The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  “What do you mean?” Foudy asked him, confused.

  That’s how new and strange the concept of the U.S. women’s national team was. The players who were on it didn’t even know what it was. All Foudy knew was that she kept getting call-ups—first to the state team, then to the regional team, and finally to the national team.

  But before Foudy knew it, she was on a plane to China for the first-ever FIFA-hosted women’s tournament. There, the U.S. beat Japan in their opening match and then settled for draws against Sweden and Czechoslovakia, which allowed them to advance to the knockout round. But in the quarterfinal, Norway beat them, 1–0, and eventually went on to win the whole tournament.

  Three weeks after the Women’s Invitational ended, FIFA announced it had been successful enough that the first women’s world championship tournament would be held in 1991.

  They called the event the “1st FIFA World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&M’s Cup.” FIFA worried the women’s event might not be worthy of the “World Cup” label. (They’ve since retroactively bestowed it with the “Women’s World Cup” name.) The matches were also planned to be 10 minutes shorter than normal soccer matches, running just 80 minutes each, an indication of FIFA’s scaled-back expectations.

  The name was confusing and the rule changes were insulting, but the national team was excited to have a world championship to compete in.

  “We were acutely aware of the men’s World Cup, so we were just waiting for our chance,” Dorrance says.

  The national team was getting better on the field—they won all six of the games they played in 1990—but that’s not to say everything had been figured out quite yet by the time the first Women’s World Cup got close.

  At the 1991 Women’s World Cup qualification tournament in Haiti, the players of the national team were given white roses by U.S. Soccer officials to throw out to the spectators.

  “We walked out to throw these roses to the crowd and we tossed them into the stands,” remembers midfielder Tracey Bates, who played on the team from 1987 to 1991. “As we turned around, they threw them back at us. I just remember covering my head and running.”

  The effort to win over the Haitian crowd didn’t go as planned—Dorrance urged his players to shake it off and focus on the first game—but by the end of qualification, the crowd was cheering for the U.S. national team anyway. The Americans outscored their opponents 49–0 over five games in Haiti. (Yes, they scored 49 goals, with 12–0 wins over both Mexico and Martinique and 10–0 wins versus both Haiti and Trinidad & Tobago.)

  “I remember in the local newspaper the next day, it said something like: The Americans tried to seduce us with white roses, but instead they seduced us with their style of play,” Bates recalls.

  The women’s game was still new, and the U.S. Soccer Federation was still figuring out how to navigate it. Alan Rothenberg, who was elected president of the federation in August 1990, admits he didn’t know what to do with the women’s side of the game when he first came into office.

  “The blunt truth is, I didn’t even know the women’s side of the game existed in the United States at that time,” he says.

  Luckily, Anson Dorrance and his assistant coaches, Tony DiCicco and Lauren Gregg, had been putting together a competitive team, even on a shoestring budget. As the U.S. women’s national team was forming its own identity, it looked to the styles it had encountered elsewhere in the world: Germany’s combination play, Norway’s direct attack, and so on.

  When the first Women’s World Cup finally arrived in 1991, the Americans were not the all-around best team. While women’s soccer was still in its infancy around the world, the teams from Europe had technical skills and tactical acumen the Americans did not. But what the Americans discovered in that tournament is something they’ve held on to ever since: a winning mentality.

  “If you would’ve compared us player for player, we might’ve been a bit more athletic, but it was really our mentality,” says Shannon Higgins, a UNC midfielder who earned 51 caps for the U.S. from 1987 to 1991. “All of us, we had to fight for what we got. We had a mentality that we weren’t going to lose and we were going to fight.”

  The national team steamrolled through the tournament. They won every game and outscored their opponents 25–5 across all six games. The closest match came in the final, when the U.S. beat Norway, 2–1.

  It was a standout tournament for April Heinrichs, a forward from Colorado. She scored four goals and drew on her own experience as the head coach of the women’s soccer team at the University of Maryland to be an effective captain of the national team.

  “My role is to be the liaison between what the players want and need and feel, and getting that message to the coach,” she once explained. “Occasionally, I help out with coaching decisions: When should we practice? How long should we go?”

  Heinrichs helped mold the captain’s role—she was the national team’s first captain, having been appointed to the job by coach Anson Dorrance in 1986. Dorrance coached Heinrichs when she was a student at UNC before the national team existed, and it impressed him how she didn’t ease her way into the team or try to make friends. As he once put it: “She came in and crushed everyone.”

  “The thing I admired about April is, she wanted to be liked, wanted to be on a team that got along, but she wouldn’t sacrifice her level of excellence to be like everyone else, wonderfully mediocre,” Dorrance said. “We took her mentality and framed the culture of the national team around her.”

  Back stateside, virtually no one knew about the first Women’s World Cup or the fact that the USA won it. The games weren’t shown on television, email was not in widespread use yet, and landline phone calls were expensive, so players sent loved ones faxes to let them know how the tournament was going. Back home, recipients distributed them like newsletters, the early 1990s equivalent of status updates on Facebook.

  Midfielder Julie Foudy quips now: “When we won in ’91, we came back and no one even knew about it. There were two people at the airport to greet us—it was our bus driver and our operations guy.”

  The players did get some recognition from U.S. Soccer, though. After they became the first-ever world champions in women’s soccer, the federation sent them all cards in the mail.

  The note inside went something along the lines of: Congratulations on your success. We’re so incredibly proud of what you and your teammates have achieved. You’re changing women’s soccer forever. Enclosed is a $500 bonus for winning the World Cup.

  When Brandi Chastain saw that $500 check, all she could think was: “Cha-ching!”

  “I thought, Whoa, this is incredible! And now when I look back and tell this story today, people are like, That is horrible,” Chastain says. “And it was horrible, to be honest, in hindsight. But in that moment, I remember thinking how lucky we were, because I didn’t know anyone who was doing what we did on the national team to make money.”

  That’s right: The national team’s bonus for winning a world championship in 1991 was $500 each, and at the time, the players were thrilled about it—even though FIFA offered prize money of around $50 million for teams at the men’s World Cup. The players were thrilled because there wasn’t any money in women’s soccer, and they knew it.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I Just Want to Play Soccer”

  It was December 1992. Mia Hamm, a 20-year-old student, was sitting at the Rathskeller, a bar just a stone’s throw from the University of North Carolina campus.

  Nicknamed “The Rat,” it looked every bit the college bar it was. Previous patrons had scrawled their names or other graffiti all over the booths, and tables had old-time jukeboxes that looked as though they didn’t work—and no one wasted their loose change trying.

  Hamm was with her coach from UNC and the U.S. national team, Anson Dorrance. Like many of the national team players, Hamm started representing her country while she was still in college—it was Dorrance who scouted her to join UNC and, when he became the
national team coach, named her to the 1991 World Cup team. She asked him to join her that day because she was meeting with a representative from Nike at The Rat.

  The meeting was unexpected, to be sure. At the time, the company had barely positioned itself in American soccer and had no presence in women’s soccer. But something told Joe Elsmore, an enterprising young employee at Nike, that he should talk to Hamm about a possible endorsement deal.

  Elsmore moonlighted as a referee, and it was while he was officiating UNC games that he got to know Hamm. He was the referee at the 1992 NCAA championship game—North Carolina walloped Duke, 9–1, and Hamm led the scoring with a hat trick. After the game, Elsmore told her she should talk to Nike before she made any decisions about her future, and a week later she called him to set up the meeting.

  He didn’t have a specific plan for the sit-down. He worked on the retail side of Nike at the time, not in marketing. But there was something special about Hamm. She was the best player on the field, yet she always put her teammates first and deflected the spotlight. She was down-to-earth, spoke with a soft shyness, and blended in—just another brown-haired, ponytailed all-American girl—but she also had an elusive star quality.

  “Mia, what’s important to you?” he asked her at the Rathskeller. “What do you want to do in life?”

  Her answer was simple: “I just want to play soccer.”

  But there was no clear way for her to do that. National team players weren’t paid more than a small stipend at the time. There was no professional league for her to join in order to make a living wage.

  Elsmore slid a small square napkin in front of him, pulled out a pen, and asked Hamm to list off her expenses to live. Her car insurance, laundry, groceries—anything she had to be able to pay for went on the napkin. At the end, the total came out to about $12,000 a year.

  The meeting ended with no promises, but Elsmore took the napkin with him to his office at Nike and set out to sell his bosses on the idea that Mia Hamm was worth signing as a Nike athlete.

  “I kind of did it on a whim,” admits Elsmore, now the director of North American soccer marketing at Nike. “I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen. I was in sales and just transitioning into marketing at that point. I talked to many Nike executives, and I said, I know we’re not really in soccer that deeply, and we’re definitely not in women’s soccer, but there’s something about this woman that Nike needs to be connected with.”

  It took some convincing to get his bosses on board, but Elsmore eventually came back with an offer: He could offer enough to cover everything listed on the napkin plus a bit more, and Nike would sign her after she graduated college in 1994 so it wouldn’t affect her NCAA eligibility.

  It was a huge moment, not just for Mia Hamm but for women’s soccer. Though Hamm sought Anson Dorrance’s input, he says he left the decision entirely up to her.

  “She didn’t need my opinion to guide her one way or the other,” Dorrance says. “I really trusted her, and I knew she was going to be fine.”

  For the first time ever, a female soccer player wasn’t going to need to think about getting a “real” job after college or getting financial help from family so she could keep playing the sport she loved.

  Michelle Akers, however, was the first women’s soccer player to sign an endorsement deal that was worth more than free gear or a couple hundred dollars. Unlike Hamm, who had her deal waiting for her at college graduation, Akers’s deal was a long-coming payoff she could’ve never expected. Akers was 25 years old when Umbro signed her, and by that point she had already patchworked her finances for years to be able to play, even though she was the best player in the world.

  Akers was hard not to notice on the field: at 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds, she was like a wrecking ball on the field when she wanted to be. She had curly golden-brown locks that she let flow freely when she played, unlike all her U.S. teammates, who always put their hair back with a hair tie.

  Her endorsement deal wasn’t too far behind Hamm’s in terms of its compensation. But it came about in a very different way than Hamm’s did.

  It started with Mick Hoban, a former pro soccer player who bounced around small-time American clubs before finishing at the Portland Timbers in 1978, a time when soccer offered meager pay. He was working at Umbro in 1991 when he saw Akers speaking at an annual conference for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association in Arizona.

  In her speech to an audience of executives from the largest sporting apparel companies in the world, Akers used her platform to make an impassioned plea: Please invest in women’s soccer. As she talked about how difficult it was as a female soccer player to make ends meet, it struck a chord with Hoban, who remembered scraping by in the 1970s.

  “When this person steps up, who is known as the dominant player in the world, and she’s telling us a story about how she’s having to piece together a career, it resonated,” Hoban says. “She’s pleading: I just want to be able to play. It paralleled what I had experienced.”

  Before the trade show ended that evening, Hoban approached Akers and gave her his business card. He told her: “We’re interested in getting involved in the women’s soccer movement, and we think you’d be a great spokesperson for it.” Weeks later, Akers had an offer to be Umbro’s first paid female endorsee and the first one in women’s soccer.

  It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it meant Akers could keep doing what she loved. Akers, a fiercely passionate competitor, had lasted longer than some players who couldn’t keep scraping by—players who hung on because they loved it but eventually had to get “real jobs.”

  After all, there was never any expectation for the earliest members of the U.S. women’s national team that they’d make any money—not when Hamm started, not when Akers started, not when any of them started. The possibility of making a living from soccer—professional league contracts, endorsement deals, bonuses for World Cups or Olympic Games—never even entered the players’ minds.

  They played, quite simply, because they loved it.

  * * *

  There were few perks for being on the national team in those days. Even traveling the world was less exciting than it sounded.

  When the U.S. players took their flight to the 1991 World Cup in China, they were confused as to why they were flying the opposite way around the world. In an apparent money-saving move, the plane from the U.S. stopped to pick up the Swedish and Norwegian teams along the way.

  “Then when we went home, instead of just crossing the Pacific Ocean, we went all the way back around to drop everybody off and then landed in New York,” remembers Brandi Chastain, who first became a national team regular in 1986.

  Shannon Higgins, a member of the 1991 World Cup–winning team, says the players didn’t have their own uniforms for years—they wore hand-me-downs from the men’s national team that didn’t fit. Higgins, all 5-foot-something, 120 pounds of her, wore No. 3, which meant she had to wear the uniform of whichever player was No. 3 on the men’s team. That was John Doyle, a 6-foot-3, 200-plus-pound giant. The 1991 World Cup was the first time that the women didn’t have to wear old men’s uniforms.

  While the men’s team got USA-branded tracksuits in the country’s signature red, white, and blue colors, the women each got a purple-and-green jacket from U.S. Soccer. The players weren’t exactly sure why that’s what the federation gave them, but they were something and they cherished them.

  “We all came to the conclusion that it was the last thing they had at the warehouse,” says Chastain, who played for a boys’ soccer team in junior high because her school in San Jose, California, didn’t have a girls’ team.

  Before the Women’s World Cup or the Olympics came into the picture, the national team actively looked for exhibition games known as “friendly matches” they could play. The goal wasn’t just to get better—the games also helped the national team figure out where it stood against the rest of the world, because there were no major competitions. But there wasn’t much mone
y to do it.

  “The early days were sort of thin for us in terms of commitment from U.S. Soccer to develop the team,” says Anson Dorrance, who was the national team coach from 1986 to 1994. “Finances were a huge issue for all of us, but our enthusiasm was certainly not lacking.”

  Higgins, a native of Kent, Washington, remembers playing friendlies in France at the same time the men’s under-23 team was there. The women’s senior national team stayed in a sort of bed-and-breakfast lodge where the German woman who owned it would cook meals for them and the players all slept in one giant room together. The men’s U-23 team stayed at a nearby hotel.

  When the women’s team went out for a run one day, they passed the U-23 men’s bus—it was a luxury liner that dwarfed the tiny shuttle bus the women were carted around in.

  “We’d look at them and say, Gee, can we put our luggage in your bus?” Higgins remembers, laughing.

  The players weren’t upset about the treatment they received, though. They didn’t know any different and couldn’t have expected more. After all, the women’s team was still new and the U.S. men’s team had existed decades longer, playing its first official match in 1916.

  “You never knew if the electricity was going to be on at the hotel or if you were going to get a shower, but no one was high-strung,” Chastain says, laughing. “We played cards by candlelight. We took showers in the pool. We had flooding in the bathroom.”

  “It was fantastic,” Chastain adds with a wistful hint of nostalgia. “It was exactly how it was supposed to be. How do you learn to be resilient as a team without going through things like that?”

  The players also didn’t make any money, though. The sorts of deals Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers signed were rarities, and some players had difficulty making ends meet.

  While each player on the men’s team got a $10,000 bonus for qualifying for the 1990 World Cup, the women received only a couple of T-shirts for qualifying for the 1991 Women’s World Cup. The shirts featured the logo of Budweiser, a U.S. Soccer sponsor, and the players sarcastically called them their “$5,000 T-shirts.”