I hope you don’t feel bad, Baby Hope. Just know you are loved and we all know you are the greatest. I miss you and don’t worry—you made our dream team in soccer.
Smile and be happy. Take care of your mom. Tell Marcus I love him.
Baby Hope, my thoughts and prayers are with you every day and night. I love you so much.
Dad
I laughed at the image my dad created—our family all playing soccer together. I knew he wanted me to remember who my lifelong teammates are.
As the Olympics drew closer, Michelle Akers retired. Based on the tension in camp between her and the other veterans, I suspected it wasn’t entirely her decision. And April made her choice on the goalkeeper: Siri Mullinix—fresh out of North Carolina—was named the starter over Bri. It was the most controversial decision April had to make, but Bri’s lack of fitness made it easier.
On September 28, I was back in Seattle when the United States lost in the Olympic final to Norway on a controversial goal in overtime. A shot bounced off a Norwegian player’s arm—normally, a play-stopping infraction—before she punched it in past Siri. The U.S. women had to settle for the silver medal. Bri admitted she was bitter over being benched. Later, she would tell reporters, “I personally still feel that if I was playing in the goal in the final we would have won it. I’m just a big-game player. When it’s on the line, I’ve been very successful.”
She was applauded for her fire and competitive drive.
III.
Back in Seattle, I felt like an outsider. While I’d been off pursuing my soccer dreams, college had gone on without me. My teammates had gotten closer to each other, bonding in the second half of freshman year. It seemed that a new social order had formed and everyone had been issued the organizational chart except me. Even Cheryl—now tight with our teammates Megan and Suz—had a personal life that didn’t include me. It hurt. I think some of the estrangement probably stemmed from jealousy. I knew other girls thought I was arrogant because of my national-team experience. I couldn’t even grab a clean T-shirt out of my drawer without hearing people talking about me behind my back. “Oh my God, she has to wear her national-team gear all the time. She thinks she’s so great.”
Wow, I thought. Be careful what you wish for. Once you reach a certain level, everything you do will be critiqued.
I didn’t feel like a different person. Through my experience with the national team, I’d been exposed to a lot, learned some lessons, and been challenged. I felt I’d grown up. But when I got back to school, I felt that I was behind and that everyone else had moved on without me. Even Cheryl. That was the most painful part. We were still like sisters—we always had been and always would be. Lesle and Amy still relied on Cheryl to find out what was going on with me in my personal life, but she had branched out and formed new relationships. I had new friends, too, like my teammate Malia Arrant, who was two years ahead of me. She and I were both tomboys, not interested in the sorority scene. But I was hurt by the growing distance between me and Cheryl. She wouldn’t tell me about certain things—a party she’d been to that I had missed. I know she was trying to protect my feelings, but it stung, because Cheryl was the one person I could always count on to tell me the truth.
I think Cheryl saw that soccer was becoming a career for me, and in many ways it was. I was working hard at it, and I was getting paid for my work. I suddenly had money—not just my college scholarship but per diem money from U.S. Soccer and grants from the U.S. Olympic Committee, which didn’t compromise my amateur status. I bought a Chevy Blazer, and now I could afford to go on spring break trips or snowboarding weekends like other UW kids. I felt rich, thanks to soccer.
Maybe Cheryl was right: I was more businesslike. I didn’t goof around and gossip as much as some of my teammates. I felt at the time that they didn’t take soccer as seriously as I did, didn’t view it as a potential career. Despite all that, we were functioning well as a team on the field. I started all twenty-one games for UW my sophomore year and set a school record for fewest goals allowed in a season. We won eighteen games and our first-ever Pac-10 championship, and made it all the way to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament. Lesle was named the Pac-10 Coach of the Year.
My father was still a fixture in the stands, one that by now everyone on the team accepted. Having unburdened myself to Lesle and Amy, I was less self-conscious about him. There even seemed to be a slight thawing in the relationship between the two sides of my family. Though my father remained ostracized by my other relatives, sometimes my mother would climb to the top of the stands and give him cookies or a cup of cocoa. She knew he was hungry. She understood that I needed my father in my life.
Once I got my own car, I gave him rides. He usually asked me to just drop him off by the side of the highway, near a freeway exit west of UW. But eventually he let me see the small tent that he lived in, deep in the woods. I learned that I needn’t have worried about running into him at the Union Gospel Men’s Shelter—he avoided the large homeless population downtown that filled the shelters, spilled out under freeway overpasses, and lined up outside the soup kitchens. Instead he survived on his monthly $67 social security check and by shoplifting at grocery stores. He said he preferred being out in the
