Solo

by Hope Solo

  Finally, after our quarterfinal, we traveled to Beijing, where the Olympic action was happening, and moved into the Olympic Village. The semifinal and final were at Workers Stadium, an old stadium removed from the Olympic Park, in a bustling part of Beijing. We had never lost to Japan, but we knew how dangerous the Japanese were. Just as we took the field for warm-ups, the other semifinal game was ending. In a major upset, Brazil had manhandled Germany, 4–1, ousting the tournament favorite and exacting revenge for their World Cup loss.

  When our semifinal began, Japan seemed intent on continuing the day of upsets. Japan jumped out in front in the first half, scoring on a corner kick. We tied the game late in the first half on an attack that I started with a long goal kick. Just before the half we scored again, and never relinquished the lead. The final was 4–2.

  I had played fine for the first five games of the tournament, but I hadn’t been required to be a game-changer. In every major tournament, a team needs its goalkeeper to come up huge in at least one game, and that hadn’t happened yet. The game hadn’t called my name. But I would be ready when it did. We were in the gold-medal game. And our opponent was Brazil.

  VII.

  In recent months, I had returned to my comfortable spot at the back of the bus, where I could zone out and listen to music. On the ride to Workers Stadium on August 21, I looked out the window and thought about my yearlong odyssey from a stadium in Hangzhou to a stadium in Beijing. I felt so strong, both mentally and physically prepared. I knew I had done everything to be ready for this moment. We pulled up to the stadium, and when I stood to get up off the bus, I looked over at Carli. Our eyes locked. We smiled a sort of half-smile that spoke everything that needed to be said. We were at once relaxed and confident. “Well,” I said. “Here we go.”

  Carli nodded. “Here we go.”

  BRAZIL’S STARS, CRISTIANE and Marta, were determined from the start to pick up where they left off in the World Cup, firing shot after shot at me. I dove to smother shots, punched balls out, collided with players. The game was calling my name. In the seventy-second minute, Marta got behind two of our defenders and into the six-yard box. She shot at me from point blank range: as she came at me I read that she would hit the ball left to the far post, but she quickly changed and blasted the ball to my right. I had to react instantaneously, throwing up my arm to block the rocket shot, which felt like it would take off my arm. The force of the blow was so loud some observers thought the ball had struck the post. No, it had struck me, ricocheting out of danger. Marta thrust her hands up in frustration.

  Regulation time ended in a 0–0 draw. We would play two fifteen-minute halves of overtime. Six minutes into overtime, Carli had a give-and-go with Amy Rodriguez and blasted a left-footed shot from the top of the box. It landed in the corner of the goal. We led 1–0.

  “Hell yeah!” I said, at the far end of the field, but refrained from celebrating. I knew we still had twenty-four minutes to play and Brazil was relentless.

  Marta beat our defense again and sailed a ball past me, just over the crossbar. Time seemed to have stopped, stretching out into the muggy Chinese night. Ball after ball was slotted through without anyone touching them. I pushed balls out with my fingertips, with one hand. We had been playing forever, an eternal battle, and still the whistle didn’t come. As the seconds ticked down, Brazil earned corner after corner. Finally I saw the referee glance at her watch. It had to be time.

  Renata Costa lofted another corner. Cristiane got her head on it. I made the save.

  And then the whistle blew.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Pretty Damn Sweet

  I sprinted out of the goal toward Carli and threw my arms around her. I wasn’t thinking about the irony, the two ostracized teammates with the winning goal and the shutout. I just wanted to hug my friend in celebration. A celebration I’d been awaiting my entire life. We had our gold medal.

  We collapsed onto each other, my teammates and I, a jumble of cleats and tears and joy and sweat. Pia—our coach, who had believed in me—lifted me off the ground in a bear hug. Brazil’s Cristiane sat on the field, distraught, wailing in despair. Their goalkeeper, Barbara, lay prone across the face of the goal, weeping. Marta walked in small circles, looking stunned and confused.

  We had done it. Just us. This unrecognized group that had lost its star player in July. We had won a major championship. We had done it without Mia Hamm, without Brandi Chastain, without Julie Foudy, without Kristine Lilly. We had stepped out of the shadow.

  There was someone else I needed to share the moment with, someone who was back home in Washington, cradling his infant son, Johnny. Only Marcus really knew how shattered and vulnerable I had been at the World Cup. Before this game, I felt sure I would need to talk to him, so I had wrapped my cell phone in a white towel and placed it with my water bottle next to the goal. Marcus’s number was pre-dialed. I ran back to the goal from the celebration, retrieved my phone, and punched SEND.

  “We did it! We did it!” I shouted into the phone over the noise. “We fucking did it!”

  We did it. My teammates and I. Marcus and I.

  “Hell yes!” he shouted back. “I’m so proud of you, Hope.”

  We were both laughing and crying, barely able to hear each other over the noise. “This is for dad,” he said over and over.

  When we were little kids, alone and scared in that Seattle police station, when we were fighting and clawing at each other in the house on Hoxie, who imagined there would be an Olympic gold medal to bind us?

  In my white towel, I had also placed a giant plastic gold medal—a ridiculous made-in-China prop that my mom and I had found in a Beijing marketplace. I put it on and ran over to where my family sat. My mom laughed in delight at my silly medal. My grandpa had such an enormous smile. My teammates and I reached up to the stands for high-fives and hugs. Pearcie’s daughter Rylie was passed down to her. American flags were handed down, and some of my teammates ran around the stadium wrapped in them. Everyone was celebrating.

  Later on, I heard some say how selfish I had been because I had ignored my teammates in order to talk on my phone and prance around with a tacky fake medal. That I was still a “Solo act.” I was far beyond caring who judged how I celebrated something I had worked for my entire life. Never again would I worry about what others thought.

  When the podium was finally set up on the field for the medal ceremony, we put on our white jackets, specifically made for the gold medal ceremony. As we lined up to step up on the podium, Bri came up to me and nodded. “I told you that you could do it, Hope,” she said. Had she really? It didn’t matter. We hugged.

  I bowed my head and felt the medal slip around my neck. I heard the anthem play, saw my Grandma with her red, white, and blue sweater and blinking HOPE NO. 1 sign pinned above her heart, singing at the top of her lungs. My grandpa was beaming with pride. My mother looked at me with so much love and amazement. They all shared this medal with me.

  I thought of that moment years ago at the Sea-Tac Airport and how proud my dad had been when I won the gold medal in the Pan-American Games: he stopped strangers to tell them about how great his daughter was. I imagined how much he would have loved to see the gold medal hanging from my neck right now.

  When we went back into the locker room, I stared at my medal for a very long time. I couldn’t find my gloves, which were covered with writing: my dad’s initials, words of inspiration from my grandma. I went back out to the field to look for them, but they were gone, probably snagged by some photographer looking for a souvenir.

  When I came through the mixed zone on the way to the bus, there was a mob of reporters waiting for me, pressed up against the metal barricades, shouting questions about redemption and Greg Ryan and vindication. I had just won an Olympic gold medal. I wasn’t thinking about the past, not about failures or hurts and certainly not about Greg. This was my happiest moment. I was not
going to let the devil steal my joy.

  “How,” someone asked, “does the moment feel?”

  “It’s unreal to me,” I said. “It’s like a storybook ending. It’s something you see in Hollywood, a fairy tale, and yet it was playing out. And my life doesn’t play out that way all the time, you know? There have been a lot of hardships. I was just hoping this one time it would really come through. But honestly, that was wishful thinking. I knew it was a long road, a long journey. And I knew it was too perfect an ending to actually happen. Nothing ever goes right with my family and my life, so this was too perfect.”

  II.

  As I’ve said many times: I don’t believe in happy endings. I’m not a bitter cynic, just a realist bracing for whatever life delivers next. People who believe in happily ever after, who hadn’t been dealt hardships and heartbreaks, always seemed a little naïve to me. But I have to admit that those hours after winning the Olympics were pretty damn sweet. When I was interviewed by ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap several hours after the game, I told him, “For the first time in my life, I can say that I’m genuinely joyful and happy.”

  After the game, we went to the U.S. Soccer House in Beijing and celebrated with friends and family. Dan Flynn told us how proud he was of us. Pia spoke about the incredible journey we’d been on. Every time Carli and I made eye contact, we laughed and laughed.

  It was so late, but no one wanted our gold-medal night to end. I jumped in a cab with Pia and some others, and we headed to a bar. Most of my teammates were too exhausted to go out, but a few of us partied and danced through the night.

  At one point, Pia came up to me and said, “Why don’t the coaches get a gold medal too?”

  I agreed that it didn’t seem fair. “Here you go, Pia,” I said, slipping my medal over her silver hair. “You wear mine tonight.”

  I wanted to share this victory with her. I wanted to share it with the world.

  III.

  A few days after I got home, Jesse and I rented a Winnebago and headed to the Gorge Amphitheater on the Columbia River—just a hundred miles away from Richland—for a three-day Dave Matthews concert that we dubbed our Gold Medal Celebration Tour. Sofia Palmqvist flew in to celebrate with me, and other friends came from Richland and Seattle. We decorated the RV in Olympic rings. We brought our mountain bikes and cruised around, partying too hard.

  Some Olympians stick their gold medals in a safe deposit box as soon as they get home. Not me. Before we left for the games, I made a bet with my friends that if we won, I’d wear mine at the gorge with my swimsuit. That’s what I did. I wore it while we played drinking games, and I wore it everywhere I went until the ribbon began to fray. I was proud of being an eastern Washington girl with a gold medal around my dusty neck.

  Two weeks after I got home, the team started a victory tour, beginning with three games against Ireland. This time I wasn’t dreading being reunited with my teammates. Our first stop was Philadelphia, where our players’ attorney, John Langel, was based. One of our first priorities was a team meeting with John to decide how to split our victory-tour money and gold-medal bonus. We were paid during the year by the national team, but the pool of money that came with the victory tour was our real payday.

  When we got to Langel’s office, I was surprised when I heard the plans for allocating the money. Bri was scheduled to receive a huge share, far more than our other alternates would receive. When I had been an alternate in Athens, I hadn’t received any of the celebration tour money. I had a feeling I was witnessing a World Cup–type scenario all over again: a decision had been made for sentimental reasons, as a personal sendoff, rather than based on agreed-upon rules.

  I took a deep breath. Bri was in the room. I knew that if I spoke up, it was going to be viewed as Hope versus Bri all over again. But I felt strongly that it was time for some consistency in how we treated people and some honest discussion. There couldn’t be two sets of rules: one for the old veterans and one for everyone else. As Pia had said with her song, times had changed. We proved it on the field in Beijing. Now it was time to prove it off the field.

  “I’m wondering,” I said, my voice quavering, “why we’re paying Bri so much? And if we pay Bri that much, why aren’t we paying the other alternates the same amount?”

  The few remaining veterans spoke up. “Well,” I was told, “they didn’t travel. Bri traveled to China.”

  “Yeah, but they were still training back home in case someone got hurt,” I said. “They were still fulfilling their obligation as alternates. It wasn’t their choice not to travel. Why aren’t all the alternates paid the same?”

  I saw some people’s eyes roll. Here we go, I could see them thinking.

  “I also don’t think—since we have to make the decision—that we should be discussing this in front of the alternates,” I said.

  I didn’t want to be disrespectful, but I thought we needed to have a fair discussion. Bri was sent out of the room. “I just want to understand the reasoning,” I said to our lawyer.

  “This is the way we’ve always done it,” I was told. “This is the precedent that was set in 2000 and 2004.”

  I was silent. I looked at him. I’m sure my teammates were thinking, Well, that shut her up. “Maybe you’ve forgotten,” I said, “but I was your alternate in 2004, and I didn’t get paid anything. So are we following a precedent that was set, or does every separate team decide what it wants to do with their bonus money?”

  I was told that must have been a mistake—that I should have been paid.

  “Whether it was a mistake or not, I didn’t get paid,” I said. “I traveled to Greece. I missed part of my season in Sweden.”

  All of a sudden there was discussion in the room. A few veterans were adamant that Bri should be treated differently, but other players started to ask questions. The right questions: they asked about precedents, about the rationale behind decisions, about what was fair. I was a bit shocked as I looked around the room—it was the first time I had ever seen the entire team participating in a decision-making process.

  We took a silent vote. I didn’t care how the voting went. I was just proud that our team was participating in the decision without feeling intimidated. We decided that all alternates would get paid the same, whether or not they had traveled. The majority prevailed against the position taken by the old guard. It wasn’t about money or what happened to me in 2004. It was about taking ownership of the team. We had finally escaped the shadow.

  IV.

  The coach of the women’s soccer team at Arizona State was a good friend of Jesse’s. He asked if I would make an appearance at one of their games, bring my gold medal, and sign some autographs. No problem. I had a free day after the last tour game against Ireland.

  One problem: ASU was playing Michigan. Where Greg Ryan was now coaching. I hadn’t seen Greg since Albuquerque, when he had tossed me my bronze World Cup medal and then gone downstairs to be fired. While I signed autographs and took pictures with ASU fans—who all wanted to touch my medal—I kept wondering if I was going to run into Greg. After the game, I went out on the field to meet the ASU team, and I saw Greg on the sideline. It felt as though everyone from both teams was staring at us. I had the gold medal, I was back on the team, I had a new coach—I could afford to be gracious. I walked up to Greg—it would have been awkward to avoid him.

  “Hi Greg,” I said reaching out to shake his hand. “It looks like things are going well for you. You remember Jesse, right?”

  It seemed like a dumb question. Jesse worked for U.S. Soccer and had told me of his own conflicts with Greg.

  Jesse stuck out his hand. “Hi Greg,” he said.

  Greg just glared at us and rudely told Jesse to keep his hand.

  Holy shit. That was way more hostile than I expected. Greg must have forgotten the note he sent me: To forgive is divine. I turned to walk away, and then changed my mind. I turned back. “Y
ou know, Greg, we’re both adults, and I thought we could be mature enough to get over what happened a year ago,” I said. “But I guess not.”

  I lifted my gold medal up into his line of vision and—as he had instructed me once—looked him dead in the eye. And then I walked away. Greg was still stuck somewhere in 2007, bitter and small-minded. I had moved on.

  V.

  The thing about happy endings is, they don’t last very long. In the early morning hours of October 31, my phone rang. It was Adrian. He needed me the way I had needed him sixteen months earlier. His dad, Bob Galaviz, had been over at his home the evening before. As it had been for my dad and me, Adrian and his father—after years of separation and turmoil—had built a strong and loving relationship. That night he gave Adrian an extra long, tight hug before he walked out to his car. Bob was driving south on Interstate 5 through Seattle when a car heading north jumped the grassy median and started plowing up the highway in the wrong direction. It hit one car, smashed into Bob’s car, then hit two more vehicles before coming to a stop. The police later said the driver had blacked out at the wheel. He killed two people, the sixty-one-year-old wife of the driver in the first car that was struck and Adrian’s father. Bob was fifty-five years old.

  Adrian got the phone call from the police. He had to go to his mother’s workplace and tell her what had happened. I was in Richmond, Virginia, where we were preparing to play South Korea as part of our victory tour, when Adrian called.

  “Hope, I need you.”

  I had seen Adrian’s father right after the Olympics. As soon as I got back from China, I found Adrian. It didn’t matter that I was planning a Winnebago tour with Jesse—I needed to share everything about the Olympics with him. We were bopping around Seattle and stopped by for a visit with his father, who had been watching Leo.