One Life

by Megan Rapinoe

  Since the first big speech I’d made at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, I had become much more comfortable speaking in public. A lot of what I said was simple and repetitive: It’s not OK to discriminate. During my speech at Cornell, I went further: It’s not OK to stay silent when you hear someone else being discriminatory. When I came out, I benefited enormously from the support of straight allies in the sports world. I wanted to make this clear to the kids coming up behind me.

  I also wanted to discuss stereotypes. In sports, homophobia is less extreme for gay women than gay men, but it gets mixed up with sexism and becomes instantly more toxic. Women are expected to look a certain way, and being gay merely changes the stereotype. There’s a perception, I said at Cornell, that if you’re a gay female athlete, then you’d damn well better “look gay.” Which is fine; if women want to have short hair and wear flannel, good for them. “But what if you don’t look ‘gay’?” I said. One of my hopes was that as more players felt confident to come out, we would broaden the spectrum of what it means to be gay. Not all of us have short hair! Some players with ponytails are gay! Just like being straight, there’s no one way to be, look, act, or feel gay, and being made to believe otherwise is incredibly narrowing.

  These stereotypes also flush out all sorts of latent prejudice. It’s a widely accepted form of homophobia, for example, for people to insist that not all women in sports are gay—as if they are defending straight women from some kind of slur—and for sportswomen to make themselves more “feminine” for fear of being mistaken for gay. A few weeks later, I did a panel with Abby Wambach at Ohio State University, where we discussed pay equity and how the men’s team is paid more for losing than we are for winning. I started talking more generally about image. As our team had become more successful and we’d started doing more publicity, we’d all noticed the increase in pressure on us to look a certain way. Everyone remembered the bad old days of David Letterman introducing the 1999 World Cup–winning team on his show as “babe city,” but we assumed that kind of talk was part of the dark ages.

  It wasn’t. Fifteen years later, a lot of female athletes felt pressure to wear makeup when they played, and while this appeased sponsors, the truth is the pressure wasn’t entirely external. We might refuse to be crammed into the “babe city” mold, but as the team got more attention, many of us started looking “cuter” and more conventionally feminine—myself included. These standards are baked into our social wiring and however much you disapprove of them, it can be incredibly hard to opt out.

  A month before the Olympics, I was invited by Bleacher Report to write a letter to my thirteen-year-old self. I jumped at the chance. Lately, I had become uncomfortable with how youth soccer was organized. I loved the game, of course, but winning isn’t everything, and looking at kids coming up twenty years behind me, I was worried by how single-track the system had become, with kids pressured to play year-round and commit to a schedule that ruled out anything else. As a kid, when I got the call to play for the Under-17 national team, no one in my life knew what to make of it. Being offered that opportunity was a completely bizarre thing to have happened. I was off doing my own thing, playing soccer as well as other sports and following my interests with no particular plan. Becoming a “star” wasn’t something I even knew to aspire to.

  Things had changed since then. The kids today were ranked when they were ten years old. They were fully on the grid by the time they were twelve, and if they weren’t, they felt as if they’d already failed. This was ridiculous. You can’t, by definition, be a failure at twelve, and there is always more than one path to success. You need huge determination to be a professional athlete, but focusing on one sport to the exclusion of all else is counterproductive. You are not a machine. You are a human being, in a world with other human beings, and while soccer is important, life is important, too.

  In my letter, I urged my thirteen-year-old self to look beyond my own experience to see if there is anything I could do to help others. “If you are feeling uncomfortable about speaking out about something, instead of doing it for yourself, do it for someone else,” I wrote. “Do it for the people, or the cause, that you are standing up for. Sometimes it’s just bigger than you. If you carry the strength of other people, it makes it a little less daunting. Putting yourself out there is hard, but it’s so worth it. I don’t think anyone who has ever spoken out, or stood up or had a brave moment, has regretted it. It’s empowering and confidence-building and inspiring. Not only to other people, but to yourself.”

  There is so much pressure on young athletes these days, it can be easy for them to lose sight of why they are competing. You hear people talk about how they gave up everything and made every conceivable sacrifice to reach their goal, which always makes me think: Where’s your passion and joy? This mindset makes winning a matter of life or death. It shouldn’t be. It’s OK to fail and move on. The most important thing is to hold on to joy.

  * * *

  —

  In July, I turned thirty-one, a week before the roster for the Olympics was announced. I wasn’t sure I was going to make the team. I hadn’t played a match in nine months, had missed the pre-Olympic friendly against South Africa, and although I was in OK shape and back to training with Seattle Reign, the other players were under instruction to not tackle me. If I made the Olympic team, I’d be coming in off the bench, and there was no way I would be able to play the whole ninety minutes.

  Whether I made the lineup or not, that year the US would have a young team with a lot of new faces. Abby Wambach had retired, as had Shannon Boxx and Lauren Cheney, who had been a strong voice on the team. Christie Rampone was injured. Amy Rodriguez, another forceful, balancing influence, was out on maternity leave and Sydney Leroux was pregnant. New great players were coming up the ranks, including eighteen-year-old Mallory Pugh, twenty-two-year-old Lindsey Horan, and twenty-four-year-old Crystal Dunn. But there’s no question there was a leadership vacuum.

  With two World Cups and the Olympics under my belt, I was considered a veteran, and coming back I felt a new sense of urgency. Given the youth of the team, we had a chance, I thought, to establish a new, less autocratic environment in which everyone’s role was important. A strong coaching voice can set this kind of tone on a team, but in its absence, it fell to the older players. How we behaved on and off the field would shape the team for years to come, and it was important to get it right.

  For all our successes, the national team had never won an Olympic gold medal right after a World Cup. There was a good reason for this. When you win a World Cup, you spend six months after the tournament flying around to suck up opportunities and publicity, so by the time the Olympics roll around the following summer, you’re completely exhausted. I probably shouldn’t have made the team. But when I learned I was on the roster, there’s no way I was volunteering to step down. Along with everyone else, I wanted to be part of the record-breaking lineup that finally nailed the world’s two biggest tournaments in a single cycle. We were so confident, most of our families booked their flights to Rio for the gold medal match before the games had even started.

  The logistics of playing in Brazil were challenging, to say the least. Four years earlier at the London Olympics, the distance between venues had been small. We could be in Glasgow one day and Manchester the next, with a mere forty-five-minute flight in between. In Brazil, we were facing much longer flights between stadiums. After winning our first two games in Belo Horizonte, we took a four-hour flight to our next venue.

  I didn’t come off the bench during those early games, which were against New Zealand and France. The first appearance I made was in our third game, in a city called Manaus, on the edge of the Amazon. The match was well attended, with thirty thousand people packing the stadium, but we didn’t exactly set the field on fire. I played for thirty minutes in the second half, and although we had won enough games to guarantee winning the Group stage by then, finishing with a 2–2 d
raw was demoralizing.

  And Manaus itself was crazy. The humidity was intense. Everything was damp. There were moths the size of your palm. The night before leaving, we dumped all our wet, sweaty gear—cleats, shin guards, gloves—to dry in the hallway outside our rooms, because the rooms themselves were damp. In the morning, they were all gone. By the time we’d flown another three hours to Brasília for the quarterfinal against Sweden, we were tired, sweaty, and in terrible moods.

  Our old coach, Pia Sundhage, was in charge of the Swedish national team, which in the history of all our encounters had only beaten us five times. We were ranked number one to their six. They shouldn’t have given us any trouble. But in the first half, though we played aggressively as usual, their defensive play stopped us from scoring. In the second half, with the score still 0–0, the Swedes scored in the sixty-first minute, and for a second things looked bleak. Alex equalized seventeen minutes later, but after Carli’s goal in overtime was ruled offside, the final whistle blew, and we went to penalties. After playing for twenty-five minutes in the second half, I was back on the bench. All I could do was watch helplessly from the sidelines.

  Alex stepped up for the first shot. It was saved by the Swedish goalkeeper, Hedvig Lindahl, and then Sweden scored on their first penalty kick, keeping the score at 1–0. Lindsey Horan rolled her shot in to equalize, then the Swedes did the same: 2–1. Carli took the third penalty and brought us to 2–2. It was unbearable to watch. Sweden’s third shot on goal was deflected by Hope, and here we had our opportunity. Our fourth shot from Morgan Brian went in; we were up 3–2—this was it! This was it! But then Sweden equalized. Christen Press stepped up; her ball went flying over the bar. There was one goal between us and disaster. Hope played desperately for time, changing her gloves, trying to psych Sweden out, but it didn’t work. Their final penalty shot went in and the game was over. We’d lost 4–3 on penalties, the worst possible exit, and the earliest the US team had ever left the Olympics.

  Even if you asked me now why we lost, I would struggle to give you an answer. You could say it was because we were a young team, or because we were exhausted from travel, but those are excuses. Really, I have no idea. “Be honest about how you approach failure,” I had written in that letter to my thirteen-year-old self. “Don’t just be critical of yourself, because that can be self-serving. Approach it honestly, assess your performance, and assess the areas where you have fallen short. Correct them and move on. Don’t dwell on it. Don’t hold on to it.” This is good advice, but it has a downside. Not dwelling means I’m still unclear on what happened. The net result was that we weren’t good enough. At some level, that’s all I need to know.

  Even in the midst of our misery, I was sure of one thing, which was that while it was OK to be mad, to cry, yell, scream, and feel as sorry for ourselves as we needed to feel, a lot of that needed to stay private. This was harder for some than others. Right after our exit, Hope spoke to the media, accusing Sweden of playing defensively, like “a bunch of cowards,” which didn’t go down well. When journalists asked me about her statement, I said Hope was a sore loser—she was criticizing Sweden for using the one strategy that might have beaten us, and to fault them for succeeding made no sense. We were all seething with hurt and disappointment. The entire situation was a mess.

  The only solution was to try to salvage some good times out of the bad. Since a lot of people’s families were already in Rio, and our hotel rooms had been booked and paid for, I decided, along with Crystal and Ali and some of the others, to head to the city anyway. Ali’s boyfriend was Brazilian, and he was going to show us around. I figured I’d never have another chance to go to the Olympics as a spectator, so why not take the week to blow it out and just go? I called Sera, who had been wondering whether to join me, and told her to come down, we’ll have a vacation.

  Things hadn’t been great between us. Since getting engaged, the dynamic had shifted. We had fallen in love because of our differences. Part of what was so attractive to me about Sera was that she was a musician and had her own thing going on, and I loved that her life was totally different from mine. Lately, however, we’d been in each other’s pockets. I felt she’d leaned too far into my life and had lost sight of her own interests and passions. This was understandable in some ways; since winning the World Cup in 2015, my life was probably taking up more oxygen than before. And I was at fault, too. I needed to be a lot more up-front and honest when I was frustrated. But I also felt she wasn’t reading between the lines. We were totally out of balance.

  If we hoped Rio might fix us, we were wrong. It was a disaster from the start. Sera headed to Brazil wanting intimate bonding time, when all I wanted was to drown my sorrows and party. She wanted to take walks and go to dinner and discuss our relationship. I wanted to be in a crowd, having fun without thinking about the future.

  One night, we were invited to a party on a cruise liner where the US women’s national basketball team was staying. Because the boat was technically in international waters, gaining entry involved a whole pain-in-the-ass process with passports. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d given up and bailed; my whole life might have been different.

  I had met Sue Bird once before, in LA that spring at a big media day organized by the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. She was a star player for the Seattle Storm and a member of the USA Basketball Women’s National Team, with three Olympic gold medals to her name. God knows my own team was successful, but the women’s national basketball team was, arguably, even more successful than we were. At the Olympic photoshoot that day, I had been sufficiently impressed by Sue to call out a dumb joke to her, then worry it hadn’t landed. (It definitely hadn’t landed. She was in her team uniform for the shoot, with hair down and full makeup, and as I walked past, I joked, “Are you getting ready for a game?”)

  My agent, Dan, introduced us, and we chatted about the fact that we both lived in Seattle and yet had never hung out. A few months later, just before the Olympics, we connected again when a number of WNBA players started protesting about police brutality against black Americans. That summer, there had been a series of high-profile cases of young black men being shot and killed by law enforcement, and members of the WNBA team Minnesota Lynx had started wearing black shirts in warm-up games. On the front were the words CHANGE STARTS WITH US. JUSTICE AND ACCOUNTABILITY, and on the back, the names Philando Castile and Alton Sterling—as well as an image of the Dallas Police Department shield, in honor of five officers killed by a sniper the previous week. It was impressive, inclusive, and inspiring.

  The protests got little traction. Black women protesting tend to be met with either sanction or silence, and in the case of the Lynx players, the only reason they got any attention is because four off-duty police officers who were providing security at the game walked off the job in disgust. Later, as more WNBA teams joined in the protest, it only hit the media because they were fined.

  It is a source of shame to me now that I didn’t respond more vigorously to those early protests. I hugely admired their actions and DM’d Sue to say, I think it’s awesome and if there’s any way my team can help, let us know. But I didn’t do more. I credit Colin Kaepernick with so much, but the fact is that the first athletes to protest were the women of the WNBA, and they have never been given their dues.

  * * *

  —

  A month later, in Rio, I ran into Sue at the USA Basketball after-party. Unlike us, her team had won gold—their fourth—and they were celebrating hard. Her high spirits were just what I needed and, along with Sera, my agents, and teammates, we all hung out until the early hours. Sue’s friend Diana will say it was obvious there was an attraction between us even then—that she lingered too long at my table that night. Looking back, there was definitely some lingering. We all made plans to meet up in Seattle—me, Sera, Sue, and our mutual friend and agent, Jess Dolan. I had no idea what was going to happen. But I knew I wanted to see
her again.

  Returning to the US after the Olympic Games was a downer. There was no parade, no victory tour, no celebrations. We had lost, it hurt, and I was as angry and disappointed as the next team member. I also knew this loss wasn’t the end of the story. I had played for the national team for almost ten years. We barely, if ever, lost two games in a row. Losing sucked, but wallow in it? I certainly wasn’t going to do that.

  14

  KNEELING

  Just before the Olympics, on July 5, a thirty-seven-year-old black man named Alton Sterling had been standing outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when police officers, responding to a call of an armed man, pinned him to the ground and shot him at point-blank range. The following day, a thirty-two-year-old black man named Philando Castile had been pulled over by police in Minnesota and shot at point-blank range. Castile’s girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter had also been in the car.

  A year earlier, Walter Scott, a thirty-year-old black man, had been pulled over in a routine traffic stop in North Charleston, South Carolina, and shot in the back by police while running away. Twenty-eight-year-old Sandra Bland, a black woman, had been pulled over in Texas for a minor traffic violation and taken into custody, where she was found hanging in her cell the following morning. In 2014, Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy, was shot by a police officer in Ohio while playing with a toy gun. Three months earlier, Michael Brown, a black teenager, was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri; and a month before that, Eric Garner, a black man, was strangled to death by a police officer using an illegal chokehold on Staten Island, New York. In 2012, Trayvon Martin, a black teenager walking home from the store in Sanford, Florida, was shot to death by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, who was acquitted by a jury of Martin’s murder.