One Life

by Megan Rapinoe

  A few days later, we played Brazil in San Diego, and it looked as if this game would go the same way. With twelve minutes on the clock, we found ourselves 3–1 down. I was starting to find my rhythm again, and slipped the ball to Christen Press, who flicked it into the net with a businesslike touch. A minute later, she made the perfect pass to me on the left side of the box and I smashed it into the near side of the goal. A few minutes after that, I passed to Kelley O’Hara from the right flank, who landed the cross to Julie Ertz, and—boom!—we were up! Moments later, the whistle blew on our last-minute 4–3 win. I was back, and four days later, when we met Japan in Carson, California, I was playing well straight off the bat. Twelve minutes into the game, I wrong-footed Aya Sameshima before coolly slotting the ball into the far post. We won 3–0.

  The Tournament of Nations didn’t receive a ton of publicity, and most of the games were attended by fewer than twenty thousand fans. But losing still stung. After our defeat against Australia, we ended up coming second in the tournament, which brought a lot of the team’s unhappiness to the fore. Jill wasn’t popular, particularly for the way she made decisions, and now we were having a poor season. At the end of July, a group of players complained to the federation on behalf of the team and asked them to find us a new coach.

  I don’t think we really expected them to fire her. Power is where the money is, and elite female athletes are serially underpaid. If a star male athlete hates his coach, he’s not going anywhere. The same couldn’t be said for us. On the other hand, we did hope that by raising our concerns about Jill’s management style, the federation might hear us out and do something to help. Instead, to our amazement, the bosses at US Soccer sat on the complaint for months, and when we pushed back, they obliquely threatened the team, noting that the only person guaranteed to be going to France for the World Cup in 2019 was Jill.

  Putting our dissatisfaction on the record still felt good. By bringing everything out into the open, it made many of us on the team realize we weren’t the only ones feeling dissatisfied with Jill. Bonding among players improved, morale went up, and as a consequence the team played even better—successes that Jill herself reaped. We were still at the ultimate mercy of the coach and US Soccer, but mentally, something had shifted. By talking, organizing, and keeping one another in the loop, we were able to present a collective front that, psychologically at least, changed the balance of power. From then on, we controlled the team.

  Speaking up can be its own reward, too, and in July, in different circumstances, Sue enjoyed a similar experience. In her interview with ESPN, she formally came out and confirmed we were a couple. Years earlier, I had discovered the difference between coming out privately and publicly, and now I watched Sue go through the same process. To straight observers, coming out publicly might seem like no big deal given she’d never tried to hide in the first place, but believe me, when you belong to a minority that still comes under attack, there is something incredibly freeing about speaking out in public.

  In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, I tried to encourage this mindset in my teammates. Coming out, like deciding to protest, is a very private decision and no one should ever be browbeaten into doing it. But it seemed to me, that summer, that standing up against fear and intimidation was more important than ever before. In August, a group of white supremacists, emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric, held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which they marched around carrying tiki torches and flying Confederate and neo-Nazi flags. When violence broke out and a counterprotester was killed, the president made a statement in which he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” His words were a green light for white nationalists everywhere.

  In August, Malcolm Jenkins, an African American player for the Philadelphia Eagles, raised a fist during the anthem of a preseason game. His teammate Chris Long, a white player who grew up in Charlottesville, put an arm around him. “I think it’s a good time for people that look like me to be there for people that are fighting for equality,” said Long.

  A few weeks later, Aaron Rodgers, quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, knelt during a game warm-up and posted a photo of it on Twitter, which Tom Brady—quarterback for the New England Patriots, and one of the biggest white stars of the NFL—“liked.” It wasn’t exactly momentous. But it was better than nothing.

  The overwhelming majority of those speaking up continued to be black players. In September, when Michael Bennett of the Seattle Seahawks and Marshawn Lynch of the Oakland Raiders staged anthem protests before games, Bennett told CNN that “Charlottesville was the tipping point for me,” and said that more white players needed to join. It was an expression of the very racism he was trying to expose that, as Bennett said, “It would take a white player to really get things changed.” The corresponding silence from white players was deafening.

  There were moments that fall when I worried nothing on any front would ever change for the better. In October, FIFA announced its short list for the Best FIFA Women’s Player award. Along with Lieke Martens of the Netherlands and our own Carli Lloyd, one of the players on the short list was someone none of us had heard of and who had never even played professionally—an amateur player for Florida State. Meanwhile, the Australian player Samantha Kerr, who’d arguably had the best year of any player in the world, wasn’t even on the list. It was pretty depressing that the highest soccer authority in the world couldn’t even identify the sport’s best players, and I was furious. FIFA, I told journalists, was “old, male, and stale.” Clearly the organization couldn’t care less about the women’s game.

  * * *

  —

  Toward the end of 2017, Jill sent me an email. She wanted to schedule a meeting, she said, and Dan Flynn would be there. Dan Flynn: CEO of the federation, who only ever turned up to a meeting when someone was about to get fired. “Just curious,” I replied casually, “what’s the purpose of the meeting?”

  “Expectations,” wrote Jill, and I went ahead and freaked out. There was no way I was going to the meeting alone. I wanted witnesses, and after calling Becky and Carli, the team captains, I wrote back to inform Jill I’d be coming to the meeting, and two of my teammates would be with me.

  As it turned out, Jill didn’t want witnesses. She messaged me to say she thought it would be better if it was just the two of us, and we ended up downsizing to an informal meeting. She said my behavior that year had been questionable, not a reference to kneeling, but to my conduct since being let in from the cold. My attitude during training was “toxic,” she said, and told me other players had complained. I didn’t believe this. I’m not a bad teammate, and I hadn’t given anyone else the attitude I’d given Jill. But this conversation was her way of telling me to back off, and I heard her. We still had to work together. I backed off.

  If I toed the line during practice, I continued to speak out off the field. By the end of 2017, something had become very obvious: If you elect a president on the basis of his attacks on one group of people, it ends up being bad for us all. I don’t know if everyone understood at the time that when Trump denigrated women, immigrants, or the differently abled on the campaign trail, it wasn’t just “a joke.” Those words mattered. To those people who said we’ll see how he does in office, fine. But we—black people, gay people, people with disabilities, the vulnerable—all of us fucking knew what was going to happen.

  Once again, I started to think more seriously about how everything joined up. You can’t defend gay people without understanding the threat posed to black people and other people of color by their enemies. And look at a concern like housing. Housing insecurity among young people is the junction at which a variety of other issues meet—sexual abuse, drug addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, as well as LGBTQ and racial inequality. Often these kids are abandoned with nowhere to turn but the streets, an unacceptable reality in the world’s richest country, but also a wake-up call about “them” and “us.” We’re all part o
f the same story. It all connects. When you pick an issue you care about and speak up, you help a range of causes you may know nothing about. When levels of inequality fall for one group, we all rise a little higher across the spectrum.

  There are hard and soft protests. In spring 2018, with what I hoped was my worst year behind me, Sue and I did something giddy and hopeful. We had agreed to be the first gay couple to appear in ESPN the Magazine’s “Body Issue,” and now we agreed to pose naked for the cover. It was silly in some ways, a huge glossy shoot for a celebrity product that doubled as an exercise in personal branding. In spite of that, the shoot still felt meaningful: to be the first, to be out, to be proud.

  We shot in Seattle. We were both used to being naked in the locker room with strangers wandering around—trainers, coaches, doctors—and neither of us was particularly self-conscious. (Some players turn their backs when they change, but it takes a lot of work to be that modest, and that wasn’t us.) We felt very comfortable with Radka Leitmeritz, the female photographer, and since we’re competitive, we got into the spirit of wanting to get the best shot without the process taking a thousand hours. The final result, in which we were shown leaping in poses that showed off all the hard work of training, was stunning. But there were shots of us touching each other lovingly, too—Sue’s hand on my shoulder, my hand on her arm—which were in some ways a much bigger deal. The whole thing was a big, splashy way of normalizing gay relationships.

  Afterward, we spoke to Jemele Hill, a reporter for ESPN. She asked us how it felt to be symbols to a lot of people, and Sue talked about coming out earlier in the year. “’Cause everybody in my life knows. It was not a surprise or shock,” she said. “But that’s not the same as coming out. It really isn’t. Being around Megan, I learned that. And then after I came out, just seeing the reactions, having people come up to me directly—” I was naturally outspoken; Sue was naturally reserved—but coming out publicly had struck us in exactly the same way, as a vital form of visibility. “I think there’s just something really powerful about that.”

  16

  DESERVING

  I made about five hundred thousand dollars in 2018. Unless you earn millions and want everyone to know, talking about how much you make is taboo—which has never made sense to me. Without transparency, how do you even know you have a bad deal, or by what metric your work is being judged? If everyone talked about how much they made, discrepancies would be harder to hide. I’d rather know, and tell. Otherwise, trying to estimate what your work is worth is just taking a shot in the dark.

  For example: I think many often assume that a Nike sponsorship deal for an athlete like me is worth hundreds of thousands. In fact, my Nike contract was a four-year deal negotiated in 2016, right after I’d injured my ACL, and was worth around eighty thousand dollars a year. As far as I know, even those of my teammates who struck sponsorship deals at the tops of their games never made far into the hundreds of thousands. This is a nebulous part of the pay equity problem: Female athletes, in my experience, are paid for what we’ve already done, while men are paid for what they could do in the future. We have to prove ourselves; they only have to show promise. And then when we outperform expectation, we’re asked, “Well, are you going to do it again?” We’re always playing catch-up.

  In the spring of 2018, with our EEOC filing still lumbering along, the team started talking about world championship prize money. We were a year out from the 2019 World Cup in France and in the best shape of our lives. From our first match in January to our final match in November—a 5–1 win against Denmark and a 1–0 win against Scotland, respectively—the US National Women’s Team didn’t lose a single game in 2018. It was a very good year for me personally. During a friendly against Mexico in April, I scored a goal and broke my own match record with four assists in a single game, taking the final score to 6–2. Over the course of the year, my goal and assist tally would rise to nineteen, the best annual performance of my career.

  To ask for more prize money in these circumstances did not seem unusual. In 2015, when we won the World Cup in Canada, the team had received $2 million out of an overall pool of $15 million in prize money. By contrast, the prize pool for the forthcoming 2018 men’s FIFA World Cup in Russia was set at $400 million. The men’s World Cup enjoys more revenue and higher viewing figures than the women’s, but not by a margin that justifies the numbers. According to FIFA’s own records, the 2015 Women’s World Cup final was watched by a global audience of 850 million viewers, of whom 25 million were in the US, making it the most-watched soccer match ever broadcast in North America. The men’s final in 2018 would be watched by a global audience of 1.1 billion, only 14 million of whom were in the US. While there was an argument that the men’s game couldn’t get any bigger, the women’s game was clearly a vast reservoir of untapped growth.

  Part of the problem for women is that when it comes to asking for raises, we’ve been socialized to not make “selfish” demands. We can advocate for our families, or in the service of a cause or campaign, but if we’re simply asking for more money on our own behalf and because we have the temerity to believe we deserve it, we are liable to be called greedy. And the problem doesn’t end when we have the money; we are also supposed to feel bad about spending it.

  I have never felt guilty about splurging. Sue’s closet is 75 percent sneakers—that’s her big spend—but I love it all: bags, shoes, clothing, moisturizers, jewelry, the whole nine yards. I have a Celine loafer habit. I love my tech (iPad, MacBook, AirPods for travel). Since my earliest days playing for the Red Stars, when I flew CeCé out to Chicago for her fortieth birthday, I’ve always liked spending money on my family. I’m sensible with money to the extent that I invest in property and consult with my uncle Brad, who’s my financial adviser, before doing anything too wild, but I think it’s OK to enjoy what I earn. And if women are considered “selfish” for doing so? No, thanks; I’m opting out of that.

  I’m also opting out of mandatory gratitude. In October, after we’d cruised through the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying rounds, winning the tournament for the eighth time in nine years, FIFA announced that the prize pool for the 2019 Women’s World Cup would be doubled to $30 million. It was an entirely random figure, with no rhyme or reason behind it. What was the metric? How did they get to $30 million? By using the magic phrase “doubling the money,” they seemed to think they’d so dazzle and overwhelm us that we wouldn’t notice there was still a $370 million shortfall with the men. “I think they’re probably looking for pats on the back for the increase,” I told journalists. “They’re not getting any from here. Fifteen million is nothing to them.”

  If they wanted to come up with an arbitrary figure, I suggested, they could go with a clean $100 million.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the year, I went home for the holidays and Sue accompanied me for some of the time. My family loves Sue. They can see how good she is for me, how easy we are together, and how she irons out so many of my shortcomings—I can only hope I do the same for her. I can be pretty absentminded; my sister Jenny has never let me live down the time we’d done a Secret Santa and I’d forgotten to buy her a gift. (“That would never happen with Rachael or CeCé,” Jenny was still saying years later. “The only person that would happen with would be Megan.” Totally true and I’m still mortified.) Now everyone in my family can bypass me and go straight to Sue, who never forgets anything.

  My hometown was in a downbeat mood that December. In late July, a terrible fire had broken out, set off by a spark from a vehicle. When my mom called to tell me, I had been in Kansas City for a game against Japan. My mom calls with local news all the time, but this was different. After we’d spoken, I looked up the fire on the internet and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The mountains I’d gazed on thousands of times growing up were engulfed in solid sheets of flame. It looked like a scene from hell. After burning for a few days in the hills, the fire ha
d spread to the town’s residential areas, and thirty-eight thousand people had been evacuated from downtown Redding. My family was safe, but over the next few weeks, the blaze would kill eight people and destroy over a thousand homes.

  I immediately put together a Facebook fundraising page. People had lost everything, escaping their homes with just the clothes on their backs. I was devastated watching my hometown suffer like this, and within two weeks of launching the page, thanks in part to the generosity of my teammates, we had raised about $150,000. I had zero time for people bringing up politics in this moment, and when someone posted a message saying they wouldn’t donate because I’d disrespected their flag, I lost it.

  “First of all, the flag is OUR flag, NOT your flag,” I wrote. “Second, there are plenty of people in Redding who wholly disagree with my choice to kneel, donate to THEM and their families. People who had 20 mins to grab their whole life out of their homes. Deal??” The idea that disagreeing with someone disqualifies them from care is absurd. Watching footage of the fire, the only reasonable response was to reach for your wallet and say, “How can I help?”

  We had an unusually conflict-free Christmas. The previous year, my sister and I had again spent the entire holiday haranguing my dad about Fox News and Trump. Now we avoided the topic. None of us had the heart to fight, and when I returned to training camp in January, it was with a renewed sense of mission I often felt after spending time with my family. Who I am isn’t tied to winning or losing, but to the people who love me no matter what.