One Life Read online

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Megan Rapinoe

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  All photographs from the author’s collection.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION CONTROL NUMBER: 2020942559 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781984881168 (HARDCOVER)

  ISBN 9781984881175 (EBOOK)

  pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  For Sue,

  who put me back together and made me invincible. I can only hope to love you the same way.

  And Mammers,

  you’re the center of the universe for all of us, and the OG of unsolicited advice.

  And Dad,

  for your quiet strength and infectious smile, and unsolicited advice.

  And Rachy,

  forever my wombmate and partner in crime, and unsolicited advice.

  And Brian,

  forever my inspiration, and for your unsolicited advice.

  And Jenny,

  for your loving heart, and unsolicited advice.

  And Michael,

  for your big bear heart, and unsolicited advice.

  And CeCé,

  for your infinite kindness, and unsolicited advice.

  And Austin,

  you are our light and forever our Doodlebop, and even you give unsolicited advice.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

  —Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  INTRODUCTION: STAND UP

  1 COUNTRY LIFE

  2 STRONG WOMEN

  3 PRACTICE

  4 BRIAN

  5 OUT

  6 DOWN

  7 CHICAGO

  8 THE ONLY GAY ON THE TEAM

  9 THE END OF THE LEAGUE

  10 LONDON 2012

  11 OLYMPIQUE LYONNAIS

  12 THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL PAY

  13 RIO

  14 KNEELING

  15 SUE

  16 DESERVING

  17 FORWARD

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  I want to start by saying something about the purpose of this book. A frequent criticism of people who have a lot of media attention is that they’re using the spotlight to leverage themselves and hijack the moment. You become famous and you run with it. You make a commercial, you put out a perfume, you cash in with a book or reality show. I am totally cashing in to capitalize on the moment. I’m just doing it for what I hope are reasons that aren’t exclusively seedy. In the pages that follow, you will read about my childhood in Northern California; my twin sister, Rachael; my hilarious mom and wacky dad; as well as my highs and lows with the US women’s national soccer team. But while I have your attention, I also want to discuss issues that are important to me and have nothing to do with sports or my family.

  As a child, I was small for my age. I was shy and let my sister speak for me. I didn’t always fit in. And while I was a natural athlete from the get-go—Rachael and I could both do double Dutch in kindergarten—for a while, I wasn’t totally sure of myself. Not until I was eighteen and in college did I even realize I was gay, for god’s sake, something that, given how completely obvious it was in hindsight, I’m still pissed at my family for not pointing out sooner.

  Like almost everyone in my hometown, my family was socially and politically conservative, although we weren’t an overtly political household. The lessons I learned growing up had to do with standing up to bullies and doing the right thing, part of which, my parents said, meant acknowledging how lucky we were. There were lots of kids in our family and we didn’t have much money, but we grew up in a safe, loving environment where all our needs were met. On top of that, my twin and I were cute, good at sports, and popular at school. We had it incredibly easy.

  We were also white. This might seem like stating the obvious, but I honestly think many white people don’t realize they are wandering around with a four-hundred-year baked-in advantage. I know I didn’t. After college, I could talk about environmental and women’s rights, and as I got older I spoke more about LGBTQ rights and pay equity. But it took me longer to piece together an understanding of how power and politics work beneath the surface and beyond my immediate experience. The very fact that I’m addressing you now, in a book I received lots of money for and began writing at the end of a year when I won every possible award, isn’t simply because I’m a good soccer player or, as athletes love to say, because I worked really hard. (You know who else works hard? Everyone.)

  The platform I’ve been given is a result of other aspects of my life, including the way I look, what I represent, and the associations that come with the sport I play. A small, white, female soccer player—even a lesbian one with a loud voice and pink hair—lands differently in the press than, say, a six-foot-four-inch black football player with an Afro.

  It took me a while to get here. Speaking up can be embarrassing. Walking into a room to ask for more money can be super awkward, as can calling people out for being racist. People get angry. They get angry even when you don’t say anything to them personally. It’s amazing to see what makes people go off, particularly when a woman is doing the speaking. As a professional female athlete I can’t—or I’m not supposed to—curse in public, talk too much about politics, wild out after winning, suggest I might be really good at what I do, or admit to being interested in money. Men play sports because they love it and want to get rich; women are there for the purity of the game.

  I’m not supposed to squander my celebrity, either. Judging by my fellow athletes, the rule of thumb is that once you have wealth and fame, you must do everything you can to hang on to them. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past four years. I’m not exactly a forward thinker. I didn’t map out what might happen if I took various political stands, like the tanking of my business or strangers from Florida calling my parents to ask them where they went wrong with me.

  But I have always understood that once you have a tiny bit of power, space, or control, you should do everything you can to share it. I don’t think you need a big platform to do this. It can be as simple as pushing back against a bigoted remark when you don’t belong to the group being targeted. It can be taking time to think about Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and countless others, and to consider why, when I say those names in public, I continue to be invited to the party when others don’t. Sometimes, what I’ve said or done has caused a big fuss. But given the breaks I’ve had, speaking out seems like the least I can fucking do.

  And here’s the thing: the more you stand up for others, the easier it is to stand up for yourself. I love playing soccer. It’s the only job I’ve ever had. I want to play and I want to win, but given the amount my team and I do win—given, as the US Soccer Federation likes to put it, the market realities—I also want to buy a gold Rolex and I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that. Equally, I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that while I’m grateful for my talent and other accidents of birth, I’m not grateful to the people making mon
ey from me and my teammates. I think they should be grateful to us.

  In 2019, after my team won the World Cup for the second time, we played a bunch of exhibition games around the country. It was a victory lap of sorts, but I got a bigger kick out of another tour I went on that year, talking to people at companies, charities, schools, and colleges, and on panels with other feminists and social justice campaigners. I talked about paying men and women equally, and about calling out sexism, racism, and homophobia. I talked about the perceived risks of activism and also the joys, the fact that caring is cool and lowering the ladder can raise your own game. In soccer, scoring a goal and hearing fifty thousand people scream your name is awesome, but I take a lot of pride in my assists, too; setting someone else up to score—being the opportunity maker—is just as important, if not more.

  I’m not the best soccer player in the world. I’m pretty high up there, but that’s where my expertise ends. Beyond that, I don’t know anything that anyone else doesn’t know and I’m not doing anything that others can’t do. We all have the same resource, our one precious life, made up of the decisions we make every day. Here, I’m telling the story of how I made my decisions, from the choice I made when I kicked that first ball to the one I made in 2016 that risked bringing my career crashing down. In telling it, I hope I’m also asking a question: What are you going to do?

  INTRODUCTION

  STAND UP

  I was on the team bus driving through the suburbs of Chicago when I picked up a call from my agent. It was September 2016, and my team, FC Seattle Reign, had just played the Chicago Red Stars in one of the last games of the season. That wasn’t why my agent was calling. Dan Levy had represented me for almost ten years and we’d been through a few things together. Five years earlier, he’d been a big part of the discussion around my decision to come out as the first, and for a long time practically the only, gay player on the US Women’s National Team—which is hilarious given the number of gays on the team—and he’d seen me through injuries and disappointments without losing his cool. Now he sounded concerned. “This is blowing up,” he said.

  The actual game that night had been nothing special. Chicago, like New York and Los Angeles, isn’t a soccer town, for reasons no one can quite put their finger on. You might get people out for a national team game, but no way are they turning up on a random Sunday night in September for a league match. We’d played to a small crowd of three thousand people and the score had been a lackluster 2–2. But at the press conference afterward, the first question out of the gate had little to do with the game itself: Had I intended to kneel during the national anthem, and if so, why?

  I had anticipated being asked this question, of course. The decision to kneel wasn’t one I’d made lightly. At the same time, I hadn’t given much thought to how it might be received. In trivial contexts, I can be impulsive—the kind of person who dyes their hair pink the night before a huge tournament, for example—but it wasn’t that. If I didn’t rehearse outcomes before kneeling, it’s because kneeling, to me, felt more like an imperative than a choice. Any risk assessment I did wasn’t premised on how my actions might land, but on calculating the risk—huge, societal, unignorable, in my view—of doing nothing.

  Still, I wasn’t expecting much of a backlash. Compared to football or baseball, soccer has a relatively low profile in this country, particularly at the league level. The nine teams in the National Women’s Soccer League are very competitive, but they don’t exactly dominate the sports pages. In the fall of 2016, even the national team—one of the most successful sports teams of all time—wasn’t riding especially high. A month earlier, we’d been eliminated from of the Rio Olympics in the quarterfinals, our worst result in an international tournament for years. I was personally off form, in the final stages of recovering from a knee injury. And the soccer season was about to end.

  I was also a woman athlete. At thirty-one, I was a veteran of two World Cups and two Olympic Games, with a history of mouthing off at least as long as my playing record. Still, it seemed fair to assume that when it came to talking about politics, my voice would carry less weight than a man’s. Earlier that year, when members of three WNBA basketball teams had worn T-shirts emblazoned with BLACK LIVES MATTER, it had triggered a flurry of interest before dying down. By contrast, when Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the 49ers, had knelt before a game in San Diego a week earlier, the response had been swift and engulfing.

  I had seen the footage of Colin kneeling. It was impossible to avoid. We were in an election year, and all summer the news had been dominated by stories of unarmed black Americans dying in police custody. Black Lives Matter had become increasingly visible. For a while, you couldn’t open The New York Times without reading about the disparity between the way black and white Americans were treated by the criminal justice system and our society at large. When Colin knelt, it had seemed to me a perfectly logical response to what felt like a state of emergency. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he said, and the invitation—surely everyone else heard it, too?—was clear.

  * * *

  —

  The morning after I knelt in Chicago, a quick glance at my social media feeds confirmed the scale of my misapprehension. Dan’s heads-up the night before had been a tiny taste of what was to come: people were mad. Whoa, were they pissed. When I was younger, I had labored under the delusion that dating men might be a part of my future. This felt like a bigger miscalculation.

  It wasn’t just the volume of outrage; it was the sheer hysterical pitch of it. I had been expecting a few chin-stroking editorials or a hashtag at most. Instead there were death threats, threats of violence, and horrible language, most of them sent to Dan and his fellow agents, often accompanied by a prim note asking if they’d mind forwarding the message on to me. A guy identifying himself as a former fan said he was thinking of burning my shirt. I was called every name under the sun. As the photo of me kneeling spread across the internet, right-wing blog posts sprung up calling for me to be axed from the team, and I was a talking point on Fox News. I was totally blindsided.

  I called my parents in Redding. It’s a small town in Northern California, a formerly prosperous outpost of the logging industry, now at the tail end of a long, slow economic decline. With the exception of Rachael, most of the rest of my family—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces—still live in the area and, my parents told me that morning, in between worrying about me, reeling at the scale of the coverage, and being mad that I hadn’t given them advance notice, they were all having to deal with the reactions of their conservative neighbors.

  One by one my siblings started to check in. CeCé, who I think of as my oldest sister but is actually my youngest aunt on my mother’s side and by far the sweetest of us all, called to make sure I was OK. My oldest sister, Jenny, who with the best will in the world no one would describe as sweet, called in a state of alarm to tell me she was having to unfriend coworkers on Facebook after they kept posting links to articles that trashed me. Rachael was on a hiking holiday in the Swiss Alps. After three days in the mountains without wi-fi, she reached a village, turned on her phone, and watched as it practically vibrated off the table with messages—mostly from friends asking, “Have you seen what Megan’s done?!” She hadn’t, but was soon up to speed. We own a business together, Rapinoe SC, which runs soccer clinics for kids across the country, and through the company’s website, hate mail was piling up in her in-box, along with cancellations for forthcoming clinics. When she called me, she barely needed the aid of a satellite to be heard. “What the hell is going on?” she yelled.

  I had a tough time coming up with an answer. As the team and I packed up in Chicago and prepared to fly to our next game in DC, the noise intensified. I had been disrespectful to veterans, I was anti-American, I was politicizing sports in a way that ruined them for everyone else. I had long, r
easoned responses to each of these accusations, but first, I was furiously indignant. So we don’t think there’s police brutality going on? We don’t? OK. So that’s what you’re saying. You’re saying all this stuff doesn’t exist, and all these people’s experiences—they’re lying? The scale of the outrage seemed to me to underline the very problem we were addressing, which is that there is huge denial about race in this country, bolstered by white fragility.

  Not all of the anger came from outside. My family rallied to my defense, as they always do, but that isn’t to say everyone agreed with me. My dad and I hadn’t seen eye to eye on politics for a while. Rachael, who totally approved of my politics, was still mad at me for not planning things out better, while other family members wondered aloud if kneeling was the best way to get my point across. The only person who, I imagined, might have been enjoying a straightforwardly positive response to what I’d done was my brother Brian. I hadn’t spoken to Brian in a while, but one grimly amusing result of my kneeling was that it pushed him several places down the league table of Rapinoe sibling to have caused the most trouble.

  There was one person I desperately wanted to talk to. Sue Bird was a star player on the national women’s basketball team, who I had met at the Olympics in Rio that summer. After reconnecting briefly in Chicago, we had agreed not to meet up again until I’d returned to Seattle and broken up with my fiancée. I had never felt this way about anyone before, and in ordinary circumstances, it would have been enough drama to last me the year. Now, as the controversy around me raged on, Sue was the person I most wanted to be with and couldn’t.

  Not all the responses to my kneeling were bad. My Seattle teammates, while largely baffled by what I’d done, were also quietly supportive, as was my team coach, Laura Harvey, and Bill and Teresa Predmore, two of the owners of the Seattle Reign. In the airport, on the street, and amid the torrent of abusive messages online, strangers came forward to offer encouragement. As tends to happen, however, the negative stuff took up the most space, and as journalists kept asking if I planned on kneeling again, I found myself in a familiar position. The quickest way to get me to double down on something is to tell me I can’t do it. It didn’t occur to me for a second that it might not be my decision to make.