An own goal, the most demoralizing play in soccer. We were trailing 1–0.
Seven minutes later, Marta—the most feared player in the world—dribbled down the right flank and was fouled by one of our defenders, who grabbed her shorts. Marta wriggled out of the grasp and blasted a shot into the lower right corner of the net. Bri dove and got a hand on it, but couldn’t keep the ball from slipping past her. On the television broadcast, former U.S. women’s coach Tony DiCicco told viewers at home that it was exactly the kind of shot Bri had once always stopped. “If she’s on her game, she makes this save,” he said.
We were down 2–0, and it was about to get worse. In stoppage time of the first half, Shannon Boxx received her second yellow card of the game for taking down Brazilian forward Cristiane. It was a questionable call, but there’s no appealing the referee’s decision. Boxx was sent off, and our team was going to have to play the entire second half a player short—ten versus eleven, for forty-five minutes.
I didn’t feel vindicated by what was happening. I was distraught. I couldn’t believe how poorly our team was playing—at every position. I knew we were so much better than this.
Watching from the bench in the second half, I witnessed the complete collapse of my team and our four-year dream. Eleven minutes into the second half, our defense was out of position and Cristiane flicked in another goal. Brazil 3, U.S. 0.
I sat at the end of the bench, stunned and pissed, and my face broadcast those emotions to everyone watching. It usually does. I don’t try to sugarcoat bad news. At that point—in the midst of the worst loss in our team’s history—smiling happily seemed pointless and fake.
At one point, my teammate Natasha Kai leaned over and nudged me. “Hey,” she said. “The cameras are on you.”
“I don’t care,” I told her. Was I supposed to act pleased as our dream derailed?
The last blow came in the seventy-ninth minute with one of the most beautiful goals in World Cup history, a dazzling play by Marta who flicked the ball over her shoulder, caught up with it, and spun past our defense to make it 4–0.
An eternity later, the whistle finally blew. The Brazilian players celebrated wildly at midfield. I had just one mission—to make my way over to where my family was sitting in the stands, to thank them for their support. As I crossed the field, Abby Wambach approached me. She looked me straight in the eye. “Hope,” she said, “I was wrong.”
I looked down and nodded. What could I say? The hard evidence was lit up on the scoreboard. Abby gave me a quick, hard embrace, and we walked away in separate directions.
At international soccer games, players exit the stadium through the “mixed zone,” an area where reporters gather for postgame interviews. They line up on one side of metal barricades and the players walk through on the other side. Our press officer, Aaron Heifetz, stuck next to me. When someone reached out to me across the barrier, Heifetz announced in a loud voice, “She didn’t play. You only want to talk to people who played the game.”
One thing I’ve learned in my life is that I can speak for myself, that I can fight my own battles. I don’t like anyone telling me how I’m supposed to feel or think or what I’m supposed to say. If I had meekly accepted what others told me, my life would be radically different: I would have gone to a different school. I never would have reconnected with my father. I would be estranged from my mother. I would have viewed myself as a failure.
I turned to Aaron. “Heif, this is my decision.”
I stepped toward the microphone and, in an instant, broke an unwritten code that decrees female athletes don’t make waves. We don’t criticize. We don’t dare wander beyond political correctness. Our hard competitive edges are always smoothed down for public display. “It was the wrong decision,” I said, my voice shaking with emotion. “And I think anybody who knows anything about the game knows that.”
I was speaking into a microphone, but I was talking directly to Greg Ryan. “There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves,” I said. “And the fact of the matter is, it’s not 2004 anymore. It’s not 2004. It’s 2007, and I think you have to live in the present. And you can’t live by big names. You can’t live in the past. It doesn’t matter what somebody did in an Olympic gold medal game three years ago. Now is what matters, and that’s what I think.”
I turned and walked away, an angry Heifetz on my heels. He reprimanded me harshly for speaking out as we boarded the team bus. I told him that if he didn’t want me to answer questions, he shouldn’t have taken me past reporters.
I got on the bus and went to my usual spot in the back, where I always sat with my closest friends on the team. The mood was grim; everyone was in shock. We hadn’t lost a game in more than three years. The conversation was muted.
“You guys,” I told them, “I just did an interview.”
They asked what I had said.
“I said I believed I would have made those saves.”
Someone said, “Uh oh, Hope,” but it was in kind of a joking way. Carli Lloyd said, “Hope, I’m sure it’s fine.” Other teammates had no reaction. The bus started up, taking us back to our hotel. I thought that was that, the end of a bad day in U.S. soccer history.
But it was only the beginning.
CHAPTER ONE
Life Behind the Smiley Face
My first memories are a kaleidoscope of happiness: A small red house surrounded by a wooden fence; my free-spirited mother, Judy; my big, outgoing father, Gerry;
