One Life

by Megan Rapinoe

  I believe this especially with regard to women, whose individual needs have long been overlooked in favor of—oh, the irony—the collective good of men. When I yelled, “I deserve this!” I was speaking for women who are told to be selfless, invisible, meek; to accept less money, less respect, fewer opportunities, less investment. Who are told to be grateful, uncomplaining. Who are discouraged from owning their victories or even seeking them out in the first place. You can share, and help, and be part of your community, and you can also stand tall and enjoy your success. No caveat, no apology. Arms out wide, claim your space.

  17

  FORWARD

  Fame is strange. When I stood on the steps of City Hall that day in July, I wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t said before, or that anybody else hadn’t said. But fame gives your words weight and now people were listening. It makes no sense. If you’re a good person and you’re standing up for the right thing, whether you made the penalty kick shouldn’t matter. As an athlete, the entry price for having political views is winning. The better you play, the more you win, and the bigger your platform becomes. I had flown back from the World Cup into a white-hot flare of fame, and while I wasn’t rushing to put out a perfume, I had every intention of using the spotlight.

  A week after returning from France, I put on a suit and went on CNN to say what I hadn’t been able to say during the tournament. When Anderson Cooper asked if I had a message for the president, I smiled briefly at the absurdity of the situation. Then I looked into the camera. “I would say that your message is excluding people. You’re excluding me, you’re excluding people who look like me. You’re excluding people of color; you’re excluding Americans that maybe support you. I think that we need to have a reckoning with the message . . . ‘make America great again.’ I think that you’re harking back to an era that was not great for everyone. It might have been great for a few people, and maybe America is great for a few people right now, but it’s not great for enough Americans in this world. . . . You have an incredible responsibility as the chief of this country to take care of every single person and you need to do better for everyone.”

  The attention during that first week was intense. I’d become used to a certain level of recognition, depending on where we were in the tournament schedule, but this was different. Every time I stepped out of the house, I was recognized. My hair—which, depending on what color I could grab when I remembered to re-dye it, veered between pink and a sort of light eggplant—made me highly visible. (I was too vain to wear a hat; I don’t look good in hats.) In June, right after my comments about not going to the White House became public, my agents had had to hire extra security at their office after receiving threatening messages, and I was still getting a lot of hostile attention. Most people were polite to my face—the only negative comment I got was from a guy who approached me on the street in Seattle, said, “Congratulations, but I wish you would represent America better,” and after I said, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” zoomed off again. But I wasn’t digging into the comments on Instagram anytime soon.

  At the same time, the level of support was overwhelming. As we toured the country in August, playing friendlies and exhibition victory matches, a new energy greeted us. I sat out a lot of those games—I was burned out, and injured, and wanted to reboot in time for the Olympics the following year—but I would still run onto the field and yuk it up for the crowd. We played Portugal, Ireland, and Korea in quick succession, and every time, the crowds were spectacular. They were cheering us for being the best in the world, but they were also, we thought, cheering us for what we’d said and stood up for.

  There was a fun side to fame. I was invited to appear in a campaign for a fashion label, shoot a commercial, and go to a lot of parties. I bought myself that gold Rolex as a victory gift—no apology necessary—and shot a guest appearance on The L Word. When I was in my twenties, the TV show had been the only normalized representation of lesbians on-screen and an important part of my coming of age. Getting to appear on the show itself felt like arriving full circle.

  My family got caught up in the excitement. Suddenly my mom was doing podcasts and my dad was being invited to do interviews on Fox News. “Dad!” I yelled down the phone. “You can’t let Fox News into the house, they’re doing takedowns of your daughter! Stick to local news!” (He never actually did the interview, although, god knows, Fox tried.)

  I was bombarded with speaking offers. Even after the World Cup was a memory, I tried to say yes to everything that came in. I traveled the country, speaking to everyone from college kids, to women’s and gay rights organizations, to payroll companies trying to navigate equal-pay claims. In airports and on the street, at matches and events, people came up to me and, after congratulating me for the World Cup win, invariably said, “You need to get paid.” I was struck by how diverse they were—men, women, old, young, every ethnicity under the sun. “You get your money!” yelled a guy in the Philadelphia airport, and punched the air. The symbolism of being the best in the world and still being paid less than the men was so stark, so ridiculous. People, regardless of their background or their politics, were like: Oh, I get it.

  To take advantage of this collective understanding of what we were fighting for, the Players Association forged a partnership with Time’s Up, the advocacy group formed to address unequal pay, sexual harassment, and other forms of gender discrimination in Hollywood and Beyond. They’d had a tough time finding a vehicle for their cause—actresses aren’t a good reference point for lots of people because, while they’re underpaid compared to male actors, they’re still paid a lot compared to everyone else. A partnership with us made sense.

  In September, I won the Best FIFA Women’s Player of the Year award and flew to Milan for the ceremony. Onstage, I spoke about how important it was to back one another up. I mentioned Collin Martin, one of the few male soccer players to have come out as gay, and Sahar Khodayari, an Iranian woman who, after facing a prison sentence for trying to watch a soccer match in a country where women are largely banned from being spectators, had killed herself before sentencing.

  I mentioned Raheem Sterling, the Manchester City forward speaking out about racism in soccer. It wasn’t enough to leave the antiracism campaign to him and other people of color, I said. “I feel like if we really want to have meaningful change, everybody has to be outraged about racism.” This applied across the board. “If everybody was as outraged about homophobia as the LGBTQ players, if everybody was as outraged about equal pay or the lack of investment in the women’s game as women—that would be the most inspiring thing to me.”

  I felt optimistic that fall. Just looking at the younger players on the team—the twenty-year-olds like Tierna Davidson who didn’t need to come out, because they’d never been in—was very cool. All around us, young people were campaigning for change. When I looked at Greta Thunberg, or the kids from Parkland speaking out about gun reform, I saw a sense of urgency and responsibility to do something—anything—that I hadn’t had at their age. At fifteen years old, they were where I was when I was thirty. They were leading the world.

  * * *

  —

  In October, Jill retired. She’d won the Best FIFA Women’s Coach Award at the same time I’d won Best FIFA Women’s Player of the Year. Winning makes people generous, and while it was safe to say we weren’t going to miss each other, the parting speeches were civil. The new coach, Vlatko Andonovski, had been at Seattle Reign since Laura left in 2018 and was known and trusted. At the end of the year, as the season wound down, the team looked toward Tokyo 2020 and the one goal that had eluded us: nailing Olympic gold after winning a World Cup.

  It would have been easy to float through the holiday season picking up awards and drinking champagne. I liked the red carpet. I liked meeting people and doing fashion shoots; suddenly my theatrical side had a whole new outlet. The tricky thing was figuring out how best to use the attention. I was having a good ti
me, but I didn’t want to let myself, or the people using me for content, lose sight of why we were there.

  In November, I accepted an award from Glamour magazine at a big celebrity ceremony in New York. It was a tough speech to write and I worked on it with Jess, who was always a great help when I needed to clarify my thoughts. I was grateful for the award and the platform it gave me, but I was also wary of self-congratulation. As we worked on the speech, Jess and I talked about who would be in the audience—powerful people with large platforms and followings. When addressing this crowd, I felt I needed to acknowledge just how privileged we all were.

  The night was freezing cold. We arrived at the ceremony and walked into a venue packed with Hollywood stars. When I gave my speech, even before I thanked my mom, who was in the audience, I thanked the person who had started all this—Colin Kaepernick. Were it not for his bravery, I wouldn’t have been standing there at all, and I couldn’t be at an event at which powerful people celebrated one another without pointing out the discrepancy in our experiences. While I was enjoying the best year of my career, Colin was still out of a job. We’d said and highlighted the same things about racism, but he was out and I was in. You do the math.

  I went through the list of people whose activism had enabled my own: Tarana Burke, who founded the Me Too movement; the community organizers Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi of Black Lives Matter. I mentioned Gloria Steinem and Audre Lorde, and recognized those such as Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland, whose deaths had swung a spotlight on how pervasive racism still is. I urged those present to use their power to lift others up, to throw down the ladder and extend their privilege. This meant being honest with themselves. Everyone in the room was great at their jobs, but that wasn’t the only reason why many of us were there. “I’m not going to act like my whiteness has nothing to do with me standing before you now,” I said.

  I am still amazed at how many people didn’t get this. You have to be patient, people said; you have to wait for everyone to get on the same page as you. To which I say: Do we? Really? I don’t think basic human rights need to take time. Politics and sport don’t mix was the other comment I heard; and while I understood that for lots of people sports are an escape from real life, I didn’t really care. Racism, sexism, and pay inequality are all pressing issues, and god forbid someone should get you to think about them on your precious sports Sunday. People want to stay asleep and say, Oh, I don’t understand what’s going on. Well, read a fucking article. Becoming aware of what is happening in our world isn’t difficult.

  In December, I won the Ballon d’Or, the most prestigious award in the soccer world. Before the ceremony, I did an interview with the French organizers, calling on stars of the men’s game—including Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Zlatan Ibrahimović—to speak out against racism and sexism, and querying why they were so reluctant to do so. “Do they fear losing everything?” I said. “They believe that, but it’s not true. Who will erase Messi or Ronaldo from world football history for a statement against racism or sexism?” I understood people were scared of losing their livelihoods. But when it came to stars of that magnitude, with that kind of wealth and power, fear of blowback just wasn’t an adequate excuse.

  There was one final award that year. Just before the holidays, I was named the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year. This was a big deal. The award has been around since the 1950s and previous winners included Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods. The glitzy ceremony was in a hotel ballroom in New York, and after getting up onstage to receive the award, I said a few things about the magazine. Was I really, I asked, only the fourth woman in the award’s sixty-six-year history who deserved to win? I didn’t think so, just as it seemed unlikely that the only people qualified to write for the magazine were white men.

  “Is it true,” I said, “that so few writers of color deserve to be featured in this publication? No. Is it true that so few women’s voices deserve to be heard and deserve to be read in this publication? I don’t think so.”

  I know the speech raised a few eyebrows, since criticizing one’s hosts isn’t exactly considered polite. Even my agents cringed when I called the magazine out for racism and sexism while the editor sat ten feet from the stage. But I didn’t give the award to myself or invite myself to the ceremony. Those in charge at Sports Illustrated were honoring me for my activism and shouldn’t have been surprised. When I made those remarks, I was thinking about Jenny Vrentas, the reporter who’d written the magazine’s cover story about me and was a woman in a job that is overwhelmingly white and male. According to the Women’s Media Center, 90 percent of all bylines in sports reporting are men’s. I was thinking about Colin Kaepernick, who was out of a job. That’s who I cared about, not the CEO of Sports Illustrated.

  This attitude baffles some people, I know. I’ve heard the phrase “bite the hand that feeds you,” which makes me laugh; I don’t think of any hand as feeding me. And I don’t need permission from an awards panel to speak my mind. If any permission is needed, it comes from my family, who raised me to be open and honest, and who gave me a good sense of whom to trust. When I say something “rude,” I think about who I am saying it for, not who I am saying it to. By the time I get into a room with US Soccer, or Sports Illustrated, or the FIFA president, or a bunch of Hollywood stars, I am sure enough of my position to not sweat the reception. I don’t need them to like me to know I am right.

  * * *

  —

  Of course I had doubts, and I asked myself if any of this is actually effective. Am I doing enough? Or am I just talking, talking, talking? I wanted to put my platform to good use, but I didn’t want to be the person who takes the microphone from somebody with less access and a different experience. It had been an incredible year, during which I had won so much praise for speaking out that it was frankly becoming uncomfortable. The only way to overcome this unease was to push harder. But in the absence of tangible results, it could be difficult to measure the impact.

  Occasionally I would hear something that made me think my message was getting through. Earlier in the year, my aunt Wendy, my mom’s sister, who had worked for several years as a program coordinator at a university, had been offered a promotion. What I found out later was that the university had wanted her to take the job, which entailed a lot of new responsibilities, without a pay raise, even though her salary had been frozen for three years. They would never have done it to a man, she thought, and told them she couldn’t take the job without more money. In response, they dissolved her position.

  Weeks after the fact, I learned from Wendy that the reason she’d asked for the pay raise—the first time she’d done so in her career—was because of the noise around the national team lawsuit. “It’s not just a campaign for young people,” she said. “I’m in my sixties and it resonated with me—equal pay and equal conditions for women. I took a risk and it didn’t work out, but it was worth it.” That they’d fired her was shocking. But sticking up for herself and asserting her worth had delivered another reward. “People are saying things are so much better than they were,” said my aunt from the hospital bed where she was receiving treatment for cancer. “But let’s go beyond better.”

  In December, ahead of the Democratic presidential primaries, I endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president. I found her phenomenal, a great communicator, totally relatable, and super smart. She was hitting it out of the park along the campaign trail and was highly organized, with great policies that were bold enough to not follow the moderate line. On a video call, I told her she had my vote and repeated a saying we had on the national team: LFG (the polite version of it: Let’s go).

  At the end of December, the whole team flew to Miami for the wedding of my teammates Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris. The event was beautiful, a totally over-the-top wedding that was covered in the pages of People. To have that level of mainstream publicity and excitement for a lesbian wedding felt lik
e a genuine line in the sand, as did the fact that they had a traditional ceremony. I’ve always been annoyed when people say, “Oh, gay couples can do whatever they want for their weddings,” implying that our weddings are totally different. There’s only so many ways you can rejig an event like that, and most of us don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Make no mistake—Ali and Ashlyn’s wedding was very gay indeed; but their “normal” ceremony was a sign of how far we’d come.

  I had to refocus, heading into the new year, and get back to peak levels of fitness. I had played a light season after the World Cup; now was the time to knuckle down and get serious. In January 2020, we flew around the country for the Olympic qualifying tournament, which we won for the fifth time in a row (highest scoring game: 8–0 against Panama). In the spring, however, my game really started coming together. Looking ahead to the Olympics that summer, I felt the first surge of adrenaline.

  It might be considered a strange coincidence that, once again, we would be playing a major tournament with a pay dispute hanging over our heads—but we’d been arguing with the federation about pay for so long, the situation had simply become the new norm. Our lawsuit was ongoing, and we had a court date scheduled for May 5. Most of us assumed that the case would be resolved before then. Going to court would be time-consuming and expensive for everyone involved, but beyond that, we believed US Soccer would seek to avoid what would be a PR disaster. Looking back to the previous summer, when we had stood on the steps of City Hall and felt the world cheering us on, most of us believed our case had been made. Surely the federation could see that.

  In February, we flew to Florida for the start of our last big warm-up before the Olympics, the SheBelieves Cup. With no settlement in sight and the federation’s position still a mile from our own, we wore our warm-up shirts inside out as an act of protest. At least no one could accuse us of being distracted. Our dominance at the World Cup had, once and for all, put to bed the lie that campaigning for a cause compromised our performance. When that cause was asking our bosses for the respect we deserved, there was no greater incentive on earth.