One Life

by Megan Rapinoe

  I understood, in early 2019, that the EEOC, like so many other agencies, was at risk of having its budgets slashed by Trump and probably wouldn’t deliver the outcome we needed. Sure enough, in February, our lawyer received a letter from the agency saying they had failed to reach a decision, and for further redress, we had a “right to sue” in federal court. On March 8, we filed a lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, claiming “purposeful gender discrimination.” This was a clear-cut case, we said, of women being paid and valued less for our work because of our gender. By launching the suit, we hoped to not only achieve equality for our team, but also to advocate for women athletes around the world.

  After news of the lawsuit came out, there was a lot of chatter about timing. Would we be fatally distracted heading into the World Cup in June? Would it interfere with our training? All the responsibility for the suit was put on us rather than on the federation for forcing us into this position, but I can’t say we felt particularly rattled. For what seemed like the umpteenth time, we found ourselves approaching a major tournament with a pay dispute hanging over our heads, and if the math didn’t make sense—that in order to be paid equally with a men’s team that a year earlier had failed to even qualify for the World Cup, we would have to win the fucking thing—we were used to it. We welcomed the extra pressure.

  Regardless of how many World Cups you play, you never get used to the buzz, and there is no World Cup buzz quite like the one generated by France. We knew the crowds would be spectacular, and on a whim, the night before leaving, I bought some pink hair dye. Eight years earlier, I’d gone platinum just before flying to Germany for my first-ever World Cup, which hadn’t gone down well with everyone. “It’s so stark—what have you done?” said my mom, peering at me critically over FaceTime. Now, as I held the pink hair dye in hand, Sue looked at me doubtfully.

  “Is this really what you want to do the day before you’re going to be on the biggest stage of your life?” she said. I thought for a minute. “That’s exactly why I want to do it!” I said. When you’re about to be in the trenches, it’s a good idea to lighten up, and pink hair is definitely one way to do it. “Oh my gosh, it looks like cotton candy,” said my mom, in a replay of 2011. She’d gotten used to the platinum eventually, however, and I was pretty confident she’d come around to the pink. If you’re going to go in, you might as well go in all the way.

  We landed in France in the first week of June to a degree of excitement I’d never experienced. Eight years earlier, at the World Cup in Germany, women’s soccer had hardly been on the map, while four years earlier, in Canada, the World Cup had been flat until the final stages of the tournament. From the get-go, in France, it felt like the entire nation was watching.

  At home, our fans watch a match as they might a movie, enjoying what happens on the field more or less passively. The French, on the other hand, know every nuance of the game and, like the English, have all the songs and chants ready. From our first match in Reims, against Thailand, the atmosphere was amazing. Thanks to Alex Morgan’s five goals, and goals by a host of World Cup newbies, we won an astonishing 13–0, a score so lopsided we were accused by some journalists of being unsportsmanlike for celebrating. As we made our way through the Group stage, traveling between stadiums in Paris and Le Havre and beating Sweden and Chile along the way, we didn’t let in a single goal. By the time we reached the final rounds, we had our eyes firmly placed on the championship title.

  * * *

  —

  We beat Spain 2–1 in the round of sixteen—I’d scored both goals, both from penalty kicks—and we were looking forward to a luxurious three days off before meeting France in the quarterfinals. The next day, Dan, my agent, called me with a heads-up. An interview I’d given in January to the soccer magazine Eight by Eight had finally hit the newsstands, and with it, a behind-the-scenes video made during the cover shoot. In an off-the-cuff moment, I’d been asked whether I was excited about going to the White House if we won the World Cup. Without thinking, I’d muttered, “I’m not going to the fucking White House.” I doubted we’d even be invited, I said. That was it, the extent of the exchange. But it was enough.

  The reaction was immediate and massive. Within a day, 12.5 million people had watched the clip on Twitter. Angry commentary started pouring across social media, and right-wing TV hosts picked up my statement as a talking point. The response was intense, like a long-range aftershock from kneeling, but it might well have ended there had it not been for the extraordinary reaction from the White House. The president of the United States of America, apparently with nothing better to do, tweeted out a response to the video, simultaneously inviting the team to the White House and accusing me of having disrespected the country by kneeling.

  His tweet was hilariously confused, an indication of just how confounded Trump was by us, and by me personally. On the one hand, we were everything he loves—WINNERS, athletes, people who represent America. On the other, we were women, many of us lesbians, who openly criticized him. In one mad tweet, he’d collapsed under the weight of his own contradictions, and it was a spectacular thing to watch. I hadn’t gone into the World Cup proposing to make it political; but on Trump’s invitation, I was more than happy to oblige.

  I couldn’t get fully into it that week; I had to focus on the game. But the night before the quarterfinals, at a scheduled press conference, I made a short statement standing by my remarks, apologizing for swearing (which my mom, among others, hadn’t liked), and adding that I was urging my teammates to boycott the White House, too. They didn’t need much encouragement. A month earlier, Alex Morgan had told Time magazine she wouldn’t go to the White House if we won, and now Ali Krieger and other teammates tweeted in support. To her credit, Jill publicly backed me, and the comments went down well with the French, who I’d always had a sneaking suspicion liked me more than they let on.

  The idea that the president of the United States was at some level goading us to lose—Trump had advised me, in his Twitter meltdown, to “WIN first” before speaking up—united us and acted like fuel on the fire. There was no conditional tense, no “we hope to win” or “we’d like to win.” No. We were going out there and we were fucking winning.

  The following day, when we walked onto the pitch at Parc des Princes in front of forty-five thousand people, it felt as if the eyes of the world were upon us. Even in ordinary circumstances, the quarterfinal of a huge tournament can feel bigger than the final. If you win decisively in the quarters, it creates a momentum that can carry you all the way to the trophy. That the match was against France, the host nation, only added to the hugeness of the occasion. And after the week we’d had, the fact was we weren’t just playing for the US. We were playing for diversity, democracy, inclusion. We were playing for the right to be different and to still be respected. We were playing for equal rights, equal pay, and the glory of the women’s game. We were playing to make an argument that winning didn’t mean stomping on anyone else, but doing everything you could to support them.

  I wasn’t energized by hate. Hate leaves me indifferent. In the aftermath of Trump’s remarks, it was the outpouring of love, from the Americans and the French, that inspired me. It was patriotism, pure and simple, an expression of everything we held dear about our country that Trump had been desecrating. Inside the stadium, the temperature was 90 degrees. Outside, ticket scalpers were prowling, a rare occurrence in women’s soccer. The whistle blew, the crowd roared. I emptied my mind of everything but the game.

  * * *

  —

  They wanted to beat us so badly. When the French dig in, they are tough opponents, and this game wasn’t going to be an easy ride. Five minutes in, Alex Morgan was fouled by Griedge Mbock Bathy, the French defender, and we won a free kick. I took it from about twenty-two yards out. The ball curved low, slicing through a crowd in the goal mouth that included Amandine Henry, the French captain, and our own Julie Ertz, before dro
pping down into the far right corner of the net. Sarah Bouhaddi, the French goalkeeper, barely had eyes on the ball. She couldn’t do a thing to stop it.

  I hadn’t really planned what happened next. Once before, in a friendly, I had thrown my arms out after a goal and without giving it much thought, had it in my back pocket that day. After my goal, the noise, the thrill, and the sheer wave of joy from the crowd slammed into me with an almost physical force. That kind of energy requires space, and I threw open my arms—shit-eating grin, chest out, heart wide-open, staring defiantly up at the crowd: Are you not entertained?! It was simultaneously a moment of pure performance and an undiluted animal reflex. We are here; we are smiling; we are not going down.

  Eight minutes later, Eugénie Le Sommer made a decent header that fell just wide of the net, caught expertly by our goalie, Alyssa Naeher. For the rest of the first half, the French seemed rattled, allowing Becky and Julie to dominate midfield. But early in the second half, after two great back-to-back saves by Bouhaddi, they started to come back.

  For the first ten minutes, France had the edge and put us on the back foot. Then, twenty minutes into the second half, Alex passed a long ball up the field to Tobin, who found me on the left side, unmarked. In what seemed like an eternity, the ball trickled toward me and a second later, the net was shaking. Two–nil up! I screamed off the adrenaline, fists clenched, yelling into the crowd, then knuckled down and got back in the game. France wasn’t done yet. In the eighty-first minute, Wendie Renard, the tallest player in the tournament, pulled off a spectacular header that sailed passed Naeher and brought the French to 2–1. It was a beautiful shot that for the French came too late. The whistle blew. The French collapsed. We were through.

  As an athlete, rising to the moment and slamming home a win when you most need it feels like everything you were put on this planet to do. As a human being, it’s just the beginning. The night we won against France was the eve of the Paris Pride march, which takes place at the end of LGBTQ Pride Month. In the postgame interviews, I talked about the match and the goals, then drew attention to the team itself. “You can’t win a championship without gays on your team,” I said to reporters. “Go gays!” We were happy, fabulous, and on every front page in the land. This is what winning for the United States looked like.

  * * *

  —

  We had four days off before the semis against England and my phone wouldn’t stop pinging. Half the messages were congratulations; the other half were concerns. From inside the World Cup bubble, I was shielded from a lot of the fallout from my spat with the president, but I understood from my messages it was still raging. The family text chain hadn’t gone this wild since my mom stepped on the lid of a trash can and nearly decapitated herself. (She’d been fine; none of us could stop laughing.)

  CeCé, at home in Redding, called me in a panic, and when her reception cut out, asked me to text her everything I was feeling and to reassure her I was OK. Rach, in France, rolled her eyes and couldn’t believe I’d managed to upset everyone again, while she was still as always, 100 percent behind me; Jenny was worried about my safety. Sue, in the US with her team, wrote a whole article for The Players’ Tribune backing me up (“So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend . . .”) that swiftly went viral. Brian, at a rehab facility in San Diego, had been texting me encouragement throughout the tournament and told me he was totally in my corner.

  My parents were in France, and while they were ecstatic after our quarterfinal win, they were anxious that the president’s remarks put me in danger. All I could tell them was not to worry; nothing had happened in 2016, and nothing was going to happen now. The whole thing seemed completely ridiculous, besides which, we were way past the point of it making a difference. As every top athlete knows, you reach a point of pressure after which it simply can’t get any higher. You can either use it to your advantage or go home.

  I was nursing a minor hamstring injury after the quarters and couldn’t play in the England game. England had done a great job against Norway, defeating them 3–0 with surgical precision in the quarters, and we knew we’d have a fight on our hands. Ten minutes into the match, before a packed stadium in Lyon, Tobin Heath ran down the right, passed to Kelley O’Hara, who made the perfect cross to Christen Press—1–0! Nine minutes later, England equalized. Before the halftime whistle went, Alex Morgan’s header off a Lindsey Horan cross brought us up a goal and we finished the first half 2–1.

  It was Alex’s thirtieth birthday and she was feeling pretty jaunty. After her goal, she raised her pinkie in a gesture to imitate drinking tea and it was fucking epic. To tease the English is such a pleasure because they react immediately and get completely outraged. It was next-level trollery, provoking a ton of shit-talking from the English and sparking a whole new level of rivalry with Phil Neville’s team, who are good, although not as good as Neville thinks they are. There was no harm, no foul, and the whole thing was pretty funny, not least because England suffered a major sense of humor failure. I couldn’t blame them. After Alyssa Naeher saved a penalty kick in the eighty-fourth minute, they were out and we were into the final.

  Four days later, we ran out in front of sixty thousand people in Lyon. We weren’t complacent. We never are. But I think we expected to score against the Netherlands early on in the match, as we had in every other match in the tournament. Instead, it took us thirty-one minutes to even make a shot on goal. After I’d sent a corner kick to Julie Ertz, she flicked it toward the goal, to be deflected by Sari van Veenendaal, the Dutch goalkeeper, who staved off two shots from Alex in rapid succession. We were pressing hard and getting nowhere.

  In the second half, a foul by Stefanie van der Gragt gave us a penalty kick and I stepped up. It’s hard to describe how a moment like that feels. It’s not that you block out the crowd. When sixty thousand people are screaming your name, you’re aware that they’re there. It’s more like you take the noise and the energy and push it down into a blade of concentration, using it to intensify your power and skill. This was it—the chance to get ahead in the biggest World Cup final of our lives.

  I took one short breath, ran at the ball, and smacked it cleanly with my right foot, directing it down the middle and slightly to the right of Van Veenendaal, then watched as it flew into the back of the net. In between running to the corner and being mobbed by the entire team, I managed to throw out my arms in what was now a signature pose. Eight minutes later, Rose Lavelle sprinted up the middle of the field, outrunning Van der Gragt and Anouk Dekker, and smashed in a goal that effectively finished the game. The Dutch never regrouped. We had won.

  It can be hard to re-create, later on, the rush of a moment like that. You collapse. You cry. You jump on the backs of your teammates. Everything we were had rested on this win, and as Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, awarded us the trophy, the crowd started chanting something it took a second to understand. “Equal pay! Equal pay!” The words rang around the stadium as blue and gold confetti rained down, and Tobin dropped to the ground to make confetti angels. It was unbelievable. “It’s ridiculous,” I said, when a microphone was shoved into my face. I didn’t know what else to say. For once, I was lost for words.

  This was the fourth World Cup win for the US women’s team. It was the second World Cup title of my career, and it felt like the first World Cup win that might lead from soccer to other kinds of victory. A few days later, on a beautiful summer day, thousands of people thronged the sidewalks of New York as we stood on an open-topped bus, drinking champagne and wearing T-shirts with the words WORLD CHAMPIONS emblazoned across them in gold. Ticker tape rained down as the crowd shouted, “Equal pay!” and we screamed it back at them.

  This was not a subtle celebration. At one point, I took a sip of champagne, threw my arms wide, and shouted, “I deserve this!” It was a moment of performance, much like my antics on the field, but also an acknowledgment that you can take pride in yourself without undermining your t
eam. Along with Alex Morgan, I had been the tournament’s top scorer and had been awarded both the Golden Boot and the Golden Ball for outstanding player. Damn right I deserved this.

  An hour later, I stood on the steps of City Hall under a banner reading ONE NATION, ONE TEAM, and after being presented with the keys to the city by Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, I made a speech. I thanked my teammates, managers, coaches, chefs, medics, ground staff, media team, and all the people who had cheered us on from day one. I even thanked the head of the federation, Carlos Cordeiro, who was sitting slightly awkwardly behind me, with the team. He had, I said, supported us throughout the tournament, and I hoped would support us in our mission to be paid equally with the men. I told him it was OK to get booed; everyone in power gets booed. In a moment of heady largesse, I even admitted it was possible that some of my unrehearsed statements that year had been a little divisive, and told him I looked forward to holding his feet to the fire.

  I asked those watching to look at our team; black, white, gay girls, straight girls. I asked them to look at their own communities and consider how they might take tiny steps to improve them. “We have to love more, hate less, listen more, talk less,” I said. “This is everybody’s responsibility.” I hoped that people could take what inspired them about the World Cup and apply it to their own lives.

  I was appealing to our country as a whole, but I also wanted to make a point about the right of each of us to fully live our own lives. There’s a fallacy in America that acting for the common good means sacrificing the individual. Well, as a person of robust ego, I am here to tell you that life doesn’t work like that. The interests of the individual aren’t at odds with the collective. You can win for the team and still celebrate your own performance.