by Abby Wambach
“It’s never easy to say goodbye. You always want to go out on top. You always want there to be that fairy-tale ending. I hope that this is it. Not just for me but for this entire group of women who have showed me the way, who have taught me about myself. Who have made me soul-search and find out more about who I am and who I want to be. That’s what makes this so special. It’s not about wins and losses or even championships. It’s about learning, it’s about growing, it’s about being you.
“I’m proud to be a member of this national team. I’ve been proud since I first got the opportunity to wear this jersey, to represent my country. I hope that people know that nobody’s perfect. People make mistakes. But on Sunday, if we make mistakes, I know every single player on the field, every single player on the bench, every fan in the stadium, has our back. That is inspiring. To be a part of it, to be able to look at the stands and see my family. No matter what happens, I’m going to be proud of what we’ve gotten, and where we’ve gotten to. I’m a lucky person and . . . I know we can do it. We’ve just got to believe.”
I exhale, feeling the weight of those words, and say them one more time: “We’ve just got to believe.”
I keep my promise and do my job, do what I’m asked to do, which means leading from the bench. This is the last World Cup I’ll ever play in—one of my last games, period—and goddamn do I want to play, to churn up the field with my cleats and feel my head kiss the ball. Instead I watch my team deliver an exuberant beat-down: one goal at minute three, another at minute five, another at minute thirteen, another at minute fifteen. I almost—almost—feel sorry for the Japanese players, wandering around as though the field is some postapocalyptic landscape they’ve never before seen. Close to halftime it becomes more familiar, and they find their way to the goal, slipping one into our net. My mind conjures the memory of my lost high school championship, the last time I lusted this fervently for a win. For five minutes straight I scream expletive-laden advice, sending teammates scuttling away from me. Sydney bravely turns to me and gives a stern order: “Okay, enough.” I promise to try. After the break Japan scores again—prompting more screams and expletives and scampering teammates—but we answer in the very next minute, and now it’s 5–2.
They’re getting desperate, tossing themselves at the ball, and goddamn do I still want to play; I was always the reliable and foolproof closer, and I need to be on the field as the clock winds down, even if there’s nothing to close. I cry as I warm up, knowing that my team is giving me a gift, and instruct myself to pull it together before I step on the field. In the seventy-ninth minute Jill sends me in to replace Tobin Heath. When I reach the line, Carli meets me there. She removes the captain’s armband and wraps it around my bicep, a gesture I didn’t expect but appreciate immensely, a reverse passing of the torch.
The field, even covered in the dreaded Astroturf, has never felt so sweet beneath my feet. Right away I’m off, galloping like a thoroughbred, relishing the chase and the capture; an opponent tackles me and earns a yellow card. In the eighty-sixth minute, Pearcie comes on. She’s forty years old, the last veteran standing from the 99ers, and this is also her last World Cup. Four minutes later the whistle blows and the celebration begins; I fall to my knees and raise my face to the sky. When I pull myself up I see my teammates, collected in a tight huddle and pulsing like a heart.
But my eyes sweep to the left and zero in on Sarah, who’s wearing a jersey decorated with my name. I lumber toward her, tentatively at first, and then pick up speed. My arms lift up and she leans down, meeting me halfway, draping herself like an ornament over the railing. I loop my arm around her back, using it as scaffolding; I am worried she’s going to fall. She wraps her hands around my face, fingertips meeting at the back of my neck, and looks me in the eye.
“I did it,” I whisper. “We did it.”
“Kiss me,” she commands.
In the moment, I am not thinking about politics, or the fact that gay marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court a week earlier. It doesn’t occur to me that a video of our kiss will go viral, or that I will be asked to articulate what was running through my mind. Publicly, I’ll say, “In that moment as a human being, you ask yourself—who’s the one person I want to run to, the person who sacrificed with me and dried my tears and wiped my blood and listened to my issues?” Privately, I’m thinking, Even after what what’ve been through, she’s still capable of being there for me. We’ve set aside all our issues for this, and now it’s here, and we won, and it’s in the past, and now we can work on finding our way back to each other.
And so I obey, kissing her like no one is watching at all.
19
ADVOCATE
Despite all the attention, the viral video, the headlines declaring that we exemplify “what love looks like,” the high from that kiss doesn’t last. The issues that plagued us before the World Cup only worsen after it’s over. My marriage becomes my new obsession, the sole receptacle of my focus, and it buckles under the weight of my neediness. Every word is misinterpreted, every glance tinged with anger or regret. I want what we once had. I chase it, I scour corners for it. It’s not anywhere, and I choose to get lost along with it.
The various pills I took to do my job, I now needed to live my life. I trade the caffeine pills for straight-up Adderall, popping one in the morning, along with coffee. I trade the Vicodin for Norco, which has a higher concentration of opioids, popping one or two as soon as the Adderall buzz wears off. I keep my old bedtime standby, Ambien, but increase the amount of alcohol I drink to help it along. I wonder how I’ll cope when I no longer have access to my prescriptions. I wake up, painfully aware of my feelings, and start the process of killing them all over again.
It’s a relief when I have to go on the road for the team’s victory tour, although initially I had protested the idea. I didn’t want the fanfare of a long goodbye, the spotlight in each stadium fixing relentlessly on me. My teammate Shannon Boxx urges me to reconsider, insisting that I owe it to all my teammates and all my fans, that I should think of it as a celebration not just of my career but of all the progress women’s soccer has made. It’s bigger than just me. I can’t argue with that. Besides, I reason, maybe the distance will help my domestic situation this time around. Maybe the act of playing and giving interviews will dislodge my negative thoughts.
It does, intermittently. I’m secretly thrilled when fans gather at the airport to meet our arriving plane. I joke with reporters that I’ll have to revert back to my natural hair color because my current platinum hue makes me instantly recognizable. We’re not allowed to sign autographs in hotels, but I always stop to talk to kids, shaking their hands and telling them to be brave. I wade back into the gender equality issue, declaring that I’ll keep fighting even though we dropped our turf lawsuit. (Our lawyers realized that FIFA was going to slow-play the case, rendering a decision after the World Cup, thereby weakening our fight.) I announce that soccer is the next big thing in the United States, and corporations would be smart to get in on the ground floor.
“Get on it, people,” I urge. “You guys are going to miss out if you don’t. . . . It’s an amazing time not only to be a footballer here in the U.S., but to be a female soccer player. We know that bringing home championships just gives us a better platform and another opportunity to start a conversation to get a little bit more pay, and bring that gap closer together.”
Every good day is chased by a bad one. I continue with my pill cocktail and my press junkets. I text with Sarah: “Are we losing something that was once beautiful? Can we ever re-create happiness again?” Neither of us has answers. My roommate on the road, Sydney, tries to go to sleep before I do to escape my dreadful snoring. As insurance, she wears headphones or earplugs. Some nights I see her watching me, my fingers doing their familiar lap from the bottle to my mouth. Once, she kicks off her covers, pulls out her phone, and retrieves one of her favorite poems. She reads it to me softly in the dark:
there will always be<
br />
parts of me that only you
can unlock,
that only you can come back to save
and that only you can calm, too soon.
what remains of me,
will always fill
the emptiness in you.
it will always complete all that we have.
the only parts
we have not learned
to say goodbye to.
the only parts where we
can still be free.
I know it’s her way of saying she is worried about me.
On October 27, a Tuesday, the national team visits the White House and meets President Barack Obama. The whole event is surreal to me, on multiple levels: here’s a butch lesbian meeting our first black president—a president who deems female athletes worth celebrating on the most visible stage in the world. “They’ve inspired millions of girls to dream bigger and, by the way, inspired millions of boys to look at girls differently, which is just as important,” Obama says. “This team taught all America’s children that playing like a girl means you’re a badass.”
We’d been warned beforehand not to request selfies, but the president slyly undermines this edict. Turning to the crowd, he quips, “I’m sure you’d all love to take selfies with them.” I decide to go for it. “Mr. President,” I say, “how about you taking a selfie with us, then?”
I hold out my phone and capture everyone’s face but my own; only a streak of my platinum hair appears along the edge. The best unselfie ever snapped.
As soon as we leave the White House, I announce my retirement from soccer, ending my written statement with the words, “I can’t wait to see what the next chapter of my life brings.” I take phone calls from the press, doing my best to redirect the focus back to the team. “It’s time for me to walk away,” I tell USA Today. “I know the young studs—the Sydney Lerouxs, the Alex Morgans—they’re the ones that will take this game to the next paradigm and that’s something I’m excited to watch and see grow. Thinking about my teammates and time spent with them, that’s what I’m going to miss most. It’s not going to be the sprints, it’s not going to be the traveling, it’s not going to be—even in some small way—the game. It’s going to be the people that I’ve been literally able to grow up with.”
That night, alone in my room at the W Hotel, I craft a rare prepared speech to give at tomorrow’s luncheon with the National Press Club. I labor over it, organizing my thoughts and fretting over the words; I want it to sound like the best version of myself.
“Character is a funny thing,” I write somewhere in the middle. “I’ve found that your character is tested the most when things don’t go your way.”
Things will be going my way soon, I tell myself. They have to.
The team’s victory tour is suspended in November, to be concluded the following month, but I don’t go home. Instead I travel to San Antonio, Gainesville, New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Milwaukee, Nashville, and Houston. I speak at fundraisers and attend galas and shoot commercials, including one for Gatorade in which I implore everyone to forget me (but only with regard to soccer, I think, not for good!). I partner with Triax Technologies to promote their head impact monitor and talk about concussion awareness and safety. I recall how I foolishly stayed on the field after I’d suffered one myself, back in 2013. My teammate, standing a few yards away, kicked a line-drive shot straight at my head, the impact felling me like a chopped tree. An opposing player approached and asked if I was all right; I mumbled my answer, my mouth incapable of forming proper words.
“I’ve headed the ball so many times throughout my career, so does it gives me pause thinking what my future looks like?” I ask Fox News. “Of course it does, so I want to put athletes in control of their lives so they don’t have that kind of pause.”
I speak at children’s soccer fundraisers, where I peer out at all those sweet, earnest faces and worry about lying to them. At one event, a ten-year-old girl waits her turn in line at my autograph table. I do a double take; she’s wearing my exact hairstyle, buzzed on the sides and longer on the top. She is me twenty-five years ago, had I been brave enough then to defy my mother and cut my ponytail.
“Hey, your hair is so cute,” I tell her. “Can I take a photo of you for some ideas for my next cut?”
She complies, squeezing in next to me.
After the click, I bring the girl around to the other side of the table, where no one can hear us, and tell her I have a question: “Does anyone think you look like a boy?”
Before she can answer, I speak again. “It happens to me all the time and it’s not something to worry about. See, you and me, we aren’t that different at all.”
She nods, her mouth set in a serious line, and I know she understands.
In Seattle, after an event, I call Haley and ask if I can see her. She lives in that city now with her husband and two children, and has a job as a social worker at an elementary school. We meet at her school and take a walk around the neighborhood, and for once our conversation seems stilted and restrained. Later, she’ll tell me she knew something was wrong: I looked unhealthy, pallid, thin. I wasn’t the Abby she’d known for years, raw and real. Instead I was “Business Abby,” distant and remote, using the voice I reserve for speaking to the press. She asks me how I’m feeling about my impending retirement, and I reach for the phrases I’ve crafted and polished. It’s so exciting, and so many opportunities are falling into my path, and I’m going to be able to make a real difference and have a positive impact on people’s lives. She nods and says she’s so happy for me, and at those words I let my mask fall.
“There’s one thing,” I say, and attempt a light laugh. “I’m going to have to drink a little bit less.”
Half the time I am a chatty wind-up toy that keeps churning its own crank, the other half an extinguished fire that will never reignite. My weight soars and plummets, plummets and soars, my body expanding and erasing itself as fast as it can. The needle in my mind oscillates along with it. I am bulging with confidence and swagger and excitement; I am despondent and convinced everything is futile in the end. When I’m on the upswing, my ideas beget ideas and I connect with people who can help me make them real.
“I am going to change the world,” I write to one, “and you will join me. Lots and lots of stuff happening to create a platform, property, conversation, equal opportunity . . . Basically create an empire where the sole focus is to make it a societal norm for men and women to be equals. Not just in sports either. And not just in this country. I want it all. I want it global. The time is now . . . and I’m going to create something to finally get the job done. I am still ironing out a map as to how it will all happen, and I want to form a coalition of other like-minded badass women to figure out a way to ensure equal opportunity for all human beings (minus Donald Trump) happens.
“Okay . . . I could go on, but like I said, it would not do it justice. And to be up front, this all has just hit me like a ton of bricks since announcing my retirement. Basically I’m fucking pissed off I have to find work after my career because I’m a woman. And I’m done with being angry and turning it on its head and just going all in to change it. Now is the time. And I am in a unique position to actually help do it.
“Not to be arrogant or overly confident but there is something symbolic about saying you ‘will’ do something, rather than you ‘want’ to. And since saying I will change the world, doors that you can’t imagine have just swung open and I’m going for it.
“Please let’s chat soon!!! I’m fired up. So much work to do, but man isn’t this gonna be fun.”
I have an emotional déjà vu: this is how I felt when I first realized I was good at soccer—not just good, but one of the best in the world, doing what I was surely born to do. I can be just as successful at advocacy. “I know I am sounding crazy in every way,” I confide to my agent. “But this is how I am processing through this. I am righteous right now. Please know I won’t lose
myself in this, but that in fact I’m finding myself and the voice I want to convey. I am in the brainstorming stage. Some shit I say and feel is batshit crazy for now. I get that. I just need to say it and get it out there. Passion is a fickle thing. It’s not always right or possible. But someone has to have the courage to say what others won’t say aloud. . . . We need a plan. I feel like the Jerry Maguire movie.”
The idea lodges inside my mind and begins to take shape. I picture an umbrella organization whose sole goal is pursuing equal pay and working conditions. I’ll connect with leaders in media and politics so there’s a point person working to effect change across the board, starting from the grassroots level and eventually lobbying for legislation in Washington. We’ll build and grow these platforms, assisting each other’s efforts and sharing results. It’ll be the female equivalent of the old boys’ club, an organization that will grow and flourish with each successive generation. We’ll reach underserved and underprivileged kids, teaching them leadership skills and inspiring them to imagine a world beyond the one they already know.
I’ll be in charge of the sports sector, working with each individual team to ensure compliance. I’ll point out the absurdity in soccer’s pay gap: My team split $2 million in prize money after winning the World Cup, whereas the victorious German men’s team received $35 million last summer. I’ll argue that FIFA should spend more money promoting women’s soccer ($73 million on our World Cup, compared to $2.2 billion for the men) and be more transparent with its finances; currently they offer no concrete figures about how much revenue we generate.