CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Bare-Ass Naked on a Lawn
I ripped off my wig—it was like having a toy poodle clamped onto my scalp. I pulled off one pair of fake eyelashes and then another. I scrubbed off the thick coating of makeup that had been spackled over my face, then stepped into the shower and watched the spray-painted tan bleed off my skin, a steady stream of dirty water washing down the drain. And I thought, How did someone who loathes all things fake end up here in the land of phony? In Hollywood on Dancing with the Stars, partnered with a dancer who was far from the world’s best teammate?
One of the phone calls my agent had fielded while he was riding the bus to World Cup games in Germany was from a producer with DWTS, which I loved to watch. Was I interested in being one of the celebrity contestants on the show? “Sure, that sounds fun,” I told Rich with a laugh, knowing full well that my soccer schedule would never allow for such a commitment.
I didn’t know what lay ahead for me after the World Cup, but I knew one thing: I wasn’t going back to the MagicJack. After pushing my shoulder so hard—ten months of grueling rehab and competition—I needed to take a long break from soccer. My goal for the 2012 Olympics was to be healthy and no longer reliant on the pain medication I had been taking for so many months. I had killed myself, but had achieved my goal: I had played in the World Cup, every minute from the first game through to the penalty-kick ending of the final. I was voted goalkeeper of the tournament. Despite all the doubts, I had prevailed.
When the team arrived in New York on the Monday after the final, we were greeted by television cameras, media requests, and a huge throng of enthusiastic fans waiting for us in Times Square. We appeared as a team on the Today show, where we were told that our final game broke a world record for “tweets per second,”—surpassing even the royal wedding. We were overwhelmed by our new celebrity status and a bit confused. Only Pearcie—the last of the ’99ers—had ever experienced anything like this. But that team had won the World Cup. We had played well, but we had lost.
That made the enthusiastic response even more moving: it was all about the game. The outpouring wasn’t a knee-jerk bandwagon response to a winner. Everyone was talking about women’s soccer. Even the idiotic commentary suggesting that we choked away the final wasn’t, I had to concede, necessarily a bad thing. People were talking about a women’s sporting event the way they talked about guys’ sports. That’s progress.
Abby and I went on the David Letterman show to talk about the game. Letterman didn’t know anything about soccer—and made that quite clear. He asked us to go out on Broadway and kick soccer balls through the open door of a cab. I nailed a shot right into a yellow cab. I was on the cover of that week’s Sports Illustrated. A few days later, in Burbank, I went on the George Lopez show and dunked him in a water tank by kicking a ball to a target that released his platform. “You’re badass,” Lopez said.
That was generally the response. We were tough, we were gritty, we were badass, and we’d made our country proud.
While I was in Southern California, there were more conversations with the Dancing with the Stars producers, and I studied my schedule. The national team had only two games scheduled in a celebration tour. There might be one more friendly scheduled in the fall. But our run-up to Olympic qualifying wasn’t going to get serious for a couple of months. I gulped. Turns out I could do Dancing with the Stars. A grubby kid from Richland all dressed up in sparkles in Hollywood, like Cinderella at the ball. “It’ll be a great showcase for women’s soccer,” everyone said.
That was true. NFL players and other Olympic athletes had received huge crossover exposure on the show. Why not a female soccer player? Why not me? Besides, I’d always wanted to learn to dance.
II.
Little girls were pushing up against the railing for autographs. A few months earlier, the MagicJack had played in front of a handful of people scattered across vast expanses of empty bleachers. Now we had a packed house and a frenzied crowd. Kids leapt over barricades and rushed onto the field as soon as the game ended, and players from both teams were sequestered in the locker room for more than an hour because the crush was so intense that we couldn’t leave. Abby—who was now the MagicJack player-coach—couldn’t address the media after the game because she couldn’t get to them. I was there just to make an appearance—speak at halftime and sign some autographs. I was mobbed and at one point had five security escorts trying to get me out of the stadium and into a van with tinted windows. It was pandemonium.
But the enthusiasm couldn’t sustain the beleaguered league. While we had been busy with the World Cup, a war was brewing between our owner, Dan Borislow, and league officials. The league told Dan it was considering terminating his ownership rights. Dan countered by filing a lawsuit to prevent that. It was a mess. Meanwhile, the league was asking some players to play for just a couple of hundred bucks a game, without health insurance. After the positive experience of the World Cup, the WPS felt like a black hole of negative energy.
I wasn’t playing soccer, but I wasn’t exactly resting. Gatorade signed me to a contract, I agreed to be involved in the Chicago Marathon and I drove the pace car at the Brickyard 400. I moved some of my belongings
