by Carli Lloyd
“Carli got a big contract in Chicago, the coach fussed over and told her, ‘You are going to be my star, you are going to be my number 10 [playmaker],’ and she fell for all that nonsense,” James says. “I think she thought she could just coast through the WPS season. She played horribly, and it was a great investment because it taught her that it doesn’t work to train at eighty or ninety percent. You can’t take your foot off the gas, ever. It was the best possible lesson for Carli to learn.”
It’s the holiday season, and a Christmas cookie party sounds great to me. Aunt Patti has invited me down to her home in Wildwood Crest, near the southern tip of the Jersey Shore, for a bake-a-thon. It’s a Saturday morning, and the weather is brutal, snow coming down hard. Aunt Patti’s house is almost ninety miles away.
“I’m not so sure you should go,” Brian says. “The roads look terrible. Just wait it out for a while and go later.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ll take it easy. I’ve got four-wheel drive. The roads should be empty. I will take my time.”
Brian tries to dissuade me, but I am in go mode. I want to bake cookies with my aunt and cousin Jaime.
“Just watch out for the black ice,” Brian says. “The first thing you tend to do is grip the wheel tighter and slam on the brakes, and that’s the worst thing you can do. Don’t hit the brake if you fishtail. Just turn into the skid and get the car back under control.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promise.
I jump in my black 2006 Nissan Pathfinder and off I go. I take back roads to the Garden State Parkway and head south. The plows have been through, and it’s really not so bad. I’m cruising along, the roads are pretty clear, and I’m about twenty minutes away, driving in the left lane, which is the clearest. It’s starting to snow harder, but everything is okay until out of nowhere I hit an ice patch and the car starts to skid to the left. I remember Brian’s caution, but I don’t remember soon enough. I tighten my grip on the wheel and hit the brake. Now I am skidding to the right, and I jerk the wheel in that direction, probably too hard, and soon the car is completely out of control, careening across two lanes, heading for a tree. I am powerless and my car is going where it’s going. Time feels as if it has completely stopped. It is the scariest moment of my life. I wait for the horrible impact and the sickening sound and the end. My mind is a blur. I don’t even have time to think of Brian and how much I love him and how sorry I am I didn’t listen to him. I don’t think about how my life and all my soccer dreams are going to end on the way to a cookie party on the Garden State Parkway.
It’s almost as if I am in a trance.
I crash into the tree, and all the airbags blast out, but the car has turned enough that it’s not head-on—my left front tire takes most of the impact. The tree slows me down, but my car is still hurtling forward, totally out of control, heading for tidal water. I have no idea how deep it is, but I do know Pathfinders do not float. The car plows through a small thicket of woods and plunges into the water, which starts pouring into the car, instantly, the fastest incoming tide I’ve ever seen. Now it’s a race against the tide. I can’t get out of the driver’s side because of the damage and the air bags, so I hop over to the passenger’s side. I look out to the right and the water looks deep. I muscle the door open and scramble up onto the roof of car, and just as I do I hear a man’s voice.
It’s a middle-aged guy with gray hair and a ruddy complexion. He must’ve been behind me and seen me skid off the road. He pulls over to see if he can help. I am still on the roof of my car.
“Are you okay?” he says. “I have something that can help.”
He lays down a long piece of metal that almost looks like a ramp you’d use to roll lawn mowers onto a flatbed truck or something. He sets the ramp up so it’s kind of a footbridge that will take me from my rear bumper to solid land. I climb down off the roof, put my foot on the bumper, and step onto the ramp. It works perfectly. I take a few steps and join my Good Samaritan on beautiful, hard ground.
“Thank you so much for stopping. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you,” I say.
“It’s no problem,” he says. “I saw the whole thing right in front of me. You are very, very lucky.”
“I sure am,” I tell him.
I stand on the edge of the marsh and look at my half-submerged Pathfinder, and only then do things start to compute in my brain. I have just skidded off a parkway, hit a tree, totaled my car, and landed in water, and I don’t have a scratch on me. My neck will be sore for a couple of days, and I am plenty shaken up. But otherwise, I could play a full ninety minutes.
Yeah, lucky would be the word.
I call 911 and Brian, tell him what happened, and assure him that I am fine but that I am sick about my car. This is the first new car I’ve ever bought, earned with the money I made playing soccer, and it’s sinking deeper every second.
“The important thing is that you are fine. You can get another car,” Brian says.
Then I call my cousin Jaime and tell her what happened. Jaime and my uncle come and get me at mile marker number 14 on the Parkway. In the meantime, the police pull up, followed by an ambulance. The EMS workers ask me if I need medical assistance or need to go to the hospital.
“I’m fine. I’m really fine, thank you,” I say.
I explain to the police how my car wound up in the water. I cross back over the metal ramp and grab a few things from the back of the car—probably not the smartest move, but what can I say? I like to take care of my stuff. The tow truck arrives and hauls my Pathfinder to the junkyard. I warm up in the back of the police car for a few minutes, and then Wayne and Jaime arrive, and we finally get back to their house by the Shore. I don’t remember too much about the cookies.
Later, I joke to Aunt Patti that maybe we should forget the cookie party concept. A year earlier, my mother and sister were invited as part of an effort to patch things up, but there was a big blowout the first night and they wound up leaving at one in the morning. Another year somebody got sick and had to go to the hospital.
“It’s The Curse of the Cookie Weekend,” I tell Aunt Patti.
The 2010 season gets off to the best start. I stay off of ice, and we finish off a strong Algarve Cup with a 3–2 victory over Germany.
“That’s the greatest game I’ve ever seen you play. You looked so fit, and you owned the middle of the field,” Pia says.
After a miserable WPS season in Chicago in 2009, I can’t wait to get going for Sky Blue. We split our first two games, and I’m not altogether thrilled with my performance, but about a third of the way through our third game—against my old team, the Red Stars—I feel I’m back in prime form. I’m playing holding mid because my teammate, Yael Averbuch, is out sick. I am tackling well, winning balls, changing the point of attack, and spraying the ball out wide. In the twenty-seventh minute, I play a ball to Natasha Kai, and as I do I lose my footing, all of my weight goes on my left leg, and my left ankle buckles like a cheap chair. I hear the crack. I lie on the field for a few moments and walk off on my own. I want to tape it up and go back in, but the trainer says the ankle doesn’t look right and the team doctor believes it’s broken. I go to the emergency room at halftime, and the X-rays confirm that I have a broken fibula.
I get a cast for two weeks, and then a boot. I start jogging at six weeks, at the team’s urging. It is way too much, way too soon. It still hurts, and I have to back off until I attend the national team camp in July. Even then I am not right, and I mostly work out on the side. Finally, I start to train in late August and into September and get back on the field with the national team at the next training camp in late September. I make my first start for the U.S. since March on October 2 against China, and it seems as if it’s been ten times that long. I am anxious about being back out there, but I play simply and effectively, keeping control of the ball and linking passes with the forwards, going for understatement rather than flash, and then we are off to Cancun, Mexico, for World Cup qualifying.
Before the games start, Pia meets with me and underscores how much the team needs me to step up, especially in the attacking third.
“You have all the tools in the world and can be the best, and that’s what we need,” she says.
“I know I can get more fit. That’s what I want too,” I say.
We breeze through games against Haiti and Guatemala—I am named Player of the Match in both—but then we look only so-so in a 4–0 victory over Costa Rica before we play the host team, Mexico, in the CONCACAF semifinals.
In front of 8,000 fans in a boisterous, sold-out stadium, we pick a horrible time for a letdown—giving up a goal in the opening minutes only makes the crowd that much louder. I tie it up, winning a scramble in front after a Megan Rapinoe cross, in the twenty-fifth minute, but the Mexicans answer right back with another score. We are totally out of sync, playing kickball, and even though we outshoot Mexico 10–1, in the second half the score does not change. I am angry and in complete disbelief at our collective level. Mexico took it to us, and we allowed our nerves to make us tentative and inconsistent, an effort that made U.S. Soccer history . . . the first loss to the Mexican women in twenty-six matches.
Now we are in a major fix. We have to beat Costa Rica for third place, and then beat Italy just to qualify for the World Cup. Everybody figured we’d waltz through qualifying. Maybe that was the problem. We have a team meeting, and I bring up the disastrous game against Norway to start the 2008 Olympics.
“We have to be more of a team. We can’t just think that because it says USA on our jerseys teams are going to lie down for us,” I say.
We are better in a 3–0 victory against Costa Rica, and then we head to Italy right before Thanksgiving for our biggest game since the 2008 Olympics.
Playing in the ancient northern Italian city of Padua, we generate tons of chances and are playing well, but not finishing. I am so fresh and energized that I feel as if I could run to Rome and back. I am all over the field. In extra time, I ping a long ball to Abby, who flicks it to Alex Morgan, a new kid with great speed and a knack for scoring big goals, and she finishes it. We win, 1–0, and head back to the States for a return match with Italy in Bridgeview, Illinois.
We have a series of meetings and a film breakdown, and before one of the meetings the team has a ceremony in honor of my 100th cap, a milestone I will reach in this next game. Paul Rogers, our goalkeeper coach, shows a video of me in action. Christie Pearce, our captain, gets up and addresses all of us.
“This is a great achievement and well deserved,” Christie says. “Carli, I’ve seen you grow so much from your college days at Rutgers until now. Your dedication and hard work are unmatched, and mentally you are so strong. You are someone who never quits and never backs off, and that’s how you’ve gotten to this point.”
Everybody applauds. There is a slide show of pictures of me through the years, and a framed USWNT jersey with number 100 on it is presented to me. Later, I receive a Rolex from U.S. Soccer, which I upgrade with an engraving that says:
100TH CAP
ITALY
NOVEMBER 27, 2010
It is a happy day all around, even though we play a sloppy game, winning 1–0 on a goal by Amy Rodriguez. The only thing that matters is that we have qualified for the World Cup in Germany next summer and averted the unthinkable.
I stick around Chicago for a day to watch the Eagles lose to the Chicago Bears and then go into a six-week break with my ankle almost completely healed and my head in a good place. I can’t wait to be back in my home and to not have to say good-bye to Brian for a while. Aunt Patti throws another cookie party, and miraculously, nothing bad happens. We just have fun together and bake into the night.
After giving my body a little time to recharge, I dive back into phase 2 of James’s training, the goal being to further establish myself as a core player with the national team. The training begins with a series of long runs to build up my aerobic base, finishing with the prescribed ninety-minute runs. I run in the snow and cold, in whatever. I layer up and go. I mix in indoor training twice a week, and then I start up with track workouts, doing 800-meter repeats on some days and twenty-five sprints up the Laurel Acres hill on others.
To mix it up, I get in the car and drive twenty miles west, across the Walt Whitman Bridge, and into Philadelphia. I turn onto Benjamin Franklin Parkway and head toward the Philadelphia Museum of Art, home to the steps made famous by Sylvester Stallone/Rocky Balboa on the big screen. There are seventy-two steps in front of the museum. Sometimes I take them one at a time, other times two at a time. I have never stepped foot inside the museum, only on the concrete leading up to it. I run Rocky’s steps thirty-five times. Nobody is playing “Getting Strong Now” in the background, but that is exactly what I am doing.
11
Empty Cup
JAMES GALANIS IS MY GREATEST SUPPORTER, but Pia Sundhage is not far behind. All year in the run-up to my second go at the World Cup, Pia tells me that she wants me in attack mode, wants me to be the focal point of everything. The day she announces our Cup roster—it includes twelve first-timers—Pia tells me that the whole key for us is going to be me getting forward as much as possible and Shannon Boxx taking care of things as the defensive midfielder.
I love Pia’s faith in me; playing for her couldn’t be any more different than life under Greg Ryan, who treated me as if I were radioactive at the end of the 2007 World Cup. It’s just that sometimes my game to-do list seems overly ambitious. Pia wants me to be the playmaker, make runs behind the forward line, switch the point of attack, distribute the ball around the field, key our possession game, and tackle and win balls on the defensive end.
A month before the World Cup we have two games against Japan. Before the second one, in Cary, North Carolina, I speak to Pia after a training session when it seemed as if she thought I was wearing a cape with a big “S” on it. I am frustrated, and Pia can see it.
“What do you need from me?” she asks.
“I’m thinking too much out there about everything you want me to do,” I reply. “I’m not playing freely, and it’s affecting my confidence. I’m much better when I can just play.”
Pia hears me, but I know that she is feeling enormous pressure. She’s led us to Olympic gold, but this is the ultimate prize—what we’ve been working for ever since we crashed out against Brazil four years earlier.
This is why she was hired.
We’re the number-one-ranked team in the world, but we’ve had our bumps along the way this year, for sure. After surviving the qualifying scare, we lost our first game of the year to Sweden and followed a stellar Algarve Cup with our first loss to England since the War of 1812. It was actually 1988, but that’s still pretty ancient history. We seem much better for having gone through all that. We win the two games against Japan, then beat Mexico, 1–0, in our send-off game in New Jersey. Next, we fly to Salzburg, Austria, for our final training sessions before traveling to Dresden to play North Korea in our first group game. Brian, Aunt Patti, Uncle Wayne, and Jaime are there, as well as Jaime’s husband Alex and his brother Andrej. Though I’m grateful for their love and support, I’m concerned that they could be a distraction if I’m worrying about their tickets and how they’re doing. I do not want to be distracted. It happened four years ago in China, and we know how that played out.
I am nervous as the North Korea game begins, but I ease my way into it and get tons of work done, possessing the ball effectively and playing some nice balls, one of them a long, left-footed pass to Abby, who swings out to the left flank and crosses it in to Lauren Cheney, who heads it in for our first score of the tournament. Rachel Buehler drills home our second goal and we score a 2–0 triumph, then keep it going by knocking off Colombia, 3–0, a victory that is highlighted by a missile of a strike outside the box by Heather O’Reilly. Megan Rapinoe follows with a wonderful hustle play, throwing the ball in, sprinting toward the box, and finishing with a superb strike of her own. I get my first Worl
d Cup goal to wrap up the scoring. Then it’s on to the city of Wolfsburg, where we play Sweden. We’re assured of advancing out of our group, and all we need to do is tie Sweden to avoid a quarterfinal against Brazil.
Every tournament, and every year, has its own narrative, and this year’s seems to be that we refuse to do things the easy way. Sweden is a physical team; they always play us tough, and with our coach being an iconic Swedish player, that goes double this time around. The Swedes convert an early PK and score a freakish second goal when a direct kick caroms off of Amy LePeilbet’s thigh into the goal. We lose, 2–1, the first time the U.S. women have ever lost a group stage game. Sweden wins our group, and we get Brazil, as tough a quarterfinal as you could ever have, back in Dresden.
I am not terribly stressed about having to play the Brazilians, honestly. The way I see it, we owe them for what happened four years ago. They are staying in the same hotel as us, and it seems that wherever they go, their fans like to pound on drums and break into song, as if they were on the beach in Rio during Carnival. It’s part of their culture, I understand that. But I don’t have to like it.
I don’t have to do anything to work up an edge about the Brazilians.
We score on an own goal off a superb cross by Boxxy in the second minute, and then the U.S. and Brazil go at it in a two-hour quarterfinal crucible, a game with little rhythm, lots of tension, and more twists and turns than an amusement park ride. In the sixty-fifth minute, Marta flicks the ball to herself, bores in on Hope, and gets blocked by Rachel Buehler, who is sent off with a red card. Now we have to play a man down the rest of the way, but Hope makes a spectacular diving stop of the PK by Cristiane, my old Red Stars teammate. This is an exhilarating turn of events—until the referee gives Brazil a rekick, apparently because Christie Rampone came in the box too soon. Marta converts the do-over to tie the game. Hope is ballistic. Nobody knows what is going on, because no explanation is forthcoming.
