by Hope Solo
Listen to me! My shoulder screamed. I’m your livelihood. You had better take care of me.
My closest teammates, Aya and Tina, were concerned. They saw how much pain I was in every day. They kept encouraging me to take care of it. One day, toward the end of that second WPS season, I gasped in pain and walked off the practice field. I couldn’t take it anymore. I went home to Seattle and started to gather medical opinions. If I had listened to my body instead of trying to tough it out, I would have had surgery right after the 2008 Olympics. But now I faced a decision: surgery on my shoulder and elbow would mean that I would miss the 2011 World Cup. Surgery on just my shoulder still put me at risk of missing the World Cup. No surgery meant there was a chance that my shoulder would blow at any minute.
And the World Cup was just ten months away.
I talked to Pia. What would my status be if I had the surgery? I knew better than to assume that any starting position was written in stone. She assured me that when I was medically cleared, I’d return as the starter.
One night, I called Paul four different times, bouncing around like a moth trapped in a lamp. I was going to get the surgery and bust through my rehab. No I wasn’t, I would just suffer through the pain. Yes, I don’t think I can keep going without surgery. No—what if I don’t come back? I didn’t know what to do.
On September 21, I was on a conference call with the WPS. My appeal was denied. The ridiculous league was upholding my punishment. I listened from Birmingham, Alabama, where I was meeting with Dr. James Andrews, the world-renowned orthopedic surgeon.
First, he did a physical strength test. “You’re fine, kiddo,” he said.
I was surprised. Then he went to his computer and looked at the images. My muscles around my shoulder were so strong that Dr. Andrews was fooled into thinking the shoulder was functional. In truth, the muscles were the only things holding the joint together. “Can you be here at six a.m. tomorrow?” Dr. Andrews asked.
The decision was made for me. I was having surgery.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Seattle’s Finest
When I could finally open my eyes, I tried to take inventory. I was alone—in a hospital bed, my right shoulder bandaged and immobile, my head hazy from a potent dose of painkillers.
Dr. Andrews came in to see me. “The surgery took a very long time,” he said. “It was extremely complicated.” He had expected a ninety-minute operation; it took three and a half hours. It took so long that the anesthesia started to wear off in the middle of the operation and I needed another dose. Dr. Andrews told me he’d found extensive damage: a 360-degree tear of my labrum—the cuff of cartilage around the shoulder—the same injury that had almost ended the career of New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. My biceps tendon was detached from my shoulder, and the capsule—the ligaments that keep the joint in place—was severely torn. The articular cartilage on the bone was shot. Bone chunks were floating around.
Dr. Andrews repaired the labrum and used thirteen anchors—eleven took hold—to secure the shoulder. He micro-fractured the bone around the labrum in hopes of regenerating cartilage. He pulled up my biceps tendon from where it had curled down my arm and reattached it with another anchor.
I tried to absorb everything he was telling me through my drug-induced haze, but only one thing registered: my shoulder had been wrecked. And my return to soccer was in jeopardy.
Not long after Dr. Andrews left, the pain in my shoulder erupted, a sickening all-consuming kind of hurt. I needed more painkillers, but the IV pumping drugs directly into me wasn’t working. The nurses finally got it fixed, and it flooded my body with pain medication and relief, but I had a terrible allergic reaction to the drugs, and itched all night. The nurses dosed me with Benadryl to help with that, and finally, at around seven a.m.—more than twenty-four hours after my surgery—I started to drift asleep.
“Hello?”
I snapped awake. Two young men were in my room ready to take me down to rehab.
“Already?”
Yes, already. I was trying to condense a twelve-to-eighteen month rehab into six months. I had to get back for the World Cup. I had to start rehab immediately.
I was miserable, but there was nothing I could do. These two strangers helped me get dressed—there was no time for modesty. I felt like hiding so I asked them to put my sunglasses on my face. They did, then put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me down to the rehab clinic—every bump and turn on the journey causing me to grimace in pain. I imagine I made a pretty picture: all drugged up with stringy hair and sunglasses in the Andrews “locker room,” the place where some of the most famous athletes in U.S. sports history had worked through pain and injury: Michael Jordan, Drew Brees, Brett Favre. I tried to go to the bathroom by myself but couldn’t manage to even pull my hair back. I was still throwing up, and the therapists had to send the receptionist to help me get on and off the toilet. My humiliation was complete.
That first morning, the therapist took my arm out of the sling and had me straighten my arm. That’s all I had to do. I thought I was going to die. A Tampa Bay Rays pitcher who’d had shoulder surgery four months earlier was in the clinic working out; he looked at me with deep sympathy. “I don’t miss those days,” he said.
I never took off my sunglasses. I didn’t want anyone to see the tears in my eyes.
II.
I stayed in Alabama for several weeks, miserable and in incredible pain. I felt helpless, having to ask for assistance to eat, to get dressed, to wash my hair. Jesse stayed with me in Birmingham, taking care of me, for which I was grateful. Through e-mail, my goalkeeper coach, Paul, monitored every step of my recovery. He asked me to send him a record of every exercise I did in therapy, even if it was just five curls with the elastic armband. He wanted to be kept abreast of the entire process, step by step, so that—true to his nature—he could make an intricately detailed, focused plan for when I returned to the team.
After a couple of weeks I left Alabama; I went to Atlanta to pack up my belongings. The national team was training there, getting ready to head to Mexico for World Cup qualifying, but I couldn’t have inspired much confidence—I was a drugged-up mess.
I headed back to Seattle, where my mom stayed with me. She saw to my every need and ignored my nastiness—the drugs made me feel terrible, and my sense of helplessness was frustrating. I wasn’t pleasant to be around, but my mom stayed, driving me an hour each way to my physical therapy in Gig Harbor.
I tracked the qualifying games online. The first three games were lopsided victories over Haiti, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. But on November 5, our team lost to Mexico 2–1. It was our first-ever loss to Mexico, and it put our backs against the wall: we had to beat Costa Rica in a third-place match in Cancún and then play a home-and-home with Italy for the right to play in the World Cup.
One more loss and we probably wouldn’t be going to Germany. I was in shock, and I started to beat myself up, second-guessing my decision to have surgery. The team was tired from a grueling WPS schedule that didn’t provide time off before qualifying. We hadn’t been playing together, and part of our struggle was the new possession-oriented system that Pia had put in. And, of course I thought I could have made a difference. The team’s struggles only added to my misery. I could barely move my arm two inches to the side. I couldn’t raise it at all. It was hard to imagine playing in the World Cup in just a few months. That is, if our team made it to the World Cup.
On November 20, I woke up early to track the game in Italy. It was agonizing, almost as bad as the rehab session that awaited me later in the day. Our team couldn’t score, and the game went into extra time. Finally in the ninety-fourth minute, our youngest team member, Alex Morgan—who had just finished her senior year at Cal—pushed a shot past the diving Italian goalkeeper for the 1–0 victory. We still had life. But it was torture, watching from afar, unable to do anything to help. I decided to meet my te
am in Illinois for the final do-or-die game against Italy. Everyone was a little shocked to see the shape I was in. I had lost weight, and my arm had completely atrophied from lack of exercise.
“You need to gain some muscle,” Pia said.
“I’m trying,” I said.
The game was tense. Italy dominated much of the run of play, but Amy Rodriguez’s goal late in the first half stood up. Barnie played great, and we won 1–0. We were going to Germany next summer. But who would be the starting goalkeeper?
II.
Snap. Crackle. Pop. Moan.
My shoulder sounded like a bowl of cereal, as my therapists Bruce Shell and Dave Andrews helped me stretch through my pain to break up the scar tissue. They pushed me all winter. When I was in Los Angeles, the head trainer for the men’s team, Ivan Pierra, was in charge of my rehab. I suffered, but I fought my ass off. “This is among the most serious shoulder injuries that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been working in sports for twenty-eight years,” Bruce told ESPN. “And I can’t imagine too many worse injuries, from a traumatic standpoint.”
Sometimes our sessions lasted six hours. Pain and suffering was my full-time job. I was taking painkillers every night to sleep. I was pushing myself as hard as I could. The team went to China in January, but I wasn’t ready to travel with them—again I watched online. The results were mixed: we lost in our first game to Sweden. Though we won two other games, we didn’t dominate in any of them.
In March, I was medically cleared to join the team, so I joined them in camp for the Algarve Cup. I could sense tension—a vibe that seemed very familiar. The World Cup was just three months away and Pia, like Greg four years earlier, seemed to be starting to stress out. She hadn’t faced much pressure until now. When she took over before the ’08 Olympics, she had inherited a damaged, dysfunctional team: getting to the gold medal game eight months later was a bonus. But she’d guided the top-ranked team in the world for three years now. The players were the ones she had chosen. The team was struggling, and it didn’t help that her starting goalkeeper could barely move.
I was mentally ready to get back to work, but I was weak physically. I started simply, working on my footwork. Everything—things that had once been so easy for me—was difficult. I got frustrated and I started to lose confidence. I had been so impatient in rehab, where that mind-set worked for me, but on the field I had to learn to be patient. Paul wouldn’t let me face a shot until we got to Portugal. There, he tossed balls to me. I was scared to react, so fearful of the pain. Every time I touched the ball, I was in agony. The first time I dove I thought my shoulder anchors would rip loose. If I can’t do this, I thought, grimacing from a soft-tossed ball, how the hell am I going to stop Abby’s shots?
I looked in Paul’s eyes to see if I could spot doubt, but I didn’t. He never questioned me. Instead, he guided me in baby steps. Four shots to each side of my body one day, five shots the next. A little bit more confidence every day. He was protective and patient—creating drills in conjunction with my therapists that would increase both my range of motion and my healing. “You’re going to have pain,” Paul said, “so you’re going to have to learn to manage it.”
PAUL’S APPROACH WAS perfect. He pushed me just hard enough so that I was progressing without risking re-injury. He never panicked about my pain or my grimaces. He kept my confidence up and also kept Barnie sharp. He got me to the point where I felt so good that I was eager for more action, but he still wouldn’t let me practice with the team. He didn’t want to do anything that would be a setback—mentally or physically. He wanted to keep moving forward.
III.
“You’re not starting.” Paul looked at me as he delivered the news.
We were in London to play a friendly against England. At long last, I was medically cleared to play. We were six months past my surgery, eleven weeks away from the World Cup opener. I needed to start—I was running out of time. I’d been working toward game day, April 2—my dad’s birthday—for months as my target goal. Pia had already announced her starting lineup at practice and I was in it. I was excited. Now Paul said I wasn’t starting.
“We only have four games left before the World Cup,” I said. “I need time to prepare.”
“You’ll get the second half,” Paul said. When I protested, he asked, “Do you think you beat out Barnie?”
“Hell no, I haven’t beat out Barnie,” I said. “She’s playing the best I’ve ever seen her. But you’ve said you want me to be your starting goalkeeper for the World Cup and I need to get games. I need to make mistakes now so that I don’t make them closer to the World Cup. Now you’re only giving me three-and-a-half games to get ready for our most important tournament.”
But Paul didn’t think I was ready. It was the biggest argument he and I had ever had. I knew he didn’t want to wreck my confidence, but I needed as many minutes as possible after sitting out for six months. I had been following a plan we had laid out back in September, and now the plan was changing. I felt I had done my part, and I trusted my coaches to uphold their end.
Paul told me to clean myself up and go meet with Pia. She took one look at my face and knew I was upset. “What are you feeling?” she said.
I told her that I needed every minute I could get and that she was taking a crucial forty-five minutes away from me.
“You don’t think you can be ready in three-and-a-half games? You need these forty-five minutes to be ready for the World Cup?”
I could hear the doubt in her voice. Pia was losing faith in me.
“Pia, I’ll be ready for the World Cup if you only give me two games. I’ll do whatever it takes. But you know as well as I do that every minute counts.”
“Get yourself ready to play in the second half then,” she said, dismissing me.
She doubted me. And when people doubt me, I became more determined. I’m going to prove to her that I’m ready, I thought.
Paul and I were fine, despite our argument. He liked that I had voiced my opinion and often told me so: he said it was better than trying to guess what someone was thinking. I later apologized to him for saying I had lost trust in him: I never had. Not for a moment.
I entered the game in the second half, my first live action since my last game of the WPS season. We were down 2–1 when I came in. We hadn’t played very well in the first half and Barnie had seen a ton of action. I didn’t see much action at all, which was irritating. I needed to make some tough decisions, get challenged. Still, it felt great to get back on the field. Paul was pleased—nothing had happened to damage the most important part of my game, my confidence. But our team lost the game, our first loss ever to England and our first loss in a friendly since the team lost to Denmark during the 2004 Olympic victory tour, back in another era.
What—the media started to wonder—was wrong with the U.S. national team?
IV.
Pia snapped at me. “Shut the fuck up, Hope.”
I was stunned. Pia, Paul, and I were having a meeting about the medical staff—I didn’t feel that I was getting proper care for my shoulder, and I was lobbying for my therapists, Bruce and Dave, to be added to the staff. They had come to Portugal, and everyone on the team had raved about them. I was completely indebted to them and to Ivan, the men’s team trainer. They had all worked as a team to get me ready for the World Cup, and it looked as though all our combined hard work was paying off. I was almost there. But without my team of therapists in camp, my progress had stalled. I had a list of issues about the team’s training staff. We had people who could tape ankles and hand out Advil but they weren’t qualified to guide an athlete back from major surgery in a compressed schedule. I was getting frustrated and running out of time.
“You have captains for a reason,” Pia barked at me.
That pissed me off. Abby regularly expressed her opinion, and she wasn’t a captain. Boxxy expressed her opinion, and she wasn’t a captain.
Pearcie—who was our captain—often asked for my opinion about the training staff, because she knew how closely I worked with them and how critical the staff was to our entire team’s well-being. I told Pia that, but she didn’t want to hear it. Six weeks before the World Cup and I was having a conflict with my coach. Was the shitstorm coming my way again?
The next morning, on my way down to breakfast, I was in the elevator when Pia stepped in. I didn’t say anything, just looked down at my newspaper.
“How you doing?” she said.
“Fine, Pia,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m good.”
And we were fine from then on out.
V.
The WPS was still going. Sort of. I had signed with a team called the MagicJack. The Washington Freedom franchise had been purchased by Dan Borislow, the inventor of the MagicJack phone technology, and he moved the team to his hometown of Boca Raton, renamed it for his company, and signed a bunch of national-team players.
The league officials and most of the fans hated him. What little tradition there was in the WPS included the Freedom, Mia Hamm’s original team, which had been owned by John Hendricks, the Discovery Channel founder who had originally bankrolled the WUSA. But even Hendricks wanted out of the WPS, and in December 2010, Dan bought the team. WPS thought he was going to be their savior, but Dan did things his way.
The league hated the fact that Dan was using the team to promote his company and that he wouldn’t abide by league rules. He didn’t have a team website or media director. He didn’t put up the sponsors’ advertising and didn’t share game film with the rest of the league. But I think the biggest reason the league hated him was because it needed him so desperately, and he knew it. Investors were dropping out, teams were folding, and the league was now down to just five teams. It was a slow death march.