When the US women’s soccer team rose to fame in the late 1990s, they projected an image that was a well-polished composite of fun, friendship and teamwork in the pursuit of excellence.
Two new memoirs, Carli Lloyd’s When Nobody Was Watching and Abby Wambach’s Forward, shatter that perception. But they do so in a way that should open a more realistic discussion on what we expect from athletes, especially but not limited to female athletes, and what they should expect from themselves.
Four years ago, Hope Solo’s Solo: A Memoir of Hope swung the first sledgehammer at the team’s image, which had been built up through years of seeing Mia Hamm deflect praise upon her team-mates and plenty of commercials portraying the team as a fun-loving bunch of young women with ponytails and cute nicknames.
Any drama had been hidden behind the omerta of the locker room. New York Times writer Jeré Longman summed it up in his chronicle of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, The Girls of Summer: “No team is without its internal tensions, and the American women had distinct groupings of age and alma mater, but private cliques never became public nuisances.”
By 2007, the nuisances were public. Before a World Cup semi-final against Brazil, coach Greg Ryan abruptly benched Solo in favor of Briana Scurry, the accomplished but rusty back-up goalkeeper. The reasoning was murky – Ryan’s public line at the time was about goalkeeping styles, but he later said Solo had broken several team rules off the field. After Brazil won 4-0, Solo walked over to an interviewer in the mixed zone, over the objections of US Soccer PR staff, and ripped the decision to bench her. Since then, one sentence has lived in women’s soccer infamy: “There’s no doubt in my mind I would’ve made those saves.”
That’s unlikely – Brazil were simply a class above the USA at the time. But new coach Pia Sundhage worked a miracle to get the team on the same page to win the 2008 Olympics. The wounds were closed, until Solo re-opened them with her memoir after the 2012 Olympics.
Now, coincidentally timed just after Solo’s termination from the national team, Lloyd has revisited the controversy. Solo has long credited Lloyd as her most steadfast supporter through the years, and in Lloyd’s book, she strongly defends her friend.
“In men’s sports, people criticize coaches and managers all the time, call out team-mates too, and it’s not that huge of a deal,” Lloyd writes. “Often the guy speaking out is even lauded for having the courage to tell the truth.”
Men who lose their livelihoods – or at least spend a few days enduring a public slaughter on social media or talk radio – after being labeled a problem may beg to differ. In retrospect, Solo’s career is similar to that of Barry Bonds, Stephon Marbury or any other controversial male athlete – their disagreements were tolerated when they were stars, but they were easily jettisoned when the team no longer depended on them.
But that’s hardly the only complaint in Lloyd’s scorching book. In her eyes, the US Soccer marketing department never did enough to promote her. The national team “feels as if it’s a girls’ club, and no, new members are not exactly welcome.” After players convince then-coach April Heinrichs to cancel a fitness session, she gripes: “The players get their way. People have told me the inmates run the asylum on the women’s national team. Here is the first example of it I’ve encountered.”
She caps the complaints with a shocking accusation in the wake of Sundhage’s departure in 2012: “A so-called leadership group of players had a conference call and began to quietly push Sunil [Gulati, US Soccer’s president] to get rid of Pia.”
Lloyd says she doesn’t want “drama,” unlike many of her team-mates. “Unfortunately, in a dozen years on the US Women’s National Team, I’ve been around enough drama queens to fill a royal palace,” she writes.
Yet “drama” is the bulk of this book. And it’s actually much of her career. Prodded by trainer James Galanis, she always has a chip on her shoulder, and she readily admits she plays better with an underdog mentality. She always has to have someone to prove wrong, whether it’s a media critic, an opposing coach (based on whispers of disrespect), or any random person who doubted her.
And she’s wildly inconsistent about those who criticize her. Some merely fuel her anger. But her relationship with Galanis starts when he gives a harsh assessment, saying she has world-class talent but neither the fitness nor the mentality to live up to it, and she appreciates the honesty. She is grateful to former youth national coach Chris Petrucelli for giving her a similar assessment in cutting her from the team. She’s pleased when current US coach Jill Ellis shows her stats proving she had been giving away possession far too easily – something Lloyd’s critics had noted for years.
She recounts a conversation with Abby Wambach, who warns that the team sees her setting herself apart from team-mates, sitting in a corner and texting, not talking with others. She concludes that Wambach is only saying these things to ingratiate herself to veteran players who don’t like Lloyd. But when Galanis tells her roughly the same thing, citing the “togetherness factor” of a team sport, Galanis is brilliant in her eyes.
(Curiously, while Lloyd mentions many of her club teams over the years, she does not mention the 2011 WPS season in which she and close friends Solo and Heather Mitts played for the Atlanta Beat – under head coach Galanis. That year, the team won one of its 18 league games.)
Yet for all the head-scratching moments and petty accusations (the topper: in 2007, when she was nowhere near the player she is today, she gripes that a team-mate isn’t passing to her, and it clearly must be for political reasons), Lloyd’s book has some value. It’s not as directly inspirational as Wambach’s book, in which the prolific goal-scorer recounts her battles with addiction with remarkable self-awareness. But Lloyd undoubtedly works hard. A familiar pattern sets in – she suffers a setback, then goes home to do such intense training with Galanis that the national team’s fitness coach worries she is overtaxing her body. She comes back fitter, coaches praise her, and she’s back where she wants to be.
And along with Wambach’s book, When Nobody Was Watching provides a harrowing account of athletes’ sacrifices. Lloyd’s single-mindedness has undoubtedly put her plane to most people. Recently, she refused to take postgame media questions until a reporter deemed to be asking tough questions was dismissed. She and Galanis are constantly searching for enemies to motivate her, leaving her in a state of perpetual conflict. Worst of all, she’s tells us how she is estranged from much of her family over disagreements on how to handle her soccer career.
And yet despite her flaws, by the end of When Nobody Was Watching, the reader is rooting for Lloyd. Not necessarily to add more accolades to a distinguished career, but to salvage what she sacrificed of her life. We root for her to have a happy marriage – her boyfriend’s charming proposal is one of the few moments of levity in the book.
And we root for her to leave behind the world of paranoia and perfectionism in which she has lived for more than 10 years, and we hope that future athletes won’t give so much of themselves in pursuit of glory.
