had been a backup for most of the past three years, she had retained the number 1 jersey—she had that right as our most senior player. I knew that requesting the number 1 jersey now could be portrayed—once again—as me stabbing Bri in the back, but I felt strongly that the number 1 jersey should be worn by the starting goalkeeper. It was soccer tradition. And it represented a fresh start.
I told Aaron Heifetz and
Cheryl Bailey that I wanted to make the change before the roster was sent to FIFA, and after a little hesitation, the change was made. My goalkeeper coach, Phil, approved—he told me that I had earned the number 1. A few teammates asked me what was up with changing my jersey, and I told them the truth: I wanted to wear the traditional goalkeeper number. The people it affected the most were my family members, because they all now had a collection of obsolete number 18 jerseys.
Secure in my place on the team, I started to make plans for my loved ones to come to the Olympics. Asking anyone to make two trips to China in the space of one year was a big request, and I had already received so much support for the World Cup that I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was grateful for the support I was receiving—my mom was coming and my grandparents were committed. They were getting older, and international travel was becoming more difficult. Grandma said it might be the last time that she left “God’s second paradise.”
Marcus wasn’t going to come, but he had the best reason of all to skip the Olympics. He and his fiancée, Debbie, had become parents of a baby boy in April. Johnny was named for my father—and he had been conceived soon after my father’s death and was born a few days after my father’s birthday and a day after my grandpa’s birthday. His birth brought joy and a sense of renewal to all of us.
Our last game before the Olympics was against Brazil in San Diego. Brazil, as usual, had struggled between the major tournaments and had been the last team to qualify for the Olympics. It was a warm night in July and the stadium was packed with enthusiastic fans. In the first half, Abby and Andréia Rosa went into a hard tackle and Abby never got up. She was flat on the ground and lifted her head to signal to the bench for help. I had never seen Abby in that kind of pain—not even when she had her head split open against North Korea.
The game came to a stop. Pearcie ran over to Abby. The paramedics lifted Abby onto a stretcher and placed an Aircast on her leg. She was taken to the hospital while the game continued. We won the game 1–0, but everyone on the team was in shock.
We found out after the game that Abby had broken both her left tibia and fibula. That’s exactly what Abby—completely lucid—had told Pearcie on the field.
Abby—our force, our scoring threat—was out of the Olympics. We were going to have to win without her. Abby and I still didn’t have much of a relationship, but we had reached a kind of détente: we agreed to disagree about what had happened in China. We were both key to the team’s success: the goal scorer and the goal stopper. I couldn’t imagine our team without her.
Some of the players were staying the night in San Diego while the rest of us were heading back to Los Angeles. I wanted to go to the hospital to see Abby, to let her know how important I thought she was to the team, to tell her that I wished nothing but the best for her. But the bus back to Los Angeles was waiting, so I left Abby behind in the hospital, where she had surgery to place a titanium rod and screws in her leg. I sent her a text.
Hey Abby, thinking of you.
A few days later, we boarded the plane headed for Beijing. We hadn’t lost a game since Pia took over—our last loss was the World Cup game against Brazil. I looked around at my teammates. There was no Lil, no Abby. Bri was only there as an alternate. Shannon Boxx, who had made it clear through comments to the press that she didn’t want to revisit the past and just wanted to play soccer, was all business. Kate Markgraf, Pearcie, and I had formed a working relationship as the core of the defense. Aly and I dealt with each other, but our relationship was never going to be the same, and we both knew it. Cat wasn’t there—she was injured. Tina had just had baby Mya. We were a completely different team. The times had indeed changed.
V.
God damn it, what was wrong with me? Why was I playing like this? I had never felt this nervous. The Olympics had started just five minutes ago, and I had already let in two goals. We had barely started our Olympic journey, and we were already facing elimination. If we were boxers, we might have been TKO’d.
We were playing our first game against Norway in Qinhuangdao, a seaport east of Beijing. We had arrived before most of the rest of Team USA, landing in China two weeks before our first game, which gave us time to adjust to the heat and the “haze,” as the Chinese euphemistically called the ever-present smog. But the long acclimation period didn’t do anything to calm my nerves. I had never been more scared to play a soccer game.
I knew how many people wanted me to fail. Sure, there were others who supported me, but I was keenly aware of how many were rooting against me and how important it was to prove them wrong. By the morning of our first game, August 6—two days before Opening Ceremonies—the accumulated weight of the past eleven months had settled in the pit of my stomach.
When I took the field, I had too much adrenaline rushing through me. In the first two minutes, I made a terrible decision. Lori Chalupny was marking the Norwegian captain, and was in perfect position. But I charged off my line and tried to punch the ball out, but I clocked Chups in the head instead. The goal was left untended and a Norwegian player easily headed the ball into the empty net. Not only had I made an error, I had injured Chups—our best defender. She left the game with a concussion.
The mistake rattled me. But it wasn’t what led to the next goal—there wasn’t really much I could do when Markgraf made a bad pass right to a Norwegian forward who brought the ball down into the box and blasted a shot past me. Now we were down 2–0. And that’s the way the game stayed. It was our first-ever loss in Olympic group play, the U.S. team’s only Olympic loss other than that golden goal defeat to Norway in Sydney in 2000. I was furious with myself. I couldn’t believe we had lost our very first game and that our entire Olympics were suddenly at risk, all because I had worried about what other people thought. What the fuck am I doing? I thought. Why the fuck am I letting the critics get to me?
It was the first time in my life that I had felt influenced by the opinions of others. I hadn’t been able to shut out the distractions on the soccer field. I thought of my dad—how he had always ignored those who judged him with a “Fuck off” attitude.
Fuck everyone, I thought.
We stayed in Qinhuangdao while the extravagant opening ceremonies unspooled in the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. We watched them on TV, but I couldn’t fully enjoy the spectacle. The thrill of being at the Olympics had given way to the desperate business of trying to recover and win an Olympic medal. We were already being ripped to shreds in the press. We could never win without Abby. The World Cup wounds couldn’t heal. We weren’t a unified team. In the eyes of the American media, we were already eliminated, forever in the shadow of the ’99 team.
But Pia stayed positive. She didn’t let us get down about the Norway result, and when we played Japan on August 9, we came out determined and attacking. In the first half, Carli scored a goal, and I played much better. We won 1–0 and headed to Shenyang to play New Zealand. What seemed impossible a few days earlier—winning our group—was within our grasp, if we won our game big and Japan beat Norway. I knew I couldn’t afford to let in a goal. We did our part, winning 4–0. At the end of the game we celebrated and then heard the score of the Japan game: the Japanese had beaten Norway 3–1.
Our celebration circle on the field was an especially joyous one. We had overcome a disastrous loss—just ten months after the bitterness that ripped our team apart, we were playing resilient, tough, unified soccer. It felt good. It felt like fate.
Before and after every game, I talked to Adrian on the phone. I was dating Jesse now, and Adrian was dating someone else, but I still needed him. Before the Olympics, I had pleaded with him to come to China. “Adrian, you’re one of the most important people in my life. I can’t imagine getting through these games without you. I bought a plane ticket for you. Please come.”
But he didn’t. Still, he got up early back in Seattle to watch every game on television—interrupting his life to support me. He a
nswered my calls at any hour of the night, and he took care of Leo.
In the quarterfinals, we played Canada in Shanghai. Midway through the first half we were leading 1–0 when rain began to pour down and lightning flashed around the stadium. The match was delayed for an hour and a half because of lightning strikes. I called Adrian. He kept me focused and calm through the long break.
When the game resumed, my old nemesis, Christine Sinclair, blasted a shot past my extended body to tie the game. It took eleven minutes of overtime before Natasha Kai, who had come on to replace Heather O’Reilly when overtime began, scored on a diving header to put us in the semifinals, where we would meet Japan again.
VI.
Our manager handed me an envelope. “This is for you, Hope.”
Inside was a letter from Abby. Back home in upstate New York, she was rehabilitating, watching us and reflecting on the team. She had thought about coming to China but decided she would be a distraction. Instead, she wrote each of her teammates a letter. Even me.
She told me that she understood that as a goalkeeper I needed to have a strong belief in myself. She said that in the past year she learned to accept people for who they are. She said that she had tried to turn me into a villain for being myself.
“That isn’t honest. That isn’t compassionate. That is controlling and manipulative. I am sorry I was like that,” Abby wrote.
She said that my skill in goal frustrated her constantly in practice and that she appreciated my ability. She encouraged me to show the world my softer side.
“You have a chance to show everyone who you really are,” she wrote. “I believe you’ll show everyone you’re a winner.”
I folded up the letter. I was blown away by the thought and feeling Abby had put into it. She could have written a perfunctory, “Go for the gold!” but she had truly thought about our relationship and what was at stake. I was humbled and inspired. She had reached out across the ravine that separated us and I knew I would grasp her hand. We didn’t have to be best friends, but we had to be teammates. We needed each other.