The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  They would have to somehow do it without Michelle Akers, their heartbeat in the midfield. A shoulder injury and her ongoing battle with chronic fatigue syndrome caught up with her. Three weeks before the Olympics, she announced her retirement at age 34.

  Akers had been considering retirement for years, but she kept going and pushed for a spot on the 2000 Olympics team because, as she later put it, “I would beat myself up with second-guessing for the rest of my life.” She made the team but determined she couldn’t actually play on. She left as the national team’s second all-time leading scorer, behind only Mia Hamm, with 105 goals and 37 assists.

  “I found myself at the end—physically and mentally—with a body ready for a M*A*S*H unit,” she said.

  Otherwise, the squad was mostly the same one that won the World Cup less than a year earlier—but there were some notable changes.

  Briana Scurry had lived it up a little too much after the 1999 World Cup victory. By the time she returned to the national team fold, she had gained 20 pounds and lost several inches on her jumping ability. She made the 2000 Olympic team but lost the starting job to Siri Mullinix.

  In addition to the three 1999 World Cup players she cut as soon as she took over as coach, Heinrichs also cut veteran midfielder Tisha Venturini. Meanwhile, two young players were added: midfielder Michelle French and defender Danielle Slaton.

  The core of the team was largely intact, but Heinrichs asked players to play slightly different roles. She shifted the team away from DiCicco’s favored 4–3–3 tactical system and into a 4–4–2 that would allow the team to defend deeper and control the midfield.

  Once the games got underway in Australia, the team comfortably got out of the group stage, buoyed by a 2–0 win over rival Norway in the opening match. It seemed like a positive omen. Norway was the team that knocked the U.S. out of the 1995 World Cup and the team the Americans hated most. In fact, the 1995 loss to Norway had been the USA team’s only loss in a major tournament up to that point.

  Many of the top players on the 2000 Norwegian team had competed in the 1995 World Cup, which gave Norway bragging rights for years. Norway captain Linda Medalen gleefully told reporters: “It’s fun to beat the Americans because they get so upset, make so much noise, when they lose.”

  What irked the Americans most, however, was Norway’s celebration: “The Train.” The players would crawl on all fours in lockstep, each player holding the ankles of the player in front, chugging their way around the field as a train. That’s what they had done after winning in the 1995 World Cup as a crushed U.S. team watched.

  “You had just lost one of the biggest tournaments of your life, didn’t even get to the final, and to see your opponent rubbing it in your face like that, it made your stomach turn,” Carla Overbeck later said. The Americans had nicknamed the Norway team “the Viking Bitches” for a reason.

  So after the Americans sailed through the first rounds of the 2000 Olympics having beaten Norway once already, it was a theatric twist that the Americans were forced to face them once again in the gold-medal match.

  Again, the Americans looked dominant to start. It took them just five minutes to strike first on an exquisite Mia Hamm run. She passed the ball to Tiffeny Milbrett in the box for an easy one-touch tap-in. The U.S. looked poised to head into halftime with the lead until Norway, playing their villain role to a tee, equalized right before the break on a Gro Espeseth goal.

  By the 78th minute, Norway had worked their way into the match again and took the lead on a looping Ragnhild Gulbrandsen header. If the Americans wanted to win another world championship at the Sydney Olympics, they were running out of time to do it.

  The clock ticked past the 90th minute and into injury time. The whistle was going to blow at any moment. Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . and then Tiffeny Milbrett scored again. Deep into injury time, it was again Mia Hamm serving a ball for Milbrett to score, this time with her head, in a dramatic equalizer to put the match at 2–2.

  The American fighting spirit—the team’s core identity—was carrying them to extra time.

  “I think there was 30 seconds left in the game and everyone was going nuts,” Kristine Lilly later recalled. “It goes to overtime once again, and we were like, Okay, we’re going to win this.”

  The Americans had every reason to believe it. They were playing well, and they were built to thrive in these high-stakes, extra-time situations.

  And maybe they should have won. Maybe they would have if the game went the full 120 minutes of extra time. But 11 minutes into it, Dagny Mellgren took the ball out of the air with her arm. The play should have been whistled dead for a hand ball, but the ref let it play on and she scored. The golden-goal rule—first goal in extra time wins the game—was in effect, and the match was over. The U.S. had lost.

  Julie Foudy went to the referee afterward and told her: “You’re going to see that video and you’re going to want this back. You crushed every damn dream I ever had, so sleep well tonight.”

  After everything they had been through in the lead-up to this tournament, the national team was left with a heartbreaking loss. It was only the second time the team had lost a game in an Olympics or World Cup, and, again, it came at the hands of rival Norway.

  While the American players cried in the locker room, Norway was next door in their locker room, singing in celebration. The Americans could hear it through the wall. It stung just as badly as watching Norway do “The Train” in 1995.

  “Because of who we were as a team, the expectation was gold or nothing. If you don’t get gold, it’s a failure,” Shannon MacMillan says. “For us to come off the World Cup and take silver, it was extremely disheartening and frustrating for us. We felt like we underachieved.”

  As devastating as the loss was, the national team would eventually have something else to focus on and something to look forward to: a league of their own.

  CHAPTER 8

  “We Kind of Bled to Death”

  It was April 14, 2001, and it felt as though everyone in Washington, D.C., knew what was about to happen that day. A new women’s professional league—the Women’s United Soccer Association, or WUSA—was about to launch, and the Washington Freedom would host the Bay Area CyberRays in the inaugural match.

  Or, if Washingtonians didn’t know all that—even if they couldn’t name either of the teams—they at least knew that Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were in town playing against each other.

  The nation’s capital had been sprinkled with billboards and bus banners announcing “MIA vs. BRANDI,” while full-page ads with the same tagline ran in magazines. Television commercials depicted the pair of national team stars sizing each other up, as if getting ready for a heavyweight fight. In one such TV ad, the two players stared at each other with fiery expressions for a few seconds until Hamm broke the silence:

  “Did you get bangs?” Hamm asked.

  “Yeah,” replied a flattered Chastain.

  “Cute,” Hamm sneered back.

  The promoters of the WUSA were counting on fans to care that two of the national team’s biggest stars were facing off as opponents for the first time. Thankfully, it worked.

  As kickoff got closer, an unexpected rush of 7,000 walk-up fans overwhelmed ticket booths as frazzled sales associates tried to keep up. Another 11,000 fans had placed orders over the phone in the days prior that had to be picked up at will call, adding to the gridlock.

  Fans would still be streaming in as halftime approached. In the end, attendance tallied 34,148, easily setting a new record for the biggest crowd at a domestic women’s soccer match anywhere.

  The WUSA was not announcing itself quietly. The inaugural match was a spectacle to behold before the soccer actually started.

  Billie Jean King, the tennis legend and unofficial adviser to the national team in their legal battles, presided over the inaugural coin toss. The national anthem featured an American bald eagle swooping across the sky at the final note of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” An
d for good measure, there were also fireworks and three female parachutists.

  While Chastain and Hamm were on the field ready to play, the rest of their national teammates, who were playing for other teams in the league, were on the sidelines, where they were announced one by one to the crowd. Julie Foudy had her video camera, of course, and she filmed her teammates hugging and giggling with excitement.

  “How cool is this?!” Tiffeny Milbrett called out to her teammates.

  A ball hadn’t been kicked yet, but already a sense of accomplishment washed over the players: It was really happening. The women of the national team finally had a league to play in.

  “What I remember about that day most vividly was standing there with the captain’s armband thinking, This is a forever moment,” Chastain says.

  Quickly, Chastain and Hamm had to snap out of it. There was a game to be played. What happened on the field, however, would end up being the least memorable part about the day.

  It was a tight and chippy affair, but the soccer was disjointed as both of the brand-new teams were getting used to playing together. Scoring chances were few and far between.

  The fans seemed to grow restless, and they clearly wanted see something from the stars they watched during the World Cup. The crowd roared when Hamm put a header on top of the net in the second half, but in truth, the effort wasn’t really that close to resulting in a goal.

  Jim Gabarra was tapped as the Washington Freedom’s first head coach after he coached the World All-Stars during the 1999 indoor victory tour. He was focused on winning the match, but he admits there was more than that on his mind.

  “I felt a huge responsibility to put on a product that lived up to all the euphoria and excitement that the World Cup and the victory tour had,” he says. “We had everything in place to live up to it as far as the crowd, the presentation, the marketing, the operations, the players. Then we had this soccer game that was probably the only part that didn’t live up to it. It wasn’t a very good game. It was the kind of game you’d expect between two new teams that had never played together.”

  The game’s only goal came in the 70th minute. With Hamm dribbling through the box with the ball at her feet, Chastain stepped to her to cut off her angle. Hamm went down, and the referee pointed to the spot for a penalty kick. Brazilian forward Pretinha took it and buried it.

  It was perhaps a cheap way for the Washington Freedom to win the match. These days, no one on either side really disputes that it was a questionable penalty call from the referee. But the game got a much-needed goal and the home team won, which wasn’t the worst thing as far as script writing goes.

  When the match ended, Hamm walked over to Chastain and told her: “I’m sorry the game had to be decided like that.”

  Chastain cried. She was upset to have given up the penalty. Still to this day she believes it was an incorrect call. (“The referee blew it and gave them a penalty kick!” she jokes.)

  But her tears were about more than just losing a game. They were about the stakes, the expectation, the moment. This was everything the players had dreamed of, and now they had to make the most of it.

  After the game, Chastain told reporters: “People asked me this week, What would make this league a success? I said, We’ve already been successful. We started a league.”

  * * *

  The first women’s pro league in the United States was actually supposed to start three years earlier. After the relative success of the 1996 Olympics, where the U.S. won gold, the national team and its most ardent supporters saw a domestic league as a real possibility.

  The league, which was going to be called the National Soccer Alliance, or the NSA, had some key pieces in place by early 1997 for a launch the following year.

  Much of the national team that won gold at the 1996 Olympics had committed to playing in the NSA, including Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, and Julie Foudy. The commissioner was set to be Booth Gardner, former governor of Washington state. Anson Dorrance would chair the advisory board. Preliminary talks had started with some potentially big sponsors, including Nike and Reebok. A search was underway to identify the eight markets that would have teams on both coasts.

  “I’m not just excited about this league, I’m ecstatic,” Julie Foudy told reporters as details of the proposed league emerged in February 1997. “To remain dominant in the world, this is a necessity.”

  In the months that followed, the league picked eight cities for teams, and the budget was set at $15 million for operations. That included player salaries ranging from $15,000 to $30,000 and ticket prices averaging around $10 each. The league also secured key investments, including support from John Hendricks, the founder of the company behind the Discovery Channel.

  But while the organizers were moving ahead with the idea of the NSA league, U.S. Soccer officials were skeptical.

  “I think they are moving a little faster than prudent,” said Alan Rothenberg, the president of U.S. Soccer and chief architect of Major League Soccer, or MLS, the men’s professional league that had launched in 1996, nearly three years after its planning began.

  For everything the organizers had gotten in place, they couldn’t get one thing they really needed: the support of U.S. Soccer.

  U.S. Soccer was supposed to vote at the end of 1997 on whether the National Soccer Alliance should be sanctioned for Division I status—earning Division I status would mean the NSA was the top level of the sport, which comes with financial and competitive benefits—but instead the federation pushed back the vote. That was enough to cause some of the league’s investors to question whether a 1998 launch was realistic anymore. With the World Cup planned for 1999, it wouldn’t be able to launch that year, either.

  Just like that, with one delayed vote from U.S. Soccer, the National Soccer Alliance was essentially dead.

  “It wasn’t a lack of planning, a lack of financial support, or a lack of support of the players, and we had the interest of TV,” said Jennifer Rottenberg, a consultant who helped spearhead the effort. “I felt some tension from U.S. Soccer—actually, some hostility.”

  Some sensed the federation was reluctant to sanction a new women’s professional league while Major League Soccer, the men’s league, was still only three years old. MLS itself was struggling with attendance and attracting investors, and a women’s league threatened to compete for the same market share.

  But Rothenberg said all along he just thought it was too soon for a women’s league to launch. Asked about it now, Rothenberg says launching a women’s league before the 1999 Women’s World Cup would’ve been a mistake—the women’s league needed to be postponed until after a World Cup, just as MLS had been.

  “I had the same view of the men,” he says. “When FIFA granted the U.S. the rights to host the 1994 World Cup, they were granted on the condition that we would start a pro league. FIFA’s intention was that it would happen before the ’94 World Cup. But when I looked at everything we had to do, I convinced FIFA they needed the hype of a successful ’94 World Cup to launch it.”

  So, the idea of a women’s league would have to wait until after the national team’s stunning 1999 World Cup win. But similar animosity from U.S. Soccer and MLS would creep into the planning again the second time around.

  On one hand, some of the people who had been involved with the NSA returned to develop the WUSA, including John Hendricks, who led the effort. On the other hand, U.S. Soccer had asked MLS to submit a business plan for a women’s league.

  With the WUSA and MLS groups pitted against each other, it felt like a reprise of the recent battles between the national team and U.S. Soccer.

  “I am aware of the women’s desire to have a league of their own, and I can sympathize with that,” said Robert Contiguglia, who became president of U.S. Soccer after Rothenberg while talks of a women’s league continued. “But they have to respect our needs as well.”

  The national team players felt the federation had thought about its own needs enough already. They we
re wary of following the federation’s lead fresh off the contentious disputes over the victory tour and their contracts.

  “We didn’t trust anything U.S. Soccer did. We didn’t trust they had our best interests in mind,” says Julie Foudy. “Everything we fought for, we had to scrape and claw for. They had given $10 million for MLS and we couldn’t even get them to support a women’s league.”

  “So, whether it was right or wrong, we felt that, with them having a huge hand in MLS and being part of it, they were trying to bottle what we were doing. We were concerned that them inviting us to join forces with MLS was them actually wanting to kill us off.”

  If MLS or U.S. Soccer were worried about the WUSA hurting MLS, they had their reasons. At the time, MLS was in the midst of discussions about folding two of its teams and the overall health of the league was questionable. It was rapidly hemorrhaging money, attendance was declining, and television ratings remained dismal. Just as there was little reason for the women to believe affiliating with MLS would ensure success, there was little reason for MLS to believe the WUSA wouldn’t be a threat.

  Meanwhile, the WUSA seemed to have the momentum that MLS at the time was lacking. Hendricks had quickly managed to get deep-pocketed investors from the cable industry to run each of the eight teams. The national team had been attracting plenty of media attention, and its individual players were attracting bigger sponsors than anyone on the men’s team did.

  The national team players were the key, and the WUSA had the support of all of them. There wasn’t going to be a successful women’s league without the likes of Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, and Julie Foudy. In the end, there was nowhere for MLS to go without the support of the players.

  There would be a new women’s league, the WUSA, and John Hendricks, who believed in them even before the 1999 Women’s World Cup, would lead the way.

  * * *

  When John Hendricks and the investors involved in the WUSA put together the 200-page business plan for the league, the revenue projections were built on having 10 core corporate sponsors. They believed there were 10 categories where they could realistically find sponsors.