The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  It was the fourth international goal for 21-year-old Morgan, the national team’s youngest player, and her most important one to date. She leapt into the arms of Wambach, who caught her. The U.S. ran out the clock to victory and returned to Chicago for the second leg with some of the pressure off.

  The return leg was another close one, but an early goal from Amy Rodriguez was enough to book a spot in Germany the following summer. They almost hadn’t made it, but the U.S. was off to the 2011 World Cup.

  “That was a really good lesson,” Sundhage says now. “Don’t take anything for granted.”

  * * *

  Mike Lyons, the first head coach of the new WPS franchise in Boca Raton, Florida, knew immediately there was something unusual about his new boss, Dan Borislow.

  After going back and forth on a salary, Lyons agreed to take the job to coach the new WPS franchise that was starting in 2011. As the conversation was wrapping up, he realized they hadn’t discussed the exchange of paperwork.

  “What about a contract?” Lyons asked.

  “You don’t need a contract,” Borislow responded.

  “How do I know I’m going to get paid?”

  “You’ll get paid. You don’t need to worry about that. I don’t deal in contracts—I deal in handshakes.”

  Lyons thought that was odd. Borislow ran a huge company. The company was built around a device Borislow invented that could connect people’s phone lines to their computers to make unlimited free calls. The device, which made him hundreds of millions of dollars, was called magicJack.

  When Borislow took over the Washington Freedom and moved the team to South Florida, in a strange decision, he renamed the team magicJack. But Lyons went ahead with the offer to coach magicJack since the $80,000 salary he negotiated was more than any other team in WPS could pay him.

  Before Lyons ever arrived in Florida or met Dan Borislow, he went straight from his hometown in New Jersey to the 2011 college draft in Baltimore. He called Borislow to talk about the plan for the draft, which included star players like Alex Morgan and Christen Press. As Lyons remembers it, Borislow immediately started screaming at him.

  “You need to get the players I want! Don’t fuck this up!” Borislow shouted.

  “I’ll get any players you want, but don’t you think you should tell me who they are first?” Lyons asked. He hadn’t been given a list, even though Borislow was acting as if he had.

  “I thought, This guy’s wacky,” Lyons says. “He’s screaming at me to get specific players and he’s never told me who they were.”

  At first, no one at the draft realized Lyons was there on behalf of magicJack. There had been no announcement or press release about the coaching hire, and Lyons was prohibited by Borislow from talking to the media.

  If those were the first hints that Dan Borislow and his money weren’t going to save WPS, they certainly weren’t the last. But the league had little choice but to take a chance on the eccentric businessman. Hopes were high for the 2011 season of WPS—it was a Women’s World Cup year and a national spotlight could help. But, with teams folding left and right, it needed someone with deep pockets to provide some stability.

  The Washington Freedom, which had been owned by John Hendricks for a decade since the WUSA launched, had been struggling. By 2011, it was time for the franchise to be sold or fold. The Chicago Red Stars were on their way out and, if the Freedom folded too, WPS couldn’t survive having just five teams.

  There was urgency to find a new team owner to buy the Freedom. Dan Borislow, who had a daughter who played soccer, had the deep pockets to commit, and there weren’t any other options. With a recession afoot and poor optics from other vanished WPS teams, interest from quality investors was thin, but Borislow seemed credible—at least on paper.

  “When someone comes to you out of the blue and he has more than enough money to commit and he has a daughter playing soccer—the usual story that sounds like it makes sense—I think people were just thrilled,” says Arnim Whisler, owner of the Chicago Red Stars.

  Borislow promised to keep the team in Washington, D.C., and call the team the Freedom. But as the league moved forward and the transition went into motion, Borislow began to chip away at the terms of the agreement. One day he might want to move the team to Florida, he said—not right now, but he’d like the right to move the team. Once the league agreed, he immediately moved the team to Boca Raton. That’s how the Washington Freedom disappeared and magicJack took over.

  From there, the situation unraveled quickly.

  First, it was small things—the team had no website, didn’t issue any press releases, and conducted no marketing. MagicJack played their games at a stadium with only a few hundred seats, well under the minimum 5,000 capacity that WPS required.

  MagicJack’s home field was also too narrow, according to WPS rules. FAU Soccer Stadium, where the team played, had plenty of space to be regulation size, but Borislow wanted it narrower to help his team’s attack. In preseason, Lyons had spent eight weeks working with the team, but two days before the opening match of the season, Borislow told Lyons to switch formations because he thought it would be better for striker Abby Wambach. Lyons argued with him but eventually obliged. The narrow field apparently worked, and magicJack won their first few games.

  Borislow would even have the magicJack players scrimmage his daughter’s under-13 team on a regular basis.

  “The players would say to me, What are we doing this for?” Mike Lyons says. “I said, He’s standing right there, go ask him. If he said we’re playing his daughter’s team, we were playing his daughter’s team. It didn’t matter—we had to do it.”

  Lyons, meanwhile, was fired after just three games—three straight wins—after a confrontation with Wambach. They disagreed about an injury substitution and Lyons lashed out at Wambach, whom Borislow had an affinity for.

  “You wouldn’t be on the field if it was up to me!” Lyons told her.

  “So why don’t you bench me?” he says Wambach responded.

  Lyons pointed to Dan Borislow: “He won’t let me.”

  After the game, a 2–0 win over the Atlanta Beat, Lyons was fired. Borislow kept paying him for eight weeks anyway and never replaced him. Instead, Borislow said magicJack would be collectively coached by the players themselves and Wambach was named player-coach.

  But there were also the big things—the sorts of things no one could let go and ignore.

  There were no medical staff or supplies to take care of players. At times, magicJack players would have to ask for treatment from the opposing team’s medical staff. One player, Ella Masar, said after she broke her nose, Borislow wouldn’t let her go to the hospital. When she protested, he offered to take her, and then he took her to dinner with his friends instead. Weeks later, an MRI scan found her left nostril had collapsed.

  Some players alleged he made sexually inappropriate comments toward them. Others say he was just rude and abusive, telling them they were “fucking idiots.” The WPS Players Union eventually filed a grievance with the front office over his comments toward players, including allegations that Borislow had told the players to call him “Daddy.”

  The WPS front office’s own interactions with Borislow hadn’t exactly been cordial, either. At one point, he emailed Melanie Fitzgerald, the league’s operations manager:

  I don’t ask for a worthless speech from you. Have somebody

  else respond to my requests and inquiries.

  Your Boss,

  Dan

  Some of the people who dealt with Borislow say he reminded them of Donald Trump. As it turns out, the two were friends.

  Borislow brought the team to Mar-a-Lago for Easter Sunday in 2011—back when it was still just Trump’s golf club for rich people and not a place where the president of the United States held meetings with world leaders. There, the players of magicJack mingled with Trump and Rudy Giuliani, who were there eating caviar and lobster.

  But for all of Borislow’s money and
the promise it would save the cash-strapped league, all it did was make things worse. When the league sanctioned magicJack for failing to meet basic requirements, he ignored it. That happened over and over until the league finally took points away from the team, affecting their place in the standings. He still ignored it.

  Finally, WPS board members voted to terminate his ownership rights, but Borislow—who once gave Lyons a motorcycle because Lyons noticed it was sitting in the magicJack warehouse untouched—had no qualms about pouring money into a legal battle. The league, on the other hand, couldn’t afford the same. The legal mess surrounding the dispute turned into a black hole that threatened to suck up the entire league.

  There, of course, were still all of the league’s other problems, but the legal battle between Borislow and the WPS front office added strain the league couldn’t withstand. On January 30, 2012, Women’s Professional Soccer announced that the 2012 season was canceled while they figured out how to deal with the escalating fight with Borislow.

  “Everyone has been trying so hard to keep things going—considering settlement options, discussing union legal action to intervene in the lawsuit, etc., but we just couldn’t manage to make things work,” league commissioner Jennifer O’Sullivan told players in an email.

  The plan was for the league to come back. It never did.

  CHAPTER 14

  “The Americans? They Just Go for It”

  With the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany around the corner, coach Pia Sundhage was faced with the very difficult decision of choosing which players would make the roster.

  Alex Morgan was a bright young forward, but she played a very specific and narrow role for the team. She was a “super sub”—she came off the bench late in games and did her best to exploit tired defenses.

  When Sundhage would send Morgan onto the field, she never gave her any instructions. She’d tell her: “Just go for it and have fun. Go out there and score some goals.”

  It was the kind of message a youth soccer coach might tell a 10-year-old kid, and it was a deliberate decision by Sundhage. Morgan had been scoring goals all her life and Sundhage didn’t want to overcomplicate it. If Morgan had a simple job—to come on for the last 15 minutes of a game and score a goal—her instincts and her physical ability were all she needed.

  Morgan, like any hungry young player, wanted more than that. She wanted to be a starter. She wanted Sundhage to trust her to do more than “just go out there and score goals.”

  So one day, Sundhage explained to her: “Listen, I’m not coaching you.” (Remembering that moment, Sundhage says now: “She looked at me like I had come from another planet.”)

  “But I want to learn and grow,” Morgan told her.

  Sundhage shook her head. “You just go out there,” she said. “You have no problem coming off the bench.”

  That approach had been working. It was Morgan who had bailed the team out of missing the World Cup altogether with an all-important goal in Italy. By following her instincts, she took advantage of a combination of speed, strength, and agility that no one else on the team had. Over a 20-meter distance, Morgan was as fast as male players, and Dawn Scott, the national team’s fitness coach, once said of her physical prowess: “Alex is a freak in a positive way.”

  Still, Morgan was inexperienced. Before that Italy game where she scored, Morgan had appeared for the U.S. only eight times. Granted, she scored in four of those appearances, but at 21 years old, she was the youngest player on the team.

  Was there a spot on the World Cup roster for a player like her? That was the question Sundhage had to answer before the 2011 World Cup.

  Once Sundhage made her decision—before she announced the final roster—she met with Morgan, who was eager to learn whether she’d made the cut.

  “You know what?” Sundhage told Morgan. “There will probably be journalists coming up to you and saying, Hey, you scored a goal again—don’t you think you should be in the starting lineup? What would you answer to that journalist?”

  “Well, I would tell them that I just want to help the team and do my best and I’ll do whatever the coach asks of me,” Morgan replied.

  Sundhage smiled. That was what she wanted to hear.

  “Well, that’s a very good answer because that’s what’s going to happen in Germany,” Sundhage said. “I don’t want to ruin you—you’re smarter than I am coming off the bench. The only thing I want is for you to do your very best. Use your speed and, if you have a chance, take a shot.”

  And that was how Alex Morgan found out she was going to play in a Women’s World Cup. It wasn’t going to be as a starter, but she was going to her first major tournament.

  Half of Sundhage’s roster featured players making their World Cup debuts with Morgan, including Ali Krieger, Becky Sauerbrunn, Tobin Heath, and Amy Rodriguez. But it was balanced by veterans Sundhage liked to count on, such as Abby Wambach, Shannon Boxx, and Christie Pearce.

  “We have people that organize defensively, people that can step up when it really matters, people that are good in the air, people that are fighters, and tricky ones as well,” Sundhage said of her roster.

  The 2011 tournament started for the U.S. in familiar fashion: They won comfortably over North Korea, 2–0, in Dresden. Then they rolled past Colombia, 3–0, in Sinsheim.

  They had enough confidence that they had planned out goal celebrations. The first, after a screamer from Heather O’Reilly, saw all the players line up on the center circle and salute the American servicemen and servicewomen stationed in Germany.

  After Megan Rapinoe, the flashy midfielder with bleached-blonde short hair, scored an emphatic goal next, she ran over to the corner, picked up the large fuzzy microphone used for capturing ambient sound for the TV broadcast, and belted out the chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen.

  By the time the players were set for their last group-stage match versus Sweden—the team from Sundhage’s homeland—they were already guaranteed a spot in the quarterfinal. The Americans still wanted to win, though, so they could top their group and face an easier opponent in the quarterfinal round.

  Instead, the Americans lost. An early penalty gave Sweden the edge, and they went on to win, 2–1. With that, instead of facing Australia, a team that had never beaten the U.S., the Americans now had to face Brazil, the team that had humiliated them in the semifinal of the previous World Cup.

  * * *

  The quarterfinal match of the 2011 Women’s World Cup seemed to be off to a dream start. In just the second minute, Brazil’s Daiane accidentally knocked the ball into her own net when trying to clear out a dangerous cross.

  The Americans held that lead going into halftime, and it appeared they were well in position to beat a Brazil team that was every bit as good and as talented as they had been in 2007. Marta was still the best player in the world, having just won the FIFA World Player of the Year honor again. The Brazilian team wasn’t giving the Americans many chances to score on their own.

  In the second half, the USA’s fortunes quickly changed.

  At one point, Marta did something only Marta could do. She flicked the ball into the air from her left foot, over defender Rachel Buehler’s head, and to her right foot. As Marta made a lunging effort to shoot the ball on the bounce, Buehler stayed with her the whole time. Buehler lunged at the same time as Marta to block the shot, and both players crashed to the ground.

  Referee Jacqui Melksham blew her whistle. She held up a red card to Buehler and then pointed to the penalty spot for Brazil. It was a double-whammy nightmare. Buehler, who was nicknamed the Buehldozer, had to leave the game, forcing the U.S. to play a woman down, and Brazil had a golden chance to equalize.

  For a moment, Buehler couldn’t believe it. She had never received a red card in her life—not in college, not in club play, not with the national team.

  “She was kind of wandering around on the field,” Heather O’Reilly says. “I remember putting my hand on her shoulder, being like,
Rachel, you’ve got to get off. You need to go.”

  It was a shocking decision from the referee. Replays showed Marta lunged into the air before Buehler made contact and was responsible for herself falling down in the box. Whether Buehler’s challenge deserved a red card was controversial.

  “To be honest, when Buehler was sent off, for a couple seconds, I thought Marta was sent off because she just fell over in the box,” coach Pia Sundhage says. “When I saw Buehler coming at me, I thought: Where is she going?”

  Cristiane stepped up to the spot to take her penalty kick. Luckily, Hope Solo had been carefully studying Brazil’s penalties, and she knew which side Cristiane favored. When Cristiane struck, Solo was in position to comfortably bat it away. The Americans celebrated Solo’s save furiously.

  That is, until the referee blew her whistle again. She judged the Americans to have encroached the penalty box before Cristiane’s foot struck the ball. Again, it was a shockingly harsh decision. The Americans angrily protested, and Solo was given a yellow card for dissent.

  Brazil switched kick-takers for the do-over, and Marta stepped up. Solo couldn’t save two in a row. Brazil equalized, and the Americans were incensed . . . furious . . . outraged. But it seemed only to fuel the Americans’ desire to win.

  For Sundhage, the red card presented a situation she hadn’t prepared for. She initially told Shannon Boxx to drop back as a centerback to keep the Americans in a four-back defensive shape. But as the game stretched on, it was clear the U.S. needed Boxx in the midfield, so Sundhage pushed Boxx back up and the Americans played in a 3–4–2 formation.

  “That’s one of my proudest moments as a coach,” Sundhage says. “It was brave, and it was smart.”

  The Americans, reeling and determined after the referee’s harsh calls, battled on, but after 90 minutes, the whistle blew with the score deadlocked at 1–1.

  The match was headed for extra time. But the Brazilians looked gassed—they used the short break between full time and extra time to sit down and rest their legs while they sipped water. The Americans, meanwhile, stayed on their feet, pacing around furiously and pumping one another up.