Eight World Cups

by George Vecsey

  “It’s like a second family,” Kristine Lilly said a few weeks before the tournament. “Female sports are different. You do a lot better when you care about each other. We are nurturing people, caring people. I’m glad to have my friends out there. It goes a little bit deeper than just sports. We all want to see each other happy.”

  This is the kind of team, the kind of family, it was: after a dispute with her parents, Shannon MacMillan had left home during college; between semesters, MacMillan lived with Joy Fawcett and her husband, Walter, helping care for the children.

  Coach Tony DiCicco understood that leadership on this team came from the strong personalities of the players, from their sense of unity. He acknowledged that his coaching techniques changed the more he was around the women. Female athletes cannot be coached the same way as male athletes. Women internalize criticism, he said, and often need to fix things on their own, which these players did.

  He worked with a soccer-savvy sports psychologist, Colleen Hacker, particularly when a former player filed a harassment suit against Anson Dorrance, the previous coach who was still producing championships at North Carolina. The tangled loyalties could have split the team, but everybody agreed to work together. (The case was ultimately settled.)

  DiCicco did make one big change, welcoming back Brandi Chastain, an extroverted veteran from the 1991 champions who had been given an unrequested sabbatical by Dorrance. Perhaps Chastain needed a break; or perhaps the coach felt he could not mold her into his image of the team. Chastain was talented and irrepressible, traits that tend to make coaches nervous.

  After her time away from the national team, Chastain was in the best shape of her life. She was proud of her physique—and was known to display it, as a tribute to her hard work. Her nickname among the players was Hollywood. When Julie Foudy filled out a team questionnaire that requested her favorite actress, she wrote: Brandi Chastain.

  The women competed for playing time, and for space during scrimmages. Mia Hamm was as tenacious in practice as she was in games, but she came into the 1999 World Cup in a scoring slump, and her confidence was down. Michelle Akers suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and needed constant medical attention but was still a force.

  The third Women’s World Cup was run by Marla Messing, a lawyer in Los Angeles who had worked with Alan Rothenberg and his team in 1994. She followed the same template from the 1984 Olympics and 1994 World Cup. Think big. Think Rose Bowl. By committing to large stadiums, Messing sent a message to the world—female athletes are not second best.

  In the opening round, the United States outscored its opponents, 13–1, in three group matches in New York, Chicago, and Foxborough, Massachusetts. In the quarterfinals against Germany outside Washington, D.C., Chastain scored an own goal in the fifth minute, misdirecting a back pass around keeper Briana Scurry. Captain Carla Overbeck and the others told Chastain, Hey, Brandi, we’ll get it back. Mistress of drama that she was, Chastain scored in the forty-ninth minute to tie the match. In the sixty-sixth minute, Fawcett scored for a 3–2 victory.

  Afterward, a fan named Bill Clinton tied up the entire stadium by deciding to greet the players, as the Secret Service held everybody in place. The national bandwagon was forming, and the president was right on it.

  In the semifinals at Stanford University, Cindy Parlow scored in the fifth minute, and Akers stepped up and converted a penalty kick in the eightieth minute for a 2–0 victory over Brazil.

  Just before the final against China in the Rose Bowl on July 10, President Clinton once again disrupted traffic outside the stadium by arriving near game time, causing many fans to miss the start. Politicians never seem to know they are inconveniencing tens of thousands of people by choosing to attend a sports event.

  The match teetered into extra time with no goals, just like the men’s final between Brazil and Italy nearly five years earlier. Akers, who was wearing down, was not sure she could last on the brutally hot afternoon. In the ninetieth minute, she and the very solid keeper Scurry went for the ball, and Scurry punched Akers as well as the ball. Akers was done. The doctor and trainer had to revive her in the locker room while the game veered into extra time.

  After being a gracious host for the first Women’s World Cup, the Chinese government had upgraded the program, overcoming old prejudices against women playing sports. Out of this drive came a new and talented generation, including Sun Wen, a rebel who used to dribble a ball and bang it against the nearest wall as neighbors called her a pseudo-boy. The Chinese program, emphasizing rote drills, produced a player like Sun, who was on a level with the best Americans.

  China was good enough to hold off the Americans for ninety minutes in the heat. In the tenth minute of overtime came the most desperate moment, when Liu Ying’s corner kick soared across the goalmouth, past Scurry. Fan Yunjie was in perfect position and headed the ball diagonally past Scurry toward the goal line, and many of the American players saw the tournament ending in front of their eyes.

  But Kristine Lilly, the modest veteran, was protecting the near post, as she had been taught to do, and she gracefully slid sideways and leaped, her head and neck braced, deflecting the ball from the line. Then Chastain went horizontal, balancing on her left hand and blasting the ball away from the area with her right foot. An act of poise by Lilly, a sheer reaction by Chastain, both fighting off exhaustion, stemmed from their long experience as admirable old pros.

  Once again, a World Cup final went into penalty kicks in the Rose Bowl. Everybody hates the shoot-out, which often produces knee-shaking yips in the richest stars.

  DiCicco’s assistant, Lauren Gregg, was in charge of the lineup for penalty kicks. Gregg knew that Hamm hated penalty kicks, and had been shooting them poorly in practice, but she told Hamm that as one of the top scorers she had to go in the top five. Then Gregg asked Chastain if she wanted to shoot, and when Chastain said yes, Gregg said she had to shoot left-footed because she had become too predictable with the right. Growing up, Chastain had listened to her father’s preaching a fundamental of this sport—how many goals go unscored because a player is not flexible enough to propel a ball with either foot?

  The first four players made their shots, but Liu Ying’s shot was deflected by Scurry, who appeared to be moving forward before the kick, but the referee did not call a violation. Lilly, Zhang Ouying, Hamm, and Sun Wen all made their shots. A goal now would win the World Cup. The tenth shooter was Chastain, who calmly hooked her left-footed shot into her right corner to win the championship. Then Hollywood celebrated by doing exactly what men do in great moments on the field: she yanked off her jersey. Her black industrial-strength sports bra was noticeable for a second or two before she was engulfed by teammates. Some people still remember her flamboyant but hardly provocative gesture more than the endurance and heart of the two teams.

  After the celebration, Lilly was holding five-year-old Katelyn Rose Fawcett, the daughter of Joy and Walter Fawcett. She shrugged off praise for her goal-line stop. “We practice this on all corner kicks,” Lilly said in that noisy room. “I shift with the ball. That’s exactly what I was doing.”

  That was the point. The nation and many fans around the world were captivated by the strong personalities and skill of the women, including the Chinese, the Brazilians, and the Norwegians. These athletes had everything—personality, talent, technique, experience.

  In the days after the final, people debated Scurry’s save on Liu Ying. Some insisted that Scurry’s forward break from the goal line had intimidated Liu, certainly cut down on the angle, and was a violation of the rules.

  Was this the action of a competitor with impatient feet—or the practiced device of somebody defying the rules? The referee, Nicole Petignat of Switzerland, did not detect a violation. Soccer players flop, sometimes they deserve a yellow card—it’s a fine line. Baseball batters pretend to be hit by an inside pitch. Basketball players reel backward from imagined contact. My own opinion then and now was that even if Scurry consciously decided t
o go after this one player, it was “cheating” only in the narrow sports definition. Others, whose opinion I admire, thought a player demeaned the sport by deliberately breaking the rule. Later, DiCicco, himself a former keeper, admitted that he had prodded Scurry to be more aggressive in moving forward, and let the referee sort it out afterward.

  The attendance of 90,185 in the Rose Bowl remains the world record for a women’s match. The attendance for that tournament was 1,194,221, an average of 37,319 per match, still the best figures for the event.

  More important, fans around the world had a new event in their consciousness—the WWC. And Americans, who revered men’s Olympic champions like the 1960 and 1980 ice hockey teams and the 1992 basketball Dream Team, now had a World Cup champion to celebrate—as Jeré Longman would call them in his knowing book, The Girls of Summer.

  It would be a mistake to say that women’s soccer took off from there. Within days, the federation and players were quarreling over a national tour planned by the players without permission by the federation. During the infighting, DiCicco resigned as head coach, and the federation was exposed for double standards toward the men’s and women’s programs.

  Three other World Cups have followed the epic 1999 tournament. In 2003, a SARS scare forced China to postpone its turn as host. The United States stepped in on short notice, with somewhat less excitement, and Germany won. In 2007, China nearly beat the Americans’ attendance record from 1999, falling four thousand spectators short, and once again Germany won. In 2011, Germany was the host, as Japan, still reeling from the horrendous damage from a tsunami and nuclear-plant meltdown, defeated the United States in an emotional final. The 2015 WWC is scheduled for Canada, which had a gallant run to the semifinals in 2011, losing to the United States after several controversial officiating calls, not yet forgotten.

  Since the exciting debut in 1996, women’s soccer has become a staple in the Olympic Games, including an epic final in 2012 with the United States outlasting Japan.

  In its way, women’s soccer has set an example for the world. The United States won the 2012 Olympic gold medal with a Swedish coach, Pia Sundhage, a former World Cup player in her own right, who delivered her opinions fearlessly and kept her players loose by singing “The Times They Are A-Changing” and other anthems of the counterculture. She was right about that: it was quite known and accepted that Sundhage was gay.

  One of the best American players on that squad was Megan Rapinoe, a blond sprite who roamed the field and came up with gigantic passes and goals and became something of a national favorite and also let it be known that she was gay. After generations of athletes and coaches, male and female, had agonized over coming out, the separate examples of Sundhage and Rapinoe broke down some of the mysteries. In 2013, Robbie Rogers, who had played for the national men’s team, came out as gay and temporarily retired before joining the Los Angeles Galaxy. And the world did not end. Nor did it end in 2013, when Abby Wambach, the powerful striker who had surpassed Mia Hamm’s world record of 158 goals, announced that she and her longtime partner, Sarah Huffman, also a player, had been married in Hawaii.

  Despite the popularity of the women’s team, the United States has been unable to build a successful league. The Women’s United Soccer Association began in April 2001, backed in part by John S. Hendricks, a founder of the Discovery Channel. The players called him “St. John” because of his generous patronage to women’s soccer, but even a saint has limits. The league featured many of the stars from 1996 and 1999 but was top-heavy with salaries and short on fans and sponsors. It lasted three years, and another league came and went.

  In 2013, the National Women’s Soccer League began, with eight teams scattered around the country, with backing from the national federation. The future of women’s soccer is still murky, but Hamm and her teammates remain among the greatest national teams in American history—the ’99ers.

  13

  THE YEAR OF THE OUTSIDERS

  SOUTH KOREA AND JAPAN, 2002

  In 2002, for the first time, the World Cup was held in two neighboring countries.

  The two-headed World Cup was either a feat of diplomacy worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize for Sepp Blatter or a cynical and lucrative compromise.

  Japan and South Korea, with their tangled history, had been competing to be the World Cup’s first Asian host. Representatives of the two nations had courted FIFA delegates, who can be quite sentimental about token gifts like ties and souvenir photo books, and they did not want to offend either suitor. So FIFA voted to accept Japan and South Korea as cohosts.

  This decision caused a huge outlay of energy and cost, since both Japan and South Korea felt the need to spend billions of dollars to build or upgrade twenty stadiums that might never house the promised games, concerts, and conventions.

  How do you say “double white elephant” in Japanese and Korean?

  In the same year that FIFA produced unprecedented twin hosts for the World Cup, the organization underwent rare public exposure. FIFA had traditionally done its business in private, with very little controversy from within or scrutiny from the press. However, in 2002, a few of FIFA’s secrets and divisions went public.

  Sepp Blatter, who was up for reelection, came under rare criticism because of the collapse of FIFA’s marketing organization, International Sport and Leisure (ISL), in 2001, with a disappearance of money, eventually estimated at $300 million. ISL, founded in 1982 by the Dassler sporting-goods company and a Japanese advertising company, had negotiated the television rights for the Mexico World Cup in 1986 and subsequent Olympic and FIFA events. Up to the bankruptcy of ISL, Blatter had mostly come off as an official who said loopy things; now he was being accused by soccer insiders of presiding over a careless and perhaps even corrupt organization.

  At a meeting of FIFA in Zurich in early May 2002, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, the general secretary, and also a lawyer and former referee, issued a thirty-page report charging Blatter with financial mismanagement. Five of FIFA’s seven vice presidents urged Blatter to resign immediately, but he denied the charges and insisted that insurance would limit FIFA’s losses from the ISL debacle to $32 million.

  As delegates arrived at the hilltop Seoul Hilton later that month, Zen-Ruffinen was claiming that Blatter had paid FIFA members to support him in the coming elections. “I have again and again asked for the necessary information,” Zen-Ruffinen said. “Neither the audit committee or myself got access … and I am supposed to be in charge of the administration and accounts of FIFA.”

  Blatter forbade Zen-Ruffinen from presiding over the meeting and said, “He is in big trouble.” Blatter said the finances of FIFA were in good order and he added, “Wait awhile till I come up with ideas to restore the credibility of FIFA.”

  Blatter was challenged for reelection by Issa Hayatou of Cameroon, who was trying to assemble a third-world bloc in the upcoming FIFA elections. FIFA now had 205 participating nations, and Hayatou, as president of the African confederation, had some influence over 52 of them. Now Blatter had to work hard to demolish Hayatou. Under rare public exposure, Blatter refused to allow debate before the vote, even though delegates from England, the Netherlands, Somalia, Tunisia, and eleven other nations had requested time to speak. Blatter’s solid victory, by a 139–56 margin, was turned sour by his refusal to discuss criticism.

  David Will, the head of the suspended internal-audit committee and a FIFA vice president, was not allowed to address the congress. “I want the congress to know that the finances are in a serious situation,” Will said after the meeting. “Nobody seems to take this seriously. If we were a company, we would have to declare insolvency.”

  As usual, the United States seemed comfortable with the status quo in FIFA. As delegates rushed out for fresh air following Blatter’s banana-republic reelection, Dan Flynn, the longtime chief executive of the United States Soccer Federation, who had cast America’s vote for Blatter, stopped for an interview. Flynn said it was “fair to ask questions,” but added, “S
epp has had twenty years of running FIFA. The last four years may have had some difficulties, but we are committed to Sepp because he has always been committed to us.” Flynn then praised Blatter for having placed the 1999 Women’s World Cup in the United States. He also put in a bid for future major events to be held in America. And that’s the way it works.

  For many Americans, soccer was perceived mostly in simplistic terms of hooligan riots and scoreless draws—or a cute little recreation for children. The public (and sponsors and networks and newspapers) generally did not appear to know or care much about FIFA politics. A lot of good American support for Blatter would do eight years later, when the United States competed with Qatar to be the World Cup host in 2022.

  When compared to FIFA, the International Olympic Committee was a model of Athenian democracy. When some IOC delegates were caught accepting favors before the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, David D’Alessandro, the head of the John Hancock insurance company, warned the IOC to clean up its act if it wanted his company’s sponsorship dollars. There was no evidence of a single David D’Alessandro in the orbit of FIFA.

  Some delegates booed and whistled as Blatter shamelessly triumphed over Hayatou. A few left the meeting openly criticizing Blatter. When questioned about the election and the state of FIFA, Blatter said, “The result of the election is that there are no questions.” He added, “The people cannot lie. The people love the truth.” It was a stunning exposure of a leader who was being accused of mismanagement by many officials close to him, and who would not tolerate public dialogue.

  * * *

  FIFA’s money machine did more than collaborate with rogue outfits like ISL and engender charges of bribery of voting members. FIFA also devoured its greatest asset, its players. This was clearly evident as the defending champions from France arrived in Seoul for a friendly with the indefatigable Reds of South Korea.