Forward

by Abby Wambach

  I bound into Jerry’s office, eager for his assessment.

  “How do you think you did?” he asks.

  “Well,” I say, “I scored the most goals.”

  He nods. “That’s the hardest thing to do. How did the rest of your game go?”

  There’s a strange lilt to his voice, as if it’s a trick question, and I hesitate before I respond. “What do you think?”

  “Terribly,” he says. “You do the hardest thing to do in our sport better than anyone else here, but the rest of your game has a long, long way to go. You’re unfit, you’re a defensive liability, and you’re only good at attacking when you’re in a scoring position. There’s so much more to the game, and if you want to stay with us you’ll have to bust your butt or I won’t bring you back to camp. In fact, I’m not bringing you to the next camp. You have talent and I would love to invest in you, but you have to have more skin in the game.”

  I’m quiet, considering his words. I long for criticism, and yet I’m reluctant to commit to what it asks of me.

  “Is this meeting over?” I ask, finally.

  “That’s it,” he says, and motions toward the door.

  One month later, back in Gainesville, I send Jerry an e-mail. “I thought about what you said,” I write, “and it has had an impact on me. If you bring me back, I’ll show you.”

  He responds immediately: he was hoping to hear exactly that.

  I implore Intense Abby to be patient while Chill Abby celebrates her twenty-first birthday: a drink for every year I’ve been alive, with Are and Nikki by my side.

  These days, my relationship with Nikki is as exhausting as consecutive suicide runs. She’s graduated and now lives in New York City, and we take turns dating long-distance and calling it off altogether. I am still insanely in love with her and desperate to make it work, but she is hesitant, both about me and about her sexuality. I’m the first girl she’s dated, and the needle is still wavering on her Kinsey scale. I send her love letters and gifts and offer to watch her dog, but I will never pressure her to come out to her family; I am not even out to mine.

  Intense Abby steps in and argues that hard work and focus will be a worthy distraction from my romantic troubles. At the insistence of Coach Burleigh, who fears my lackadaisical fitness might ruin my prospects with the national team, I make an appointment with Randy Brauer, a muscular therapist who trains the Gators football players. We meet by the track, and Randy tells me to run, observing me from the sidelines. After one lap he holds up a hand, halting me.

  “Good god,” he says. “Has anyone ever taught you how to run? You’re leaving craters in the track.” Not only are my feet improperly positioned, but my body is tightly coiled: fists clenched, brows furrowed, mouth pursed, shoulders raised to my ears. I need to relax and stop fighting myself. Intense Abby is nothing if not coachable, and within two weeks my steps are nearly imperceptible, quicker and lighter than they’ve ever been.

  I test them one day during a training session. One of Randy’s athletes, a starring center for the football team, makes a comment as I sprint past. I don’t recall what he said but I’ll never forget his tone, the snide veneer coating his words. I interpret the tone as judgment. Years later, when I am wholly comfortable in my skin, I will be judged in similar ways—questioning looks when I walk into bathrooms or through airport security, looks that require me to cinch my voice an octave higher to say “Hi,” and, if that fails, to declare, bluntly, “I am a girl.” It will happen so often, for so long, that it will become a joke to me and my teammates, yet a part of me will always find it hurtful, and want people to pay better attention, to take the time to look. To see me.

  But in college, such comments, purposeful or otherwise, are not funny at all. Standing on that track, I remember how far I have come and shrink at how far I have to go. Right then, straddling the middle, I am not in the mood to be judged.

  The football player is a big boy, three hundred pounds, and could easily bench-press twice his weight. I hear a silent whistle and I’m off, scorching the field with my feet, running at him with all I have, as if each step might be my last. He’s on bended knee, studying his foot, and doesn’t even hear me coming until I’m on top of him, knocking him over and belly-flopping onto his chest. I am near feral, teeth bared, kicking and growling as we flip and fumble across the grass, and when he finally escapes, scrabbling away, I rise up and think: Victory.

  I take a step closer to becoming myself, fully and without reservation. Are is looming behind me, an electric razor poised at my scalp. “Do it,” I order, and he does. My hair drops in long blond sheaths, forming a shag carpet on his floor. Are’s mother, Dena, stands to the side wielding tweezers. “You gotta fucking teach me to pluck my eyebrows,” I tell her, and she obliges, starting on the left. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” As she pinches and pulls, I force myself to ask her a question: “What would you do if your kid was gay?”

  She withdraws the tweezers and catches my reflection in the mirror. “I would just hope they could find love and happiness,” she says.

  Smiling, I motion for her to finish.

  The next day, Are and Dena sit next to my parents at my game. My mother gasps when she sees me. “Oh my gosh,” she says, elbowing my father. “Peter! I cannot even believe that’s Abby’s head. Oh my gosh. This is a tragedy!”

  “A tragedy is the Twin Towers coming down,” Are points out, “not Abby’s haircut.”

  The shock of my hairstyle is eclipsed by the news that I won’t be graduating. With just a few months left of school, I’m drafted by the Washington Freedom for the WUSA’s second season. My parents help me pack up my life in Florida and move to an apartment on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. When the last box is emptied, my father hands me a credit card bill showing eight thousand dollars in charges. My mother stands nearby, watching him.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “A bill for your partying,” he says. “Did you really think I was going to pay for four years of your partying?”

  I smile, attempting levity. “Well, yeah.”

  “I’ve been paying the minimum for four years—you can take it over now.”

  I take the bill and think, You have no control over me anymore. No one does.

  Next time, my mother comes to visit me alone. I take her to lunch at Chevy’s, a Mexican place near Pentagon City. I’m sweating, the heat of my hands defrosting my chilled glass. She sips her iced tea and scans the menu. My heart thumps in time with the mariachi music. I can tackle a massive bear of a football player without hesitation, but I am deathly afraid of this woman. When I find my voice, it squeaks into the air an octave higher than usual, and I feel like I’m back in Pittsford, fighting against wearing dresses and weathering The Look.

  “Mom,” I say, and pause. “I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time. I’m nervous, and I’m really sorry if this upsets you, but I’m a lesbian.”

  Her reaction is swift and unexpected. “No, you’re not,” she says, pursing her lips.

  My body straightens in the booth. “Yeah, I am.”

  “Abby, no, you’re not.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  She shakes her head. “Abby, you just don’t know what it’s like to be with a guy.”

  I understand: in some deep, secluded corner of her mind I am still a good and proper Catholic, virginal, waiting for marriage.

  “Mom,” I say softly. “If you’re talking about sex, I do know what it’s like to have sex with a guy . . . I’m dating someone, a woman. I’ve dated a few girls. I dated Teddy, remember, and I’m much happier dating girls.”

  Her expression is one of stern sadness, as though she’s caught between recognition and resignation. She opens and closes her mouth, debating her next words, and then she gives herself permission to say them: “Don’t tell me you have one of those strappy things.”

  I drain a full glass of water while I contemplate how to respond.

  “Mom,” I say, “do you
ask any of your other children about their sexual behaviors behind closed doors?”

  “No,” she admits.

  “Do you want to start now?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  We order and eat, and for once in my life I don’t know how to fill the silence.

  6

  ROOKIE

  Every day I wake up and repeat my mantra: No one controls me anymore. I make my own money now, around thirty thousand dollars per year, an amount that, to my twenty-two-year-old self, seems inconceivable. I buy a motorcycle, a chili-pepper-red crotch rocket that I zip around the streets of Georgetown. I make a few unfortunate fashion choices, growing my hair into a haphazard mullet and wearing a leopard-print cowboy hat. I am still on-and-off with Nikki, and she is still not out to her family; I understand but am slowly losing patience. I want a commitment, a plan. I want a future.

  I crave some vestige of comfort and familiarity, so I invite my old high school friend Audrey to live with me. Chill Abby and Intense Abby are in balance, neither one overpowering the other. Chill Abby still eats and drinks whatever she wants, but Intense Abby is determined to excel at her new job with the Washington Freedom, to keep getting called to the national roster. No one controls me anymore, but the knowledge still burrows in my brain: If I play well, my mother might forgive me for being who I am. If I play well, I might forgive her for wishing I were someone else.

  Nevertheless, I am growing more brazen about my sexuality, and come out to my Washington Freedom teammates without any reservations. One morning, en route to a game, our driver takes a wrong turn. “We’re going to have to flip a bitch,” someone says, a euphemism for making a U-turn. “Well, I’ll flip a bitch,” I quip, and am relieved when everyone laughs.

  The star of the Washington Freedom is Mia Hamm, member of the legendary ’99 World Cup–winning team and the most famous female soccer player in the country. Back in Pittsford, in my childhood bedroom, a signed poster of her occupies a place of honor over my bed. Mia’s popularity is the prime reason the WUSA exists at all. She is eight years older than I, six inches shorter, forty pounds lighter, several decibels quieter, and infinitely more terrifying than she appears. Last year, during my official debut for the national team, I was called off the bench as a late substitute in an exhibition game against Germany. For the entire eighteen minutes I played Mia yelled at me—Where was I going? Why wasn’t I moving? What the hell was I doing?—and she approached me afterward, explaining that she knew I was tough enough to take it.

  Before our season begins, Mia has arthroscopic surgery on her left knee and is projected to miss the first ten games. Nevertheless she’s at every practice and match, screaming from the sidelines, and whenever I exit the field she suggests ways I can improve. I’m leaning too far back when I shoot, she says, and that’s why the ball is going over the bar. I need to remember to drop my shoulder. I should use my big body as often as I can. I still covet criticism over praise, and absorb everything she says. At season’s end, I’m named the WUSA’s Rookie of the Year.

  Tacitly, subconsciously, that honor signals that I can coast a bit, relax into my vices. Chill Abby takes a step forward, positioning herself as my dominant personality. I party just a bit harder than I play and my body regresses, forgetting how it moves at its peak. April Heinrichs, the coach of the women’s national team, begins excluding me from important games. One night she pulls me aside and renders a verdict I’ve heard before: I’m unfit, I’m lazy, I’m uncompetitive. If I don’t shape up, and quickly, I won’t be playing with the women’s national team. I’ll miss the 2003 World Cup, my first.

  I listen; I focus; I push Chill Abby away. I finish my second season with the Washington Freedom with a league-leading thirty-three goals, including the winner at the championship game—the “golden goal,” it’s called, since it happened in overtime. Our celebration is short-lived; three weeks later, on September 15, 2003, the WUSA folds. The 99ers are beloved, but their fame is not enough to sustain an eight-team league—especially when the target audience, teenage girls, have their own games to attend. I am out of a job and worried that we’ll never be able to reignite that national passion for women’s soccer, that our sport is destined to be less than, irrelevant, othered.

  The World Cup was initially scheduled to be held in China, but after the SARS outbreak, it was moved to the U.S., and we were determined to take advantage of playing at home. Rides on the team bus are usually a raucous party, with my voice the loudest of them all; I channel my nervous energy into singing (badly), dancing (even worse), and chattering in nonsensical stream-of-consciousness monologues. Julie Foudy, another 99er and the captain of the national team, once gave me a T-shirt emblazoned with the words HELP! I’M TALKING AND I CAN’T SHUT UP. But this time the atmosphere on the bus is subdued, everyone weighing their private pressures and concerns.

  Mia and Julie are hoping that a World Cup victory might revive the WUSA; if the team plays as it did in 1999, the sponsors could be persuaded to invest again. A few days earlier, I was profiled in the New York Times, with the headline calling me a “Mass of Woman” and the article positioning me as a potential breakout star for the team. Intense Abby is hyperaware of the expectations percolating all around—and within—her. I am the one major piece that’s different from the ’99 team, the new ingredient that remains tested and unknown.

  We start with wins in our group: against Sweden, Nigeria, North Korea, Norway. Despite the victories, the crowds are small and subdued. People are preoccupied with football season; more than that, the ghost of the failed WUSA seems to haunt each stadium we play. On Sunday, October 5, we face Germany at PGE Park in Portland, Oregon, just a few miles from where I will one day live with my wife.

  From the beginning the game feels off, a dance where the team is a half step behind. The day before, we had practiced set pieces, predicting how and where and when Germany would attack, but our opponents are not behaving as expected; then build-up is cautious and deliberate. I have a “mark,” the player I’m supposed to defend (and, in Coach Heinrich’s words, “run over like a Mack truck”). Her name is Kerstin Garefrekes and she is five-ten, just one inch shorter than I, but lighter and leaner; my body should overpower hers in any showdown. I have studied her play and asked my teammates about her history, and I believe I can anticipate her every dodge and step. But somehow, in the first fifteen minutes, she moves in a way I don’t predict, positioning herself near post. On a corner kick, she finds the ball before I do and bangs her head against it, bouncing it off the crossbar and into the net. They score twice more, and we don’t score at all.

  No matter that my mark didn’t make the game-winning goal; I allowed her to set the tone. That thought attacks me with every bit of strength I have, and a new mantra blooms inside my head: This loss is your fault. It is the high school state championship all over again, and I want to disappear, to rewind my life back to a time before I ever pulled on cleats or headed a ball. Tonight, I will spend hours in the shower, wailing and weeping and beating my fists against the tile, but this time my grief will be private. Now, though, I force myself to stay on the field, watching my teammates cry while the Germans celebrate, climbing on each other’s backs, chanting words I can’t understand.

  I feel an arm drop across my shoulders and hear Coach Heinrichs say, “Come on, let’s go inside.”

  “No,” I tell her, my eyes still fixed on the German team. “I want to remember this.”

  7

  MANIC

  For three weeks after the World Cup I can think of nothing but that first goal, the goal that spurred the Germans to a win, the goal I allowed. My mind replays the moment on a continuous loop, an excruciating image I’m powerless to block. Even the elements that were objectively out of my control become details in my narrative of failure: I should have known how my mark would pivot and spin. I should have beaten her to the ball. I should have hurled my body at her to throw her off balance. Somehow, magically, I should have
rendered all the German players motionless through sheer force of will. I gnaw at myself with a quiet savagery. My fault, my fault, my fault.

  I’m relieved when Coach Heinrichs announces the Olympic roster and I’m on the list. In February 2004, we start residency camp in Hermosa Beach, California, where I share an apartment with two teammates at 1212 Monterey Boulevard; we dub it “doce doce.” I find solace in removing myself, geographically, from the site of my own failure, and I begin preparing for the challenge ahead. I drink no alcohol. I eat no sugar. In addition to doing soccer drills and scrimmages, I work out twice daily at a training facility in the Home Depot Center. I watch my body wake up and change, the ridges of muscles rising up, the ropy veins twitching along the length of my limbs. With every hoist of the weights and lap around the track I remind myself what’s at stake: after these games, the 99ers are retiring. I ruined their final World Cup, and now I have a chance—no, a responsibility—to make it up to them and to redeem myself in the process. By early August, when we leave for training camp in Crete, I’ll be a different person, as different as if I’d reconfigured the cells inside my blood.

  My resolve remains even as my love life becomes unexpectedly complicated. Since starting training, I’ve noticed a woman who’s working as a nanny for our assistant coach. Her name is Haley, and she’s my usual type: confident, athletic, feminine. I have no idea if she’s into girls until one day, when I step off the bus, she lays a hand on my shoulder, her fingers curling against my bare skin. There is something so strangely intimate about the touch, the delicate but purposeful dig of her nails, that I stop, my foot raised in midair. What the hell was that? I think, and try to dismiss it. I’m still dating Nikki, and she’s scheduled to fly in from New York for a visit, and the last thing I need right now is to muddle through a long-distance breakup.