by Carli Lloyd
Getting all this positive feedback makes me want to work even harder. I am grateful that I have never had any issues with complacency. I sometimes can be my own worst enemy with my perfectionism, but the other side is that I am never satisfied and never feel as though I’ve made it, so I keep working as if I am trying to make the team. I guess the pain from getting cut from South Jersey Select has stayed with me all these years.
I never want to feel that way again.
Returning home after the Algarve Cup, I take a few days off and then get right back into the Ark Road office. I do lots of ball work and drills with James and Ryan Finley, a fellow Universal Soccer Academy student and a U-18 national team player; we take turns serving crosses to each other. I work on finishing and taking free kicks. My routine includes regular ninety-minute runs, twelve 800-meter interval workouts, and punishing hill sprints in Laurel Acres Park. I also do lots of body-weight strength training, cranking out sets of push-ups and crunches, in addition to calf raises, squats, and work with resistance bands. Every time I go home my fitness goes to another level. It’s as if I am a car just out of the shop, freshly tuned up, running leaner and stronger, more explosive off the line. Without Ark Road and James, none of this would be possible.
We’ve qualified for the Olympics and the opening ceremonies are not even two months away. I have started all fourteen games we’ve played under Pia, all of them victories. Things have never been better on the field, but the drama on Black Baron Drive in Delran doesn’t want to let up.
James is coaching my brother’s U-17 team with the Medford Strikers, and my father is the parent-manager. For years my father has regarded James as all but a soccer messiah, but as I become more independent and start to make my own decisions, my father begins to shift his viewpoint. My parents both think that James was behind my decision to leave Rich, even though that is 100 percent not true. Then the 2007 World Cup happened, and my parents think that James gave me terrible advice on the Hope matter and was responsible for me being an outcast on the team.
James recognizes that it’s important to be part of the team, but he didn’t want me to get caught up in funky team dynamics. When I was pulled out of the starting lineup and then didn’t play at all in the third-place game, my parents were convinced that this was almost all James’s fault and that he was imperiling my career.
Things with my parents have never fully recovered from the Rich episode, and now every day I’m home it feels as if I’m tiptoeing through a minefield. I never know when someone is going to go off. I’m doing better than I ever have with the national team, but the discord at home weighs on me constantly. I make it a point not to spend too much time there when I am back on breaks. I stay with friends, or stay with Brian, and that becomes a point of contention too.
“I don’t understand why you hardly ever have dinner with us and don’t spend more time with your family after you’ve been away,” my mother says.
The fact is that, even though I love my family, home is about the last place I want to be just now. I return to Jersey for a few weeks before I begin final preparations for my first Olympic Games. I do not need any family drama.
One night when I am out, I call home and my father answers. He starts right in on me. I don’t want to hear it.
“You never want to hear it,” he says. “You never want to hear anything we have to say. Why don’t you get over here and get your stuff out of the house or I will throw it out the window?” I can’t believe it has reached this point. But true to stubborn form, I don’t back down.
“If that’s how you want it, fine,” I say.
I call Brian and tell him what happened. “I am going to get my stuff. Can you help me?”
Brian is shocked, but he is there for me, of course. He is always there.
I drive over to the house, pull up in front, and take a breath. I step over the curb I used to spend hours kicking the ball against. I look at the side yard that was my field when I wasn’t down at the park. Being nostalgic is not my natural inclination, but it’s inevitable given the circumstances.
I walk in the house and head straight upstairs. It’s the saddest day of my life. I begin packing up all of my belongings. Brian arrives and has some suitcases to hold some more stuff. My mother and sister come into my room, and we all start crying. I am overwhelmed and so sad. I can’t even believe this is happening.
When I’m finally finished, it is almost midnight. I head to Brian’s mom’s house, weeping as I drive. It feels so final, so crushing. I’ve lived my whole life in that house. Every minute of it. And now my own family doesn’t want me anymore. Brian comforts me as only he can. I am so grateful for his support. I stay with him at his mom’s house. I am exhausted and utterly drained. It takes a long time to fall asleep.
Days after I move out, I fly to South Korea with my teammates. The tournament is called the Peace Cup, and peace sounds very nice around now. I am rooming with Shannon Boxx, and it’s fun, the attacking and holding mids bonding between training sessions and ice baths. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised given the events at home, but my body feels tapped out and my legs feel as if I’m wearing ankle weights. Our first game in the Peace Cup is against Australia, and I am brutal. It’s my worst game since we played Norway in the Algarve Cup. I give up the ball often and beat myself up each time I do.
Our next game is against Brazil, and I’m in a much better place mentally. I’ve forgotten about Australia and am treating this as a clean sheet—except that ten minutes in I go up for a header and smack my nose into the back of somebody’s head.
Blood starts gushing. I don’t realize until the trainer and doctor come on the field that my nose is broken, pushed to the side of my face. I get subbed out, and they take me into the locker room, where the doctor examines me and with no warning snaps my nose back into place.
The pain is way worse than when I smashed into the Brazilian head.
I get fitted with a hideous mask with a beak that sticks out about two inches and makes me look like a falcon. Which is what we call the mask: the Falcon. I decorate it with a U.S. Soccer sticker and a Nike swoosh, but the artwork doesn’t make it any less clunky.
We beat Brazil, 1–0, and I return the next game with the Falcon strapped on my face. I can’t stand it. I play okay in a 2–0 victory over Italy, getting an assist on a corner kick, but in our final game against Canada, much stronger competition, I am not very good again. My passes are off and my touches are off, and I am not running the way I typically do, my frustration getting the best of me. Pia subs me out at halftime. It is the right move to make.
Afterwards, she talks to me.
“How can we handle this if this happens at the Olympics? I don’t want to have to take you out. I want you to play every minute of every game. What do you think was going on tonight?”
“I think I just let the mask get in my head,” I say. “I hate it. It’s hard for me to see the ball and have clean touches. I wasn’t playing well, and then I got down on myself when I made mistakes.”
I don’t tell Pia this, but this penchant for self-criticism is still one of my biggest challenges as a player . . . giving myself permission to screw up and not let it put me into a downward spiral. James talks to me about it all the time. We have more work to do.
The best thing about the whole trip is the connection I forge with Boxxy. Even though we’ve played together for several years, this is the most time we’ve spent together. We butted heads somewhat when I first came on the team, but now we’re in a completely different place. She’s such a committed, team-first player, doing tremendous work without a lot of fanfare. When you are on a team, at any level, you know who the people are who do the dirty work, who just keep putting out and giving, usually without much acclaim attached. That’s Shannon Boxx. She centers me and supports me through all my struggles on this trip, and I am so thankful she is my roommate.
After a brief return home, we have a quick two games in Norway and Sweden. We crush Norway, 4–0, and
beat Sweden, 1–0, and I have ditched the Falcon in favor of a new custom mask that is far more streamlined and manageable. I can actually play with it. I score in both matches and am back on my game, especially against Sweden.
Now there are only two games left before we leave for China and the Olympics—both against Brazil. We’re 19-0-1 under Pia and an entirely different team than the one that showed up in that disastrous World Cup semifinal nine months earlier. We beat Brazil, 1–0, in Commerce City, Colorado, and head west to San Diego. Our final game before the Olympics is on my twenty-sixth birthday—July 16.
Just over thirty minutes in, I see Abby sprinting hard toward the penalty box. I don’t know what just happened, but Abby is ticked off. I can tell just by how she’s running. We have a saying on our team: “Abby is seeing red.” When Abby sees red, you better watch out. She’s coming after you, and coming hard.
The ball is loose and bouncing near the top of the box and Abby is gunning for it, and so is a Brazilian defender named Andreia Rosa. They collide violently. Abby goes down.
She goes down hard.
Oh no, I am thinking. Abby, please get up.
Abby does not get up. She motions for medical attention.
This is bad, I am thinking.
Unfortunately, I am not wrong. Abby Wambach, our leading scorer for the year with thirteen goals and ten assists, a player who is on her way to being the most prolific scorer in U.S. Soccer history, has broken her leg in two places. When the trainers ask if she can move her leg, she says, “It’s broken.” She is gone for twelve weeks, gone for the Olympics.
It is a grotesque sight, and it is unthinkable. This is Abby. She is as close to indestructible as any athlete I know. The Olympics are twenty days away.
Can this really be happening?
It is a horrific, sickening reminder of how fragile our world is. One minute you are one of the top goal-scorers on earth, and the next you are a hospital case.
There is a record crowd of more than 7,500 in Torero Stadium, and almost all of its members are quiet. They celebrate in the eighty-fifth minute, when Natasha Kai heads in my free kick for the only goal of the game, but who is kidding whom?
We just lost Abby Wambach three weeks before the Olympics. There is nothing at all to celebrate.
“Abby is a great player,” Pia tells the press, “but it’s not about one player, it’s about the team. Still, we will miss her—Abby is Abby. We’ll have to change a little bit.”
Hope Solo, firmly entrenched once more in goal, insists there is too much character on our team for us to quit now and says, “We’re a winning team, and we’re going to find a way to win.”
Abby says, “Above everything else, I’m only one player, and you can never win a championship with just one player. I have the utmost confidence in this team bringing home the gold.”
The memory of our painful and awkward conversation at the end of the World Cup is long gone. A great athlete and teammate is badly injured. I watch her getting carted off the field, and all I feel is deep compassion for the great Abby Wambach.
9
Fine China
OUR BRAVE FACE about Life Without Abby lasts three minutes into our first Olympic game. We are playing Norway, a team we’ve outscored 12–1 in our last three meetings, in the coastal town of Qinhuangdao, about 200 miles east of Beijing. It is a summer resort area noted for its invigorating breezes and prime bird-watching opportunities. In the second minute, there is not a bird in sight. Only a ball in the back of the U.S. goal. Hope comes off her line, and leaping to punch out a long ball, she collides violently with Lori Chalupny. Both of them are sent sprawling. A Norwegian winger named Leni Kaurin takes advantage of the miscommunication and heads the ball into the vacated net.
Wait. It gets worse.
In the third minute, defender Kate Markgraf knocks a backpass toward Christie Pearce Rampone (she got married), but it is too soft, too slow. Before Rampone gets near it, Norway’s Melissa Wiik swoops in and tucks the ball just inside the left post.
We aren’t 180 seconds into the Olympics and we are down two goals. I’d expect the Great Wall to crumble before I’d expect us to open our Games this way. We never recover and lose 2–0. Norway is the only team other than the U.S. to win Olympic gold—the Norwegians won in Sydney in 2000—so it’s not as if they can’t play. But come on, how can this be happening?
It is the first time the U.S. has ever lost in group play in the Olympics. Already the media is sounding the refrain that we can’t win without Abby. I am not quite sure how the Olympic setup works, but I think our medal hopes might already be history until Pia explains that we can still advance to the elimination round if we win our next two games. Later that night, Pia asks Christie, Boxxy, and me to come see her in her hotel room.
“You are the core of this team,” she says. “You are the ones who have to help us regroup and get the team going. We need a quick attitude change. We can’t do anything about Norway. We’ve got a tough game against Japan in three days, and everything from here on has to be positive. I believe in this team as much as ever, but you are the ones who have to set the tone on the field.”
It is a great meeting, and a pivotal message.
Japan is a technically skilled team, a side that likes to carve you up with a tiki-taka possession game. We are not at our best still, but we battle hard and play with commitment and urgency. In the twenty-seventh minute of the first half, our defender, Stephanie Cox, controls the ball near the Japanese end line, gets some space, and sends a cross toward the 18-yard line. I see what’s coming and run onto it and belt a volley that dives just below the crossbar into the Japanese goal. It feels as if we’ve finally joined the Olympic party.
Our next stop is in Shenyang, a 2,000-year-old city in northeast China, not that far from Inner Mongolia. Our opponent is New Zealand, and a victory could lock up our group for us, provided that the Norwegians lose to Japan. We deliver a powerful, high-energy performance, winning 4–0 and advancing to the quarterfinals against Canada, thanks to the Japanese, who cooperate by beating Norway.
The Canadians have beaten us in only three of our forty-three matches, but the gap is narrowing. We won a hard-fought 1–0 game in our most recent meeting in the South Korea Peace Cup, and with Christine Sinclair, one of the world’s premier goal-scorers, on their side, there isn’t anybody thinking this game will be easy when it kicks off in Shanghai.
Angela Hucles scores to give us the lead in the first half, and then it starts to pour and lightning bolts begin flashing all around the stadium, as if the whole sky is plugged in. Play is stopped for ninety minutes, and we return to the locker room to wait it out. Some people stretch, while others sing and still others play games. I am content to rest up and get geared up mentally for the rest of the game. The lightning finally stops and the game resumes, and Sinclair ties it up with a missile just beyond a diving Hope’s reach. A taut game heads into overtime, when finally, eleven minutes in, forward Natasha Kai converts a diving header, Abby-style. Tasha is immediately swarmed under a soggy and wildly happy celebration spilling everywhere.
Into the semifinals we go, in Workers Stadium in Beijing, a half-century-old concrete oval in the northeast section of the city, a world apart from the gleaming, new-age venues in Olympic Park. Our opponent is Japan again, and its players are in a confident, attacking mindset from the start. Hope parries away a threat in the opening minute, before a defensive lapse leaves an unmarked player in front on a corner kick. Hope has no chance, and we are down 1–0. It stays that way until the closing minutes of the half, when Heather O’Reilly has one of her signature high-speed bursts down the right flank and crosses in front, where Hucles slots in a left-footer to tie the game.
Then, in the forty-fourth minute, Markgraf finds me with a good ball near the center line. I shield the defender, take two touches, and send it ahead to Amy Rodriguez, who quickly finds Lori Chalupny, who eludes a defender on the left, cuts in front, and fires a shot under heavy pressur
e into the upper left corner. Up a goal, we are on our way to a 4–2 victory and another shot at Brazil, the team that stomped on us right here in China eleven months ago.
The Brazilians advance with a shocking 4–1 rout of Germany in the other semifinal, a reversal of the World Cup final result. Now we have our own kind of reversal in mind, and nobody wants it more than Hope, who has made it back from exile. Not only is she no longer Goalkeeper Non Grata, she is the person we’re counting on to hold down the hottest team on earth.
Hope had started the whole mess with her comments about believing she would’ve made a difference in that earlier game. Now she’s got the blank canvas she wants. Let’s see if she can paint a masterpiece. No, it’s not a World Cup final, but it’s the next best thing. I prepare with a careful reading of James’s latest email. For years he has emailed me before major competitions. His words aren’t just sustenance; they are my motivational rocket fuel.
He begins:
Ms. Lloyd,
Wow, you are in the final of the Olympics. It’s been an amazing run thus far. Over the last five games you have grown as a player more than I imagined. You have gone from a player who works hard but wastes energy to a player who works hard and saves the energy for the right moments. Your play in midfield has more than helped your team get to this point.
After a game-by-game evaluation of my performance during the Olympics, James closes with two final points:
Your Chance to be the Biggest
Keep your head up high. With a little more work and a little more concentration you can steal the show and wake the world to who you are. You need to focus on being steady and taking advantage of your chances. I know you will get chances and you need to make them count. Two goals or an MVP performance will set you up as a top-5 player in the world, just in time [to be] the top player at the next Olympics.