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  Dan Borislow had bought the team in 2011, relocated it from Washington to Florida, and changed its name from Washington Freedom to magicJack, the name of the phone company he owned. He was an inventor and a horse breeder, exactly the kind of guy who buys himself a sports team, which I don’t say to disparage him—the enthusiasm and investment of eccentric billionaires are what keep even the biggest NFL teams afloat. My beef that year, looking at the chaos of the WPS, was that when money was tight, or the league failed to turn a profit, those billionaires were quicker to bail on us than they were when backing men’s teams—specifically, the less successful players of men’s Major League Soccer. The WPS was home to some of the best soccer players in the world, but we were women, and in the minds of many investors, we represented a financial risk, irrespective of skill.

  I didn’t play many games for magicJack. I had no roots in the team, and along with the other national team players, saw the league season that year as a stopgap between the World Cup and the Olympics. In July, we played against the Western New York Flash in Rochester, New York, and attracted the biggest crowd ever in attendance for a WPS league game—some fifteen thousand people—but it wasn’t a number we ever managed to pull in again. In October, as Borislow’s legal problems grew, the WPS took away the team’s franchise and magicJack shuttered. A few months after that, the WPS folded.

  For those of us on the national team, this was more of a symbolic blow than a practical one. It was depressing that another women’s soccer league had failed, but it didn’t alter our lives on the national team and there were plenty of other opportunities to play. In the new year, I flew with the national team to Canada to compete in the CONCACAF qualifying tournament for the Olympics, and in the spring we went to Portugal for the Algarve Cup. We won a lot of our games by wide margins, as usual: 13–0 against Guatemala, 14–0 against the Dominican Republic, 4–0 against Canada, and 5–0 against Denmark. For the first time, however, we sensed a sour edge to victory. With each passing game, our world dominance intensified, and we could no longer ignore how badly we were paid.

  Player salaries and conditions on the national team were governed by a collective bargaining agreement that was negotiated every six years and was due to expire at the end of 2012. Since the last agreement, the team had been finalists in the World Cup, won the Olympic gold medal, and never lost the FIFA number-one world ranking. We’d attracted huge amounts of publicity and seen TV audiences soar. And yet for tier 1 national players, the basic salary being offered by the US Soccer Federation was still roughly $70,000 a year, with a bonus structure that bore no relation to that of the men’s teams. Male national team players received a minimum bonus per game regardless of outcome; women received payment only if we won, and then only if the team we beat was in the FIFA top ten. In any given year, a top-tier women’s national team player would earn 38 percent of the compensation of her equivalent on the men’s teams. If the men’s and women’s teams each played twenty friendlies in a year, the men would earn on average $263,320; the women, $99,000. And so it went on. Heading into the Olympics, we were the number-one women’s team in the world. The men, ranked thirty-five in the world, had failed even to qualify.

  I had never thought too much about these numbers before. As a young player just getting into the big tournaments, my focus had exclusively been on playing and winning. Now, as senior players including Christie Rampone, Heather Mitts, and Abby explained the situation to us and solicited our opinions before talking to a lawyer, my attention shifted. I was still focused on winning, but for more than one reason now. The quickest way to make our argument to the US Soccer Federation was by winning and winning big, and while the World Cup had brought us unprecedented publicity, this time we couldn’t afford to come second. As we headed to London and the 2012 Olympics, I felt a surge of defiance. Bring it on.

  10

  LONDON 2012

  In Europe, the crowds really know what they’re doing. In America, if you score a goal, everyone goes wild. In Europe, where soccer is the only sport, more subtle plays and skills raise a cheer. Our first match of the Olympics was against France in Glasgow, and the eighteen thousand people at Hampden Park noisily rewarded Abby, Carli, and Alex for their goals. But they also lost their minds for tough tackles, corner kicks, and every time I grabbed possession from the French deep in their half, the kind of detail that most American crowds miss. We were just as much of a novelty for the Euro fans, too: 4–2 was a pretty average win for us, but from the sound of the crowd, we remembered that lower scores were the norm for most teams.

  The World Cup had been a bigger deal for us than the Olympics in many ways; we hadn’t had to share the stage with so many other sports. But the Olympics were the bigger event, with 204 countries and almost 11,000 athletes, and global audiences of up to 3.6 billion. It wasn’t just a sports competition, either. If our success after the World Cup had taught me anything, it was that we weren’t a team, we were a multimillion-dollar business. And while winning was the only real basis for the brand, once dominant, there were steps we could take to boost our value.

  I had always loved hamming it up, going right back to childhood when I’d run around doing Jim Carrey impressions or making CeCé laugh by pretending to talk out of my ass. As a team, we’d thought up a million goal celebrations over the years, not just to please the fans, but for our own amusement. To keep ourselves going, we got into the habit of yukking it up and milking the crowd. I started calling us a traveling circus.

  The second game at the Olympics was against Colombia, and I had something planned in the event that I scored. The match was due to take place on July 28, which was Ali Krieger’s twenty-eighth birthday. She should have been with us; she’d started in all six matches of the World Cup and had played brilliantly, scoring the final penalty that put us through to the semifinals. A few months before the Olympics, in a game against the Dominican Republic in the qualifying rounds, she’d torn her ACL during a horrible tackle and was out. It was devastating. It’s one thing to injure your ACL and another to do it when someone wilds out at you while going for possession and you’re due to be a starter at the Olympics. If I could, I wanted to cheer her up.

  Thirty-three minutes into the game against Colombia, I took a ball from Alex, who’d just decimated the Colombian defense, and looping it from the edge of the box over the Colombian keeper, I watched it drop to the right side of the net. While my teammates mobbed me, I bent down, took a note I’d tucked into the inside of my shoe, and held it up to the camera. “Happy B-day Kreigy, we liebe you,” it said. (It should’ve said “Kriegy,” of course—I spelled her name wrong. “Liebe” referred to the tattoo she had on her arm; it means “love” in German.) Watching at home, she saw it on TV and burst into tears.

  We won that match 3–0 after Abby scored a second goal in the seventy-fourth minute, and I sent a through-ball to Carli, who smacked it in three minutes later. After our final Group game against North Korea—which we won a lackluster 1–0, and NBC skipped to broadcast volleyball—we beat New Zealand 2–0 in the quarters, and were through to the semifinals against Canada.

  My parents had come to support me, as had my aunt and uncle, Melanie and Brad, and their son, Dylan. Sarah had come, too, although I wasn’t able to hang out with her much. One of the infuriating things about playing in a big tournament like the Olympics was that our movements were heavily regulated. For the two weeks of the tournament, there were strict curfews in place and sanctions for breaking the rules.

  Some of these curtailments applied to the men’s teams, too, but they were generally more stringently applied to the women, and this seemed to me to be connected to money. As a rule, the less you earn, the less respectfully you’re treated, and vice versa. Think of those NBA guys earning $20 million a year—no one’s telling them they have a curfew; they’re going to do whatever the fuck they want. With money comes not only popularity and fame, but also the invitation to behave with a certain amo
unt of gusto that’s hard to pull off when you’re lower down the food chain. We on the national team were treated better than those league players making forty thousand dollars a year, but we still made peanuts compared to the men’s teams, and it kept us relatively meek.

  The pay disparity also made it easier for the soccer authorities to control us. We were the best female soccer players in the world, but when we played at the Olympics we were required to have roommates. Why? “For team chemistry,” said our coaches, but that was nonsense. You don’t have to room with someone to have team spirit. You don’t even have to like someone to have team chemistry with them. It was a weird power play by the authorities and part of the infantilizing culture that surrounds female athletes, where the coaches have more power than the players.

  As usual, my instinct was that the best way to counter this was to keep on winning. The more we won, the more power we had, and the more we could change our environment. We approached the semis against Canada with a certain amount of swagger, turning up at Old Trafford, in Manchester, with our eyes set on the final. The Canadians scored first with a great goal by my old Portland teammate, Christine Sinclair. Early on in the second half, I took a corner kick. It was chaos in the goal mouth, a mess of Canadian defense, and by some extraordinary fluke, the ball skipped past all of them and into the net. It’s extremely rare to score a goal directly from a corner, and this was the first time it had been done in the Olympics. We barely had time to celebrate. Sixty-nine minutes in, Christine scored for the Canadians again and we were down 2–1. I equalized with a shot hammered in off my right foot, and from there we started to push harder. When Christine scored her hat trick, Abby answered by slamming it in on a penalty kick, and with two minutes on the clock, we were 3–3. We dominated in extra time, maintaining possession and pushing deep into the Canadian half. In the 122nd minute, just before the final whistle, Heather passed to Alex, who leapt up to head the ball over the goalkeeper. As if in slow motion, we watched it drop to the back of the net.

  It was an amazing match. NBC, which had torn itself away from volleyball, called the game “an instant classic.” The New York Times summarized it as “one of the best games, involving men or women, in memory.” The Canadians were pissed at decisions made by the Norwegian ref, chiefly a penalty awarded against their goalkeeper for time wasting, a rule referees never usually enforce. “We feel like we didn’t lose, we feel like it was taken from us,” said Christine Sinclair, and I understood her pain. We on the national team knew only too well what it felt like to lose in the dying moments of a big game. But we had fought hard and deserved the win. Now, thirteen months after losing to Japan in the final of the World Cup, we would face them at Wembley for the gold medal.

  Our experience of the Olympics had been pretty disjointed so far. We had missed the opening ceremony to be in Scotland for our first game, and hadn’t been to London and the main Olympic site yet. With two days to go before the final, we traveled down from Manchester to the center of the games, in Stratford, East London. I’d grown up watching the Olympics and clung to certain idealistic ideas about the Olympic dream—for example, the notion of all the athletes of the world commingling in harmony. This lasted about five minutes after actually experiencing it. Check-in and getting passes for the Olympic Village took forever. Unlike a hotel, where everything is nearby, the site was massively spread out and hugely inconvenient. You had to walk for miles to get from your room to the food hall. It might’ve been OK if we’d been there for two weeks and had time to settle in and orient ourselves. But we’d just played six games in a row all over the country and were exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep, which made being stuck in what looked like kids’ beds with kids’ comforters all the more infuriating. The whole village was a low-budget, prefab city and, coming in after being on the road, it wasn’t what we needed. Next Olympics, we vowed, we wouldn’t stay in the village.

  All of these gripes evaporated, of course, when we walked out in front of eighty thousand people at Wembley. It was the largest crowd I’d ever played in front of before and one of the biggest ever for a women’s game. The noise was overwhelming. Carli got us under way with a goal from a low header in the first ten minutes, and for a second it looked as if we might have an easy ride. Then the Japanese pushed back hard, hammering out multiple attempts on goal that, one after the other, Hope Solo punched and deflected away. Toward the end of the first half, Christie Rampone stepped in with a brilliant save after the Japanese got past almost all our lines of defense, followed by Hope launching herself at a ball hit by Yuki Ogimi, the Japanese striker, sending it bouncing off the crossbar. In the second half, I sent a ball to Carli in midfield and she streaked up the field with it, outflanking all but one of the Japanese defenders, who she dodged rightward until she had a clean shot, smacked it squarely toward the left post, and watched, time slowing, as it cannoned to the back of the net. It was 2–0.

  We didn’t dare get complacent. Nine minutes after Carli’s goal, Yuki Ogimi pushed up the field and snuck in a goal, leaving us exposed to the possibility of the worst possible result: a tie at full time and another penalty shootout. The Japanese, seeing how close they were to eliminating our lead, didn’t quit. Moments after their goal, a corner kick rocketed toward Hope, who leapt through the bodies in the goal mouth to catch it. With seven minutes on the clock, the Japanese forward Mana Iwabuchi got past Christie Rampone and looked set to take the score to 2–2, until Hope flew leftward and punched it away. It was a brilliant save and Japan’s last real chance to change the outcome. The final whistle blew. A few minutes of overtime elapsed. We had done it.

  As the noise slammed into us from the bleachers, all I could think was: Oh, this is what winning feels like. After the World Cup, we had been so excited and proud to have grown interest in the game that it had been hard sometimes to remember we’d lost. Now, as we ran around the field, mobbing one another with joy and yelling at our fans, that World Cup feeling revealed itself to have been a fraction of the feeling we had now. This was winning and it was completely different.

  All the practice, all the travel, all the sacrifices made—not by me; I had just been doing what I loved—by my parents and everyone else who had invested in me over the years had brought us here, to this intense moment of joy. For a moment I was overwhelmed and burst into tears. The energy of the crowd lifted us that day and carried us home on a wave of celebration. For a few weeks, it didn’t matter that the old league had collapsed and the new one—the National Women’s Soccer League, or the NWSL—hadn’t started yet. It was even possible, for a moment, to live with the fact that we were haggling with the federation over the terms of our contract renewal and looked likely to end 2012 without an agreement. Weeks earlier, when our lawyers had first pressed them for more money, we had known we were the best in the world. Now, once again, we had the gold medal to prove it.

  Following our success at the Olympics, I was asked to make more public appearances. In October, I went back to the University of Portland for the first time since graduating, to be honored at halftime during a game. I signed a lot of balls and gave a lot of interviews, and as this went on, I started to notice a pattern. At games and public events, kids standing in line for autographs told me not just about their ambitions in soccer or how much they loved the game, but also how, after I came out, they had gotten up the courage to come out, too. In every interview I gave, LGBTQ politics was on the agenda, so that by the end of the year I was talking as much about gay rights as I was about soccer or the Olympics. I told the truth: that coming out was the best decision I had ever made and I thought it had improved my playing. A huge part of being a successful athlete is trusting yourself and your body—knowing when you can and can’t come back from injury, and learning to listen to yourself. I couldn’t imagine being an effective player if I wasn’t completely honest. I play my best when I’m free.

  I hoped that by talking about all this I was doing something to normalize being
gay and counter the fact that so many athletes remained in the closet. At the Olympics, there had been only two other out athletes on the entire American team—Seimone Augustus, the basketball player, and Lisa Raymond, the tennis player—and out of roughly 10,700 athletes in the entire Summer Games, a total of 21 were out. (Based on statistical probability, the estimated number of gay athletes was probably north of 500.) Nothing fired me up more than thinking about how hard it still was for people to come out, and I wasn’t going to stop talking about it until that changed. In November, I was due to receive an award from the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, to be presented at their 41st anniversary gala, and was told I’d have the opportunity to make a speech. I leapt at the chance.

  I had done a lot of one-on-one interviews over the years and spoken at countless press conferences after games, but I hadn’t done a ton of formal public speaking. My mom reminded me of the time I’d run for class president in high school, citing a speech I’d given involving a tortured analogy about a hot dog, which in her opinion landed very well, and reissuing the advice she had given me back then: “Just be prepared,” she said, and told me to think about how I wanted to connect with people. I wanted to keep it loose, fun, and, above all, completely honest, and I was confident I could deliver a message while still sounding basically like myself. Still, as I waited to go on stage at the hotel in downtown LA, I was nervous.

  I swear a lot. My mom doesn’t like it, and I’m always trying to cut back, but most of the time it comes out spontaneously and I wasn’t sure whether it would be OK to do that on stage. Then Lori Lindsey, my friend and national teammate, got up to introduce me, cussed vibrantly, and I decided it was fine. I thanked the center for its tireless work, the real foot soldiers of the fight against bigotry. I said that being able to go into an event on the scale of the Olympics while being an out gay woman—“being a wide-open book and just saying this is who I am, I’m damn proud of it, and hopefully you are, too”—had been amazing. I talked about the wonderful response I’d gotten, and how I hoped this would encourage other athletes and public figures to come out, too.