FRONTISPIECE
DEDICATION
TO MY MOM, THE TRUE CHAMPION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I was young and things in my life got crazy, I would think to myself, “I’m going to write a book someday.” This book is my story, one I’ve waited years to tell. It is my opportunity to share my life, in my own words, from my own perspective. The events and people I describe to you in the book are portrayed the way I experienced them. The conversations in the book all come from my clear recollections of them, but as a general rule they should not be taken as word-for-word recitations. In all instances, though, I have remained true to the essence, mood, and spirit of the exchanges.
—Hope Solo, June 2012
CONTENTS
Frontispiece
Dedication
Author's Note
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
Life Behind the Smiley Face
CHAPTER 2
God’s Second Paradise
CHAPTER 3
A Double Identity
CHAPTER 4
Somewhere—Anywhere—Far Away
CHAPTER 5
Bare-Branched, but Ready to Bloom
CHAPTER 6
The ’99ers
Photographs
CHAPTER 7
“I Should Have Died a Long Time Ago . . .”
CHAPTER 8
An Arm Like Frankenstein
CHAPTER 9
Made in the WUSA
CHAPTER 10
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
CHAPTER 11
“Only a Daughter Cries Like That”
Photographs
CHAPTER 12
Shadows
CHAPTER 13
“You Can’t Go by a Gut Feeling”
CHAPTER 14
Stepping into Liquid
CHAPTER 15
“Don’t Let the Devil Steal Your Joy”
CHAPTER 16
The New #1
CHAPTER 17
Pretty Damn Sweet
CHAPTER 18
Unprofessional Professionals
CHAPTER 19
Seattle’s Finest
CHAPTER 20
It Just Takes One
CHAPTER 21
The Silver Lining
CHAPTER 22
Bare-Ass Naked on a Lawn
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
I don’t believe in happy endings, but maybe my mother did back when I was born. She had known a popular older girl in high school named Hope who had been nice to her; for her the name was imbued with a sense of friendship and belonging. My father said he viewed my birth as a fresh start, a chance for him to leave something good in a world that had brought him mostly trouble and bad luck.
Hope.
But my family doesn’t do happy endings. We do sad endings or frustrating endings or no endings at all. We are hardwired to expect the next interruption or disappearance or broken promise.
Case in point: September 27, 2007. I sat on the bench in China, at the Women’s World Cup. I had been the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. national soccer team for three years. We needed to win the most important tournament in soccer to reclaim our international dominance and prove to ourselves that we were of the same mettle as the 1999 World Cup champions—the greatest women’s team in American sports history. We were incessantly compared to them, the team that had changed women’s sports forever during the summer following my high school graduation. Not just a great athletic team, those players had molded a reputation of overwhelming goodness, the girls next door who kicked butt on the soccer field. They projected an image of best friends—their closeness mythologized by a Nike ad campaign in which all team members announced to their dentist that they “will have two fillings,” in support of a cavity-prone teammate. The ’99ers cast a long shadow, one we couldn’t escape.
My father had died unexpectedly two months before the World Cup. I was emotionally fragile, even though I was strong between the posts. We won our group and trounced England in the quarterfinals. I dedicated my growing string of shutouts to my dad: three consecutive World Cup games without allowing a goal.
Yet for the semifinal game against talented Brazil, I lost my job. My coach, Greg Ryan, called me into a meeting two nights before the game. He wanted to replace me with a popular former starter, Briana Scurry—a ’99er who had been in goal for that championship and who had also shut down Brazil in the 2004 Olympic gold-medal game. But that was the past; Bri had barely played for three years, while I had ascended to the top spot. Yet Greg decided she would do better against Brazil based on those long-ago results.
Only a few of the old guard remained, but Greg claimed that one of those legends, Kristine Lilly, along with Abby Wambach, a younger player who had allied herself with the ’99ers, had suggested the change. I felt betrayed, especially by Abby. It was a bitter disappointment, but not a complete shock.
II.
Fate, like some coaches, plays favorites. On the soccer field, I expected to be judged by my hard work and performance. Soccer made me a star in my hometown. It insulated me from hurts and harsh judgments. It lifted me out of eastern Washington and set me on a trajectory that only a few ever get to experience. It gave an anchor and order to my life, which too often had been defined by drama and chaos. But even the wins on the field, the growing success, couldn’t overcome my fatalism, the sense that life was beyond my control. My father’s sudden death—after he had finally found a calm place in his life after years of erratic, self-destructive behavior—was all the evidence I needed.
Being benched in Hangzhou was still more proof that hard work and talent might not be enough. Devastated, I thought of my father: I had spread a little of his ashes inside the goal at every game until this one. He had planned to be here, watching his youngest child. He always called me his Baby Hope.
I thought of my family—my mother and brother, my grandparents and aunt, my best friend’s parents, my boyfriend, and my brother’s fiancée—who were sitting in the stadium. They had traveled around the world to support me. They were wearing black armbands in memory of my father. I had wanted to be strong and courageous for them, but now that chance was gone.
The game was a disaster almost from the start. Bri looked rusty, colliding with Brazilian forward Formiga as she came out on a free kick. In the twentieth minute, U.S. defender Leslie Osborne dove to head away a corner kick
