The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  “When you’re on the bench, that’s just one of the hardest places to be, because you can’t really affect the game,” MacMillan says. “So for me, I was watching the game and realizing Joy’s open on the near post. I kept seeing her on the near post—there was this massive gap.”

  In the 65th minute, with the game stopped as the Americans lined up for a corner kick, MacMillan came on as a substitute for Julie Foudy. At first, MacMillan thought Tiffeny Milbrett would take the corner kick, but Milbrett waved her over. MacMillan’s first touch of the game would be serving a corner kick into the box.

  She looked for Joy Fawcett.

  “I just knew Joy was going to be there,” MacMillan says. “I drilled the ball into that near post and, as soon as it left my foot, I knew.”

  Fawcett redirected the ball into the goal with her head and the Americans were back on top. MacMillan ran straight to Fawcett for a hug.

  Live television cameras caught Bill and Hillary Clinton celebrating the goal in a suite overlooking the field at Jack Kent Cooke Stadium. They laughed as they clapped, almost in disbelief of the USA’s tenacity.

  “To come off the bench, and have that be my first touch, and get the ball to Joy, who was my rock on the team, I couldn’t get to her fast enough to celebrate,” MacMillan says. Joy Fawcett, a defender, was, along with Overbeck, the only other mother on the team. Fawcett had two daughters, and she raised them around her teammates, reinforcing the family atmosphere of the national team.

  After finishing the job against Germany, the U.S. blew past Brazil in the semifinals, winning 2–0. At the Brazil game, the U.S. women played in front of 73,123 fans, and by the time D.C. United, the men’s pro club team, took the field as part of a doubleheader—an extra measure to ensure the games could attract crowds—60,000 people got up and left. It was clear who the crowds had come to see.

  With that, the Americans had landed their spot in the final versus China.

  * * *

  Once the World Cup final arrived, the U.S. women’s national team players were more popular than they had ever been by orders of magnitude. Suddenly, more people were showing up to watch team practices than had come to games one year before. Police barricades had to keep the fans at bay.

  Tiffeny Milbrett remembers getting off the team bus in Los Angeles with Michelle Akers and joking to her teammate: “Whoa, now we know how it feels to be animals in the zoo.”

  Everything the players of the national team did elicited a reaction from the massive crowds that came to watch them train. The smallest moments would prompt whispers or laughter or cheers from the crowd.

  “There were so many people that were so interested in us,” Milbrett says. “That to me was the weirdest feeling and pivotal moment to say: Wow, I’ve never experienced attention like this before. That was the moment you realize these people were here for you and they were interested in you.”

  As the U.S. national team continued through the tournament, the attention grew bigger and bigger, which meant new experiences along the way. One of them happened during the group stage in Chicago. One fan, a girl maybe around 10 years old, chased the team bus for blocks until the players finally urged the bus driver to stop. They figured they should reward the young fan for her effort somehow.

  “That girl probably chased us for four or five blocks before we finally yelled to the driver, Stop, stop, stop!” Shannon MacMillan remembers. “We were like, What should we give her? Brandi pulls out her shoes and tosses them to the poor girl. She probably had a heart attack right there when the bus pulled away.”

  A women’s soccer event that started with doubts about ticket sales, followed by worries about how long the excitement could last, was showing no signs of slowing down.

  “Halfway through the tournament, you started to see it snowball,” says Julie Foudy. “I thought maybe Giants Stadium was a one-off, and we were worried about how we could sustain those levels. But you just saw the frenzy escalate as the tournament went on. We’d have 2,000 people lining the practice field in this frenzy, just screaming at us. That’s when we started figuring out we had hit a nerve.”

  By the end, the players knew the stakes. The 1999 Women’s World Cup final against China had legitimately become a major event both in the U.S. and globally.

  At the time, diplomatic relations were tense because the U.S. had bombed a Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese citizens, which the U.S. government said was an accident. JP Dellacamera, the play-by-play announcer for ESPN and ABC during the tournament, remembers there being an unusual heightened sense of concern.

  “The night before the final we had a big production meeting and we were told, god forbid if something happens, make sure you guys are safe—safety is the first priority—but if you’re in a position where you can help describe what’s going on, then that’s what we expect you do,” he recalls. “I remember thinking that was unusual.”

  For the players, the final got off to a rocky start because television scheduling left almost no time between the third-place match and the final. When Norway and Brazil were stuck at a 0–0 deadlock after 90 minutes, instead of the third-place game continuing into extra time, as it was supposed to, it went straight to penalty kicks. But that still took longer than the TV schedule allowed, and while that game dragged on, the Americans started to warm up for the final inside the stadium in sneakers, instead of on the grass in cleats, as they were supposed to.

  “The bulk of our pregame warm-up was in our running shoes on cement underneath the Rose Bowl bleachers,” Tiffeny Milbrett recalls. “But the third-place game didn’t even get to extra time—they had to go to PKs immediately because of TV time. How unfair is that?”

  The American players needed to ignore that disruption to their usual routine and forge ahead. They quickly were shuffled out on the field, where the pop-rock band Hanson sung the national anthem, jets raced overhead, and the whistle blew for kickoff.

  In front of a record crowd of 90,185 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California—the largest ever to see a women’s sporting event—the players of the U.S. women’s national team were about to play the biggest game of their lives.

  * * *

  The match started like many high-stakes finals: It was tight, it was scoreless, and both sides just wanted to minimize mistakes. The occasion was huge, and neither side was willing to push too hard and risk giving up a goal on a counterattack.

  Michelle Akers was a marauding presence in the midfield as she sniffed out potential attacks and shut them down. Her teammates nicknamed her Mufasa after the Lion King character, ostensibly because of her wild mane of curly hair, but it was also fitting for the way she prowled the midfield and pounced after the ball. China managed just two shots on goal after 90 minutes.

  As Akers put it in 1999: “I play hard and people just bounce off me or I go through them. I don’t notice it until after I get hit in the face.”

  But seconds before the fulltime whistle blew, forcing the 0–0 match into extra time, Akers collided with Briana Scurry in the box on a corner kick. Akers crumbled to the turf and stayed down in a heap.

  She was woozy from an apparent concussion and dehydration. Doctors checked on her to see if she needed to be taken to the hospital, but either way, she needed to come out of the game. She, of course, tried to convince the coaching staff otherwise and to let her keep playing.

  “That’s Michelle,” assistant coach Lauren Gregg says. “She would die for this team. We had our physician assess her, and the decision was that her health was in jeopardy. There was nothing that would allow us to put her on the field.”

  As extra time started, Akers was on a stretcher in the U.S. locker room, with an IV in each arm and an oxygen mask over her face.

  For as tough as Akers was, she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that sapped her of energy when she did the most mundane tasks. She fought her way through it, but her concussion left her especially woozy. Out of sorts, she kept asking for the score
, even though the game was on a TV that she was watching in the locker room.

  Back on the field, losing their midfield enforcer changed the way the Americans played. Sara Whalen replaced Akers and took Joy Fawcett’s spot on the back line while Fawcett shifted to defensive midfield. The Chinese looked revived by the change. They attacked more freely through the midfield and found another three shots on goal during extra time.

  One of those shots should have sealed a victory for China. Ten minutes into extra time, China executed a perfect corner kick: a lofted ball toward the top of a six-yard box followed by a driving header toward the far post. Briana Scurry, stationed at the near post, had been beat, and there was no way she was going to get a hand on the ball.

  “I was like: Uh-oh, the ball’s behind me,” Scurry said after the game.

  If the ball went into the net, China would win because, at the time, the golden-goal rule was in effect: the first goal scored in an overtime period would be the game-winner.

  Kristine Lilly, meanwhile, was stationed at the far post, her feet on the goal line. It was a job assigned to her on corner kicks. As the ball went across the face of goal for the corner, she drifted away from her post, but as the ball headed past Scurry and toward the open net, Lilly was in the exact perfect spot to lunge upward and head the ball away from the goal.

  It was pure instinct. Lilly single-handedly denied China a game-winning goal.

  “It happened like that,” Lilly later said, snapping her fingers. “I did not even know what was going on.”

  The Americans held on after that and, with the score stuck at 0–0 at the end of extra time, the match would be decided on penalty kicks—a fitting final act of drama for a World Cup full of thrilling performances.

  * * *

  Penalty kicks. PKs. Spot kicks. A penalty shootout. Whatever nomenclature you choose, deciding a game via penalty kicks is an excruciating and oftentimes cruel twist in soccer. Some call it a crapshoot based on pure luck. Others think it’s a legitimate test of skill. But a penalty shootout is very different than the 120 minutes of soccer that precede it.

  The penalty shootout is all about psychological tricks.

  There’s not enough time for a goalkeeper to read a shot and react after the ball is kicked, so they often choose a side before the player even shoots and then lunge in the chosen direction as the player connects their foot to the ball. Goalkeepers often memorize which side certain players prefer and run through the odds before they choose which side to lunge for.

  Most of the time, goalkeepers stretch their arms out in goal as the player walks up to the spot—the goalkeeper wants to look bigger and thus make the goal look smaller. Maybe, then, the shooter will become rattled or overthink the placement of the ball.

  For the kickers, the key when shooting is to not give away whether they are opening up their stance to shoot outside, or whether they’re shooting across their body inside. Some players might stutter-step in their run-up to the ball to throw the goalkeeper off her rhythm. Some will make eye contact with the goalkeeper to show they are fearless, while many will block the goalkeeper out and focus only on the ball.

  Lauren Gregg helped Tony DiCicco prepare the team to take penalty kicks, and she had a journal full of penalty kick observations just in case of a moment like this.

  Michelle Akers would’ve taken a penalty kick, but her concussion left Gregg with a choice: Should Brandi Chastain take her spot or Julie Foudy? Gregg was worried because earlier that year, in a friendly against China and goalkeeper Gao Hong, Chastain had a penalty kick and missed—it went off the crossbar. Chastain also tended to kick to the right side with her right foot. If Chastain was going to take another kick against the same Chinese goalkeeper in a World Cup final, it would need to be an attempt that Hong would not expect.

  Gregg leaned toward choosing Foudy, but DiCicco had an idea—one that might be enough to throw China’s goalkeeper off. Could Chastain take it with her weaker foot? DiCicco told Gregg to find out.

  “I went up to her and said, We want you to take a kick, but are you comfortable taking it with your left foot? She said, Hell yeah! She wanted it,” Gregg remembers.

  Chastain had never taken a penalty kick with her left foot before, but she didn’t hesitate. She didn’t really know why she was asked to kick it with her left foot—all she knew was that she was ready.

  Mia Hamm was less enthusiastic about the shootout. She was the star of the team and arguably the team’s best, most reliable player. But she tried to get out of being one of the first five penalty kick-takers.

  Hamm looked Gregg in the eyes and said: “I don’t think I should take the kick.”

  “I remember it like it was yesterday,” Gregg says. “I remember thinking that I cannot flinch a muscle and I cannot show anything but a mirror of confidence to this kid.”

  Gregg was surprised by Hamm’s self-doubt in taking a kick but played it cool. She told the player: “We need you. You’re one of the best goal-scorers in the world.” Hamm nodded and said, “Okay.”

  The Americans and the Chinese went back and forth exchanging successful attempts for four straight kicks. Someone needed to miss eventually to break the deadlock.

  For Briana Scurry, just one save would’ve been good enough. For a goalkeeper in a penalty-kick shootout, getting even just one save is considered a huge success. Saving one shot means giving your own team of kickers the chance to pull ahead and win. Whether the goalkeeper’s team wins or loses, if she saves one penalty kick, everyone will say the goalkeeper did her job.

  As one of her psychological tricks, Scurry never watched her own team during penalty kicks. During the 1999 World Cup final, she waited to hear the crowd’s reaction to tell her it was time to go back into the goal.

  As she puts it now: “Whether we scored or not is not relevant to me at the time because it’s not in my control, and I don’t let it filter into my thinking.”

  Scurry also never looked at the kicker until she stepped into the goal and was ready for the shot. But when Liu Ying, China’s third kicker, stepped up to the spot, something felt different.

  “I was walking from my place where I wait into the goal and something in my mind said, Look,” Scurry remembers now. “I looked at her and I knew she was the one. How do I know that? I felt like—and I still feel this way 20 years later—I just knew. There’s certain times in sports where you have a surreal, otherworldly feeling about stuff. I had an audible sound in my mind that said, This is it. I just knew.”

  “Players talk about being in the zone and the net looking big or whatever, and it was like that,” she adds. “It didn’t matter where she kicked it—I was going to save it.”

  Liu Ying took her shot, and Scurry lunged out to her left and palmed the ball away. As the crowd let out a deafening roar, Scurry erupted with an explosion of fist pumping and screaming as she walked back to her place to wait while kicks proceeded. Suddenly, the Americans had a chance to pull ahead.

  Lilly went next, putting the U.S. ahead, but China answered. Hamm followed, looking nervy but burying her shot, and again China scored. It came down to Brandi Chastain, the last kicker in the USA’s rotation. If she made it, the U.S. would win and become the biggest success story of perhaps a generation. If not, China could still come back and win it.

  “It was such a heavy moment,” Chastain says. “The feeling was that the future of women’s soccer depends on the outcome of this game.”

  Chastain settled the ball at the spot, took a few steps back, and waited for the whistle to blow. When it did, she waited for a moment and then ran up to kick the ball. With her left foot, she fired it across her body to the right side of the goal. The Chinese goalkeeper, Gao Hong, was diving the correct way, but Chastain’s placement was too good. The ball tucked just inside the post and out of Hong’s reach.

  The ball hit the back of the goal loudly enough to make a loud thump. And then the Rose Bowl filled with the roar from the crowd in unison.

  The U.S. had ju
st won the 1999 Women’s World Cup. Chastain ripped her shirt off without a moment’s hesitation, waved it around her head, and then dropped to her knees. The image of her on her knees behind the penalty spot, both fists in the air—jersey clenched in her right fist—was captured by photographers. It instantly became one of the most iconic images in American sports.

  The players rushed Chastain, who lunged to her feet and pointed in the air with a huge smile spread across her face. Michelle Akers, still woozy, yanked the IVs from her arm and charged out onto the field to celebrate.

  The players of the national team were world champions again—and this time, everyone knew about it.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Babe City, Ladies and Gentlemen”

  There was one specific moment when Briana Scurry knew something had changed for her after the 1999 World Cup.

  She was still in Pasadena, California, where the team had won the trophy in front of a record crowd at the Rose Bowl and for a record TV viewing audience. ABC said 40 million people watched some or all of the final, and the overnight TV ratings were more than double the network’s expectations. The national team had just finished its media obligations for the moment—they were the stars of a parade down Disneyland’s Main Street the morning after the final and were quickly being booked by everyone from David Letterman to the White House.

  With some downtime, Scurry was on her way to lunch with friends who were in town for the tournament. She wasn’t wearing any U.S. Soccer–branded gear, and she certainly wasn’t wearing goalkeeper gloves and cleats—there was no obvious hint as to who she was. But as she walked down a sidewalk, she heard a man yelling her name.

  “Scurry! Scurry! SCURRY!” The man slammed on his brakes in the middle of the street, put the car in park, opened his door, and ran over to her.

  “I just had to come over and shake your hand and tell you that you were awesome,” he told her. His car was still sitting in the street with the door hanging open and cars were waiting behind. The man looked close to Scurry’s own age at the time, 27.