One Life Read online

  There was one bright spot toward the end of the year. In the fall of 2009, I was introduced by a Red Stars teammate to Sarah, an Australian forward for Sky Blue FC, a league team in Harrison, New Jersey. If every new relationship is, to some small degree, a correction to the one that came before, then Sarah was just what I needed. She was relaxed, very cool, and with a spunky personality. Australians can be known to be a little corny, but Sarah was hilarious, and as the season finished up and we headed into winter, we tried to spend as much time together as we could.

  At Christmas, all the players in the league scattered. Sarah headed back to Sydney to play for the Australian national team during winter break, and I returned to my parents’ house in Redding. I was twenty-four, and I felt like a teenager all over again. My sister, who had taken a redshirt year at Portland and had just graduated, was home, too, so we were back to sharing our old bedroom. Brian was off doing his thing. Austin was almost ten, and at school. After graduating, CeCé had married her high school sweetheart, Donnie—which Rachael and I had been lobbying for since we were five years old—and was raising a family in Redding, and Jenny was married and working locally, too. My dad still pulled long hours in construction, and my mom was still working at Jack’s. The day after I got home, I woke up and came down the hallway to find my mom sitting in her chair in her dressing gown, hair wild, drinking coffee, ruling the morning as she had done all my life.

  Returning to the same fixed point allows you to measure how far you’ve gone and that’s what it was like coming home. The day after I arrived, I headed to downtown Redding and my old gym at the YMCA. Walking through the familiar sliding doors was bizarre. I remembered working out in this gym as a teenager. Now I was swiping in and saying hi to the desk clerk as a player on the national team. I wasn’t exactly a big shot. I hadn’t played in a World Cup, or been to the Olympics, and no one beyond my family and a few hard-core fans knew who I was. Still, the transformation seemed to me like an improbable leap. My only goal as a kid had been to keep playing the sport I loved, and it had brought me here, to a career playing for my country alongside the best in the world. I was incredulous.

  The sensation didn’t last long. One benefit of our noisy household was the impossibility of holding on to romantic notions about yourself without someone loudly shutting them down. “What do you think?” I asked Rachael that night, about an outfit I was thinking of wearing to Jack’s. She looked up from the bed. “Trash,” she said, and even though I was irritated, I knew she was right. On Christmas Eve, our mom did her famous buffet for the family, which thirty-plus members turned up for, including most of my mom’s siblings and their spouses and kids. And although everyone asked eagerly about my life as a player, soccer and its anxieties suddenly seemed far away. There was no social media in those days, and I had almost no public profile. But I began to realize that Christmas was something that would become even more important to me in subsequent years—whatever happened out there, real life was here.

  Rachael’s second ACL injury hadn’t finished her career as a player, and in the new year, while she was figuring out what she wanted to do in the long term, she moved to Iceland to play for the team, Stjarnan Women. I headed back to Chicago and new digs in Bucktown, which was a much funkier neighborhood than Streeterville. Sarah had been traded to a team in St. Louis, and it would be a busy few months, juggling my playing schedule for the Red Stars with training camps for the national team, and traveling to see Sarah in Missouri.

  There was a joke rule of thumb on the team. Because so many of the players were in the closet or trying to hide their sexuality, the benchmark was, basically, that if you flew to see someone on your day off, there was no way you weren’t sleeping with them. People would be, like, Oh, I’m just going to visit a friend in California, and we’d exchange glances and call bullshit. If you get on a plane on your off day, when you’re exhausted and just want to rest, you’re having sex. That’s just the bottom line.

  I was out to everyone on the team and I was out to my family, and beyond that, no one was asking. The average attendance for a Red Stars home game was four thousand—pretty small—but even the national team wasn’t that popular, and no one outside the locker room was speculating about our personal lives. I wasn’t naive about the difficulties of being a gay person in sports; there was a reason none of the big stars were out. And growing up in Redding, I wasn’t deluded about homophobia in small towns or religious communities. But beyond that, I hadn’t given my being gay much thought. I truly believed, in the spring of 2010, that I had done all the coming out I would need to.

  Marriage equality had been in and out of the news for a few years at that point. In 2008, only two states permitted same-sex marriage—Massachusetts and California—although just as quickly as the law had been passed in California, it had been revoked under Proposition 8. In 2009, a federal lawsuit had been filed challenging Prop 8, and in 2010, a judge had declared the ban in violation of the equal protection clause. The case had started making its way through the appeals process toward the Supreme Court, just as another high profile case hit the news.

  Edith Windsor was an indefatigable campaigner for gay rights. In 2009, Thea Spyer, her partner of over forty years, had died, and although the couple had been legally married in Canada, their marriage wasn’t recognized by the federal government in the US. After Spyer’s death, Windsor was hit with estate taxes in the hundreds of thousands that she would have had written off as a spousal deduction if she had been the surviving spouse in a heterosexual couple. In 2010, at the age of eighty, she filed a lawsuit against the federal government, claiming that the definition of “spouse” in this context—that is, as exclusive to marriages between men and women—was unconstitutional. In both the challenge to Proposition 8 and Edith Windsor’s lawsuit, the Supreme Court was years away from making a ruling. But the publicity around the cases was huge.

  Reading about what was going on triggered a visceral reaction. Marriage equality was a personal issue to me, and as I watched United States v. Windsor work its way through the courts and read the commentary about the debate, I understood that these cases weren’t isolated. They were expressions of an injustice that was baked into the system, and that would take a huge clamor to change. As a kid, I’d always pushed back against bullies and stood up for myself and my friends. Now, as an adult, I felt something dormant in me twitching to life: political anger.

  8

  THE ONLY GAY ON THE TEAM

  I don’t really do risk assessment, at least not in the traditional sense. If I’m thinking of doing or saying something that might potentially cause trouble, I don’t base my decision on how it might land. Instead, the three questions I ask myself are: (a) Do I believe in what I’m saying? (b) Do I know that what I’m saying is right? And (c) Does it need to be said as a matter of urgency? If the answer to all three is yes, I don’t have anything else to decide. I might avoid an issue if I don’t feel strongly about it or am underinformed, but otherwise I’m getting involved. In 2010, the campaign for marriage equality inflamed and informed me. In 2011, the popularity of my team during the World Cup in Germany gave me a platform that compelled me to act.

  In the run-up to the tournament, I didn’t think the 2011 FIFA World Cup would be different from any other big competition in US women’s soccer history, which is to say we would probably do very well, there’d be a flurry of press interest, then the attention would die down and our lives would go back to normal. It had been this way ever since the team’s first big win in 1999, when the US victory at the World Cup had failed to translate into better ticket sales year-round. Every four years, people get excited about women’s soccer, then for reasons no one can fathom or control, interest fizzles out. This was the way things were and, we were led to believe, would always be.

  In the fall of 2010, we blazed through the early rounds of the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying matches—the FIFA regional tournament organized by the Confederation
of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football, which took place alongside those of five other regions—achieving the kind of lopsided results we were accustomed to as number one in the world: 9–0 against Guatemala, 5–0 Haiti, and so on until we’d racked up nineteen victories in a row. In the semifinals, we suffered an upset. Mexico hadn’t qualified for the World Cup since 1999, when they’d come in last and the US had won, and that night in Cancún, they were ranked twenty-one places below us. The crowd of eight thousand people was boisterously behind them, and to our shock, Mexico scored in the third minute. Carli Lloyd equalized twenty-three minutes later, but we never got back on track. My play was choppy and inconsistent and my shots on goal all went high, and we finished the game trailing 2–1. The crowd was so psyched that clearly many of them thought we were out of the World Cup. In fact, we still managed to qualify by beating Costa Rica a few days later, then Italy in the CONCACAF-UEFA match. But it was a bumpy road, and when the press called our defeat by Mexico “the greatest upset in women’s soccer history,” they weren’t a million miles from the truth. (Although perhaps that said less about our performance than the brevity of women’s soccer history.)

  At home, the Chicago Red Stars were having another bad season. For two years in a row now we had finished second to last in the league, and after the drama in Mexico, I was ready for a break. I’d hardly seen Sarah in months, and at the end of the year, after spending Christmas together in Redding, we headed to Australia for winter break. Spending a few weeks in the sun before coming home in the new year seemed like the perfect vacation, and I wouldn’t even fall behind in my training. During the US off-season, Sarah played with her Aussie league team, Sydney FC, and I tagged along to train with them. The trip was exactly what I needed, and at the end of January, I was ready to return, refreshed, to the US.

  On the plane to California, I started to feel strange. I was flying to Redding via LA to visit my family. At first I just had a headache. It got worse over the course of the flight, until it was so bad I thought my head would explode. Then I started to ache and feel nauseous. My dad picked me up at the airport in Redding, and when I got home, I collapsed into bed. A few days later, I couldn’t get up and the doctor was called. I had meningitis. It wasn’t the bacterial kind that can kill you, but it was pretty severe, and I was laid up for the best part of a month. I was extremely fortunate this coincided with the off-season, but even so, it took everything I had to get back on my feet, and my mother has never recovered. Even now, ten years later, she’ll still say, “Are you OK? You sound tired,” and I’ll know from the strain in her voice that she’s thinking back to the meningitis. (“Mom, of course I’m tired,” I’ll say. “I’m a professional athlete; it’s literally my job to be tired.”)

  At twenty-five, I was young and fit enough to bounce back relatively quickly, and I was heavily incentivized. My first-ever World Cup was five months away, and having missed out four years earlier thanks to my ACL injury, I was determined to be ready this time. But it was a shaky start to the year. In the months before the competition, the performance of the national team was up and down—in March, we were in the final of the Algarve Cup, and I was in good form, scoring an early goal against Japan in the opening rounds and the winning goal against Norway that got us into the final. A few weeks later we lost to England, which was a blow. Still, I was feeling pretty confident, and in May, when Pia Sundhage, the team coach, announced the World Cup roster, I knew I deserved my place on the team.

  I liked Pia. She wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but no coach ever is, given that they always need to leave someone on the bench. Pia could be a little inflexible, and she wasn’t always the best communicator, but as a person she was funny and eccentric, and we had a good working relationship. That June, the team geared up to fly to the World Cup in Germany. We played our farewell match against Mexico in New Jersey, to a dispiritingly small crowd of 8,000 people in a 25,000-seat stadium, lest any of us harbored delusions about the popularity of women’s soccer. Then we got on the plane to Germany. Right before the tournament began, Pia took me aside and told me I wouldn’t be in the starting lineup for the first game against North Korea. I had lost my spot to Lauren Cheney, who was two years younger than me and had competed in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I was pissed.

  I don’t tend to internalize other people’s feelings toward me. I’m so self-critical and honest when I mess up that when I feel confident about something, I tend to think that it’s justified. I had only been playing for the national team for two years and was among the less experienced players on the roster, which included veterans such as Christie Rampone, Shannon Boxx, and Abby, with whom I’d patched up enough of a friendship to assuage any awkwardness. And I understood that Pia was under a lot of pressure going into the World Cup. But I had scored a lot of goals during the CONCACAF qualifying rounds, as well as set up Amy Rodriguez’s goal in the game against Italy that got us through to the World Cup. I had also played well in Portugal. Perhaps that hadn’t been enough and there wasn’t a huge case to be made. But being benched was a real blow.

  When I know I’m being underestimated, my performance improves. What are you going to do? The only recourse is to double down and play so well no one can doubt you again. When we got to Dresden, the excitement of being at the World Cup was intensified by my excitement about getting on the field and proving myself. The opening game against North Korea gave me almost no opportunities—I came on late in the second half and we won a businesslike 2–0—but our second game against Colombia was different.

  I came out at halftime and almost immediately scored, a clean strike from inside the penalty area, which felt like the purest retort to Pia. I wasn’t the only one who saw it that way. “There’s an answer to the coach!” screamed the English commentator on ESPN, and the camera flashed to Pia high-fiving the assistant coaches. Over the years, I had heard a lot of talk about what being an athlete was about, a lot of it bullshit about the purity of the game. Now I had an answer of my own: as a professional soccer player, there is nothing like being screamed at by twenty-five thousand people after scoring a goal in the World Cup to confirm that you work in a branch of entertainment. After scoring, I grabbed a sideline mic that was lying on the edge of the pitch, and with Lauren Cheney and Lori Lindsey at my side, Lindsey on air guitar on the other, busted out a line from “Born in the U.S.A.” The crowd went wild.

  I had a lot of family in the crowd that day, not only my parents and Rachael, but also my aunt Melanie and her daughters, Aleta and Anna, all of whom stayed throughout the tournament and cheered me on the whole way. A few days later, we lost to Sweden, an upset for sure but not enough to stop us advancing to the quarterfinals, and that’s when we ran up against Brazil. It’s strange to be able to date a new phase of one’s life to a particular moment, but there’s no question, looking back, that the fortunes of the national team—as a brand and as a team—changed definitively that day. Going in, all we knew was that the game was likely to be dramatic. We had a long history of rivalry with Brazil and it was personal. Their reputation for bad sportsmanship was deserved and annoying, and when they started acting poorly in Dresden that night, the crowd, initially on their side, started to turn against them. By the final whistle, we had tied 1–1 and went into stoppage time with what felt like all twenty-five thousand people on our side.

  Up to that point, the whole game had been kind of weird, choppy, and uneven, with neither side really finding its rhythm. We had scored early on—or, rather, Brazil had scored an own goal—and then we’d almost immediately been given a red card. Brazil had taken a penalty and missed it, been given a do-over, and scored. A few minutes into stoppage time, they scored again, putting them ahead 2–1. We were down to ten players because of the red card. The fight was on.

  I’ve heard rival players, particularly from Europe, talk about the US as an unbeatable team because of our “winning mentality.” We lose, of course. I’ve won plenty and los
t plenty. The difference is that we truly believe we’re going to win, in every single game, no matter how the game is going or at what stage it’s in. In a country of 330 million people, only 23 women get to make a living the way we do, and you need to be a gladiator just to get on the team. You’re in the cauldron every day. We train to win, and we play to win, and every second of play we’re relentless. Sweden has a good mentality. Japan before 2015 was pretty cutthroat. The old German team had that outlook for sure. But not all teams think this way, and it’s the difference between winning and losing.

  In the 122nd minute, I was thinking, We’re fucked. But I can hold two thoughts in my head at one time, and while thinking, We’re fucked—because we’re in the dying minutes of the game, the ball is way down on our end, and the Brazilians are trying to run down the clock with their antics—I’m also seeing Ali Krieger dribbling up the sideline, passing the ball to the middle to Carli, and then Carli dribbling for what seems like an eternity. And I’m like, Just fucking pass the ball to me! Because I’m open and coming up on the left! And she dribbles across the field, finally plays it; I take one touch, and I don’t even really look up. But I’m like, Bitch, you’d better be there. Somebody has to be there. And it was literally a Hail Mary pass. This was our last chance—the ref should already have blown the whistle—and I just bombed it up the field, where the ball found Abby, who headed it in. “Oh my god!” she screamed. “Oh my god! Best cross of your life!”

  “I know!” I screamed back. We were back from the dead and over the moon.

  People always ask me: Did you see Abby in that moment? And the answer is, no, it was a moment of pure desperation. I just fucking smashed the ball with my left foot and hoped for the best. On the other hand, yes, I did “see” her to the extent that I’ve been working on this my whole life. I know how to put myself in the right position to throw all my might behind a final push. My right foot is better and more accurate than my left, but I work on my left foot all the time. I work on it so hard it becomes second nature, so that when I need to call on it in a moment like this, I’m not thinking, Can I even put the ball up there? I just do it.