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  A week later, I was scheduled to play with the Pilots in a home game against Washington State. It was a low-key Thursday-night match and the contrast was a little head spinning. I had gone directly from playing in a 27,000-seat stadium with the best players in the world to a 5,000-seat field in Portland with a bunch of other college kids. The change of pressure and pace was a relief honestly, and after the whistle blew, I relaxed into the game. Toward the end of the first half, we were two goals up (one scored by Rachael in the twenty-ninth minute) and looking good to keep on dominating the game. Just before halftime, I ran to block a pass, planted my left foot on the turf, and after feeling a sting in my knee, suddenly found myself down on the field.

  I wasn’t in pain. This wasn’t a contact injury, so there was no trauma, and it didn’t seem to me to be a big deal—which is what I always think about things that turn out to be a big deal. That evening, when the doctor told me I’d torn my anterior cruciate ligament, a common knee injury in soccer, or any sport that requires sudden changes of speed and direction, I was pretty relaxed. I was told I’d need surgery the following week and would miss out on playing with the national team in a friendly against Iceland that Sunday. But my meniscus wasn’t torn and I wasn’t in agony. Besides which, I was twenty-one years old and clearly invincible.

  Being injured puts you in a weird limbo. You have to keep training to maintain your fitness, without working toward the fixed goal of a game. Rehab is double the work of regular training, and to get back up to your level, you’re in the gym early and out late, which can be lonely and demoralizing. Some coaches ask injured players to attend practice and watch from the sidelines, which seemed to me a recipe for depression and which I avoided. The best way to move forward, I decided, was to get better in record time, and rejoin practice with my invincibility restored.

  The early days after the injury weren’t really that bad. But as the days became weeks, and weeks became months, it became clear this was a bigger problem than anticipated. I missed the qualifiers in South Korea. I missed all the games in the NCAA tournament that season. (Portland lost in the quarterfinals against UCLA.) I ended up playing only ten games in my sophomore year, and as the 2007 season got under way without me, it looked as if I would spend even less time on the field as a junior. I started to feel out of sorts.

  In early September, with one eye on the World Cup coming up in November, I pushed myself as hard as I could. After swearing to the coach I was ready to come back, I appeared in two games for the Pilots that fall, one against Cal State Fullerton on September 7, and one against Purdue two days later. Both were disastrous. I lasted thirteen minutes in the first game; and although I played for most of the second half against Purdue, I wasn’t remotely in form. A few weeks later, during a training session, I felt my knee ping. I had torn my ACL again.

  It was enraging and frustrating, and I could hardly believe it had happened. Ridiculously, Rachael had just done exactly the same thing, on the same knee, and a year later would do it again. In short order it went me, her, me, her, so that in October 2007 we both found ourselves in the position of needing a knee operation. I hadn’t liked my previous surgeon, and after doing some research, our mom found Dr. Michael Dillingham, a former NFL team doctor for the 49ers, who would see us in San Francisco.

  ACL knee surgery is fiddly. They take the ligament out and use a skin graft to repair it. Then they drill holes in the heads of your tibia and femur, put the repaired ligament back in, and pin it in place with a screw. A lot of people use skin from their arms for the graft, but I was too small, so they used cadaver grafts instead. The surgery took a couple of hours. When I came round, my mom was sitting by my bed.

  “You know, Megan,” she said, “it’s not the end of the world. You still have your college scholarship, and you’ve achieved great things already.”

  I knew what she was trying to say. Two injuries on the same knee within the space of a year was a good indication your career was wrecked, and my mom wasn’t the only one to think so. Within days of my injury, career obituaries started running in the college press, in which my ambitions were referred to exclusively in the past tense. “Rapinoe was also making a push to be a regular on the United States Women’s National Team,” ran one. Clearly, everyone thought I was done.

  I couldn’t blame them; I had busted my ACL twice in a row, why wouldn’t they think that? And while I was lucky that, in the days after the surgery, I was healing well and wouldn’t need a further operation, I would have to stay in San Francisco for rehab, which was gruesome. Years later, I would discover that Sue Bird, my girlfriend, had the same physical therapist as Rachael and I did—Lisa, Dr. Dillingham’s wife, and the toughest PT we ever had. It was a house of pain, more hard-core than any training I’ve ever done for the national team, to the extent that I still do some of the exercises and squats she taught us today.

  In the weeks after surgery, I was quieter than usual. I may not have shut myself in my room, as I used to when I was a kid, and I didn’t drink or take drugs or go off the rails. But Rachael says this time was the most dispirited she’d ever seen me. I was helpless, with no sense of purpose and no one to blame but myself. Rachael was in bad shape after her injury, too, but her ambitions had changed and she hadn’t been banking on a career on the national team. For me, recovery was deeply frustrating. To know I could compete at the highest level and to be prevented from doing so was awful, and I had no back-up plan. I’d never so much as had a job before, not even when we were kids, when our parents had said as long as we were working hard at what we loved, they would take care of the rest. Well, all I loved was soccer and now I couldn’t play.

  Slowly, regular life resumed. In between rehab, PT, and training, I went back to being a normal student. I studied, hung out, drank too much in the spring, went to class. I was dating someone and thought I might be in love. Rachael and I left the campus dorms and moved into a big house with a bunch of other students, before moving out again, fast. (My sister is super fastidious and I’m a borderline slob, but even for me the house was too wild. We got an apartment together and were much happier.) I was low, for sure. But I took one day at a time. And while it was painful, in August, to watch the Olympic Games on TV, at least I was out of action long before team selection took place. If I’d made the Olympic squad and been cut, the experience would’ve been much harder. When the USA won gold, I didn’t think, I could have been there.

  I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. This time, I was determined to go slow and heal properly. I was going to learn patience and humility and accept that however good I was, I wasn’t invincible. Stripped of its delusions, my ambition grew stronger. When I’d woken up from surgery that day and my mom had tried to console me, I’d had the strongest feeling I didn’t need consolation. “Mom,” I said, “I’m not done.”

  7

  CHICAGO

  When I met Abby Wambach in 2006, she was the star of the national team. I was twenty-one, in my sophomore year at college, and had just started training alongside her. She was five years older than me and already a veteran of international games. We began dating almost immediately, and although as my first serious relationship it was almost by definition guaranteed to fail, the experience was intense. I really loved her.

  Being a professional athlete can be hard on your personal life, but in the early days with Abby, the fact that we were rarely in the same town was a plus. Every time she came to see me in Portland, the honeymoon period rebooted. I suffered the first ACL injury a few months after we met, and the prolonged excitement of a long-distance relationship was a welcome distraction from rehab, as was the fact that in the relatively small world of women’s professional soccer, Abby was a celebrity. She would fly into town for a few days, we would hang out and have a great time, and she would leave again before things got too real. If there was no will-you-go-to-the-store-to-buy-milk, or pressure for the relationship to engage with the nitty-gritty of lif
e, I was 100 percent down for that. Apart from anything else, it allowed me to preserve all my energy for recovery.

  I trained hard all through 2007 and the first half of 2008 without playing a single game. In the spring of my senior year, I began to feel fit again, and that August, I returned to the Pilots lineup. The first game of the season was at home against Oregon, and I wasn’t nervous. I had waited so long and been so conscientious about rehab that I felt pretty confident running out onto the field. I made four shots on goal that night, and ran almost from one end of the field to the other before crossing to a teammate, who smashed it in. Two of Portland’s three goals were scored off my assists, and after the game, when the coach set off fireworks to celebrate the start of the season, I felt as if they were personally for me. I was back.

  My comeback was great in terms of my career. I hadn’t returned to the national team yet, but I was performing better than ever, helping the Pilots to a nineteen-game winning streak that year, which took us to the NCAA semifinals. (We lost 1–0 to Stanford in that game—not a bad result given we were missing four of our best players, three of them to the Under-20 National Team at the World Cup in Chile, and Rachael, who had reinjured her tendon.) My life seemed to be getting back to normal.

  Or at least it did professionally. Emerging from two years of limbo was a pretty big life change, one that brought to the forefront certain aspects of my relationship with Abby. Five years is a big age gap when you’re dating in college, and at twenty-two, after two years on the bench, I was fresh and raring to go. Abby, on the other hand, was entering a tough midcareer phase. In July 2008, she broke her leg in a match just before the Olympics. The injury was bad, and she was understandably an emotional wreck, but I found myself recoiling from her needs. I was free and happy for the first time in years and I didn’t want to be pulled into someone else’s problems. I had no idea what to do.

  Looking back, what I see is two young people who for a while were deeply in love. I also see the selfishness of youth. At the time, Abby seemed so much older than me that I gave her almost no leeway to make mistakes, or have needs. Now, of course, I realize that she was young, too, only twenty-five when we met and still figuring things out. When she broke her leg, I was impatient and unsympathetic, and immature enough to want to get out to avoid having to deal with it.

  In the end it was my sister who called it. Rachael and I generally give each other space to date whomever we want, but we can also look each other in the eye and say, It’s fucking over, you have to move on. She and my mom liked Abby. But one night, while we were sitting around on campus, my sister said, You have to break up with her. I looked at her, eyes wide, head nodding. The timing was bad and ours was an unceremonious ending—I basically left Abby in the hospital bed with her broken leg—but my sister was right.

  I hadn’t played for the national team in over two years, but by the end of 2008, I was playing so well I knew the phone call was probably coming. In the meantime, there were new opportunities. In January 2009, I had to make a choice. I could either graduate from Portland and accept a job playing for the Chicago Red Stars, who had selected me second overall in the 2009 Women’s Professional Soccer draft. (The first pick in the draft was Amy Rodriguez, who went to the Boston Breakers.)

  Or I could redo my senior year. I’d missed so much playing time at Portland that per the terms of my scholarship, I qualified for a redshirt year. However, after all those years of sitting around, I was ready for my life to begin. I was gracious, of course, and thanked everyone who’d helped me at Portland. But I was also young and impatient, and desperate to move on. I will see you fucking later, I thought.

  * * *

  —

  The history of women’s soccer leagues is a history of failed enterprise, underinvestment, small crowds, and big disappointments, as well as women playing for little or no money. The first-ever league, which started playing in 2001, grew out of the success of the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup–winning team, and was called the Women’s United Soccer Association. WUSA had eight teams. It folded in 2003, after three seasons. Six years later the Women’s Professional Soccer league, comprised of seven teams, was formed in its place, and was set up on the back of the national team winning gold at the 2008 Olympics. In March 2009, I moved to Chicago to play for the Red Stars in the WPS inaugural season. Along with everyone else, I hoped this was the league that would last.

  I didn’t know Chicago at all, but because of the way player housing was organized, living and playing there was a lot like being back in college. The entire team, including Carli Lloyd and Lindsay Tarpley, captain of the Red Stars, was housed in a single apartment block in the downtown neighborhood of Streeterville, with a bar on the ground floor of the building. We put in a lot of hours in that bar. Rachael came to see me and my parents visited, and those first few weeks flew by like a whirlwind. We had a blast.

  There was one big difference between being a student and being in Chicago, of course, and that was money. At college, I’d gotten by on a combination of my scholarship, contributions from my parents, and small stipends from the National Olympic Committee for being on the national team. Now, for the first time in my life, I was earning. I was on a WPS player salary of around thirty-two thousand dollars, and that March I also signed a contract with the national team and was put on a tier 2 salary of fifty thousand dollars a year, with the possibility, if I hit tier 1, of my salary increasing to around seventy thousand dollars. I had nothing to compare my salary to and I didn’t think to question it. The number seemed perfectly adequate to me, and immediately after signing, I flew to Portugal with the team to compete in the Algarve Cup, a low-key international tournament of twelve teams. The crowds in Portugal were tiny—we lost the final game against Sweden in front of 1,200 people—but returning to the national team was intense after my years on the bench. Soccer had always been front and center, but now, with no classes, no distractions, and no other demands on my time, it wasn’t just my passion, it was my job. This was life as a professional athlete.

  In the beginning, at least, I felt this transition more keenly at the league level. National games were a much bigger deal and the real measure of my career, but they were also sporadically organized and subject to busy tournament schedules interspersed with long down periods. Life in the league, on the other hand, was much more nine-to-five. The Red Stars’ home ground was a 28,000-seat stadium about twelve miles southwest of downtown, and the training schedule, once I returned from Portugal, was like nothing I’d experienced before. I wasn’t lazy. But I was inconsistent and had, until then, the supreme confidence of the young that you could float through training sessions and make up for it later. Back in August 2006, when I’d started playing for the national team, the coach, Greg Ryan, had said something sharp about my training habits. He’d called me “one of the most creative young players in the national system,” before saying he’d noticed I had an aversion to practice. He wasn’t wrong. I look back now and think, Oh, what a mess. I was so unprofessional. In the middle of the season, I’d still go out and have a couple of beers at dinner or stay out late. If I wanted a burger, I’d have one, and although I was generally quite healthy, there was no rhyme or reason to any of my habits. I didn’t understand that training is what gets you into the game, that it’s the difference between winning and losing, and for a long time I was not a great training player. I was fit enough to get away with it, but looking back, I wish I’d been better.

  Playing on a daily basis forced me to improve, and those league games with the Red Stars were where I really started to sharpen my skills. Playing at club level is hard. If you’re a national team member, you’re likely one of the best players on your league team, which means that your opponents will zone in on you. During those early games in Chicago, I would ask myself: How many goals can I manufacture basically by myself? How do I find a way to be impactful and to make other players better? I learned how to play with greater consistency. I
learned how to be in the right place at the right time. When players get described as “creative,” as I often do, the meaning varies depending on who’s saying it and why. Sometimes when I see a player called “creative” I think, No, they’re just doing a bunch of stupid tricks, like step overs or scissors, that have no effect on the game. I don’t do a lot of that stuff. My strengths are simple: I can use both feet, I have good vision, and I like to play quickly. I’m never going to be dribbling, dribbling, dribbling. That’s not me at all, and I’m not good at it.

  I think back to what I’d learned as a kid, which was how to be successful without being physically the best. My creativity comes out in my vision and in my passing ability, in the fact that I’m willing to try things and fail. Taking a calculated risk and being a little unpredictable fall under the banner of creativity, as does knowing the game really well. As my training improved, I tried to find opportunities—an unexpected cross, a long pass up the field to someone so out of range no one was paying attention to them—before other players did.

  We didn’t have a great season. There were a lot of brilliant players on the Red Stars, but we had a young, inexperienced coach and for some reason we never meshed as a team. After winning our first game in April against Saint Louis Athletica, we basically lost or tied ten games in a row. Our longest winning streak was two games against Washington Freedom and the California team FC Gold Pride, and we finished the season in second-to-last place. I was doing well on the national team, having been in the starting lineup for six games that year and ending the season leading the team in points, but the failure in Chicago was still disappointing.