The National Team Read online

  FIFA, an organization that was seeing profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars at the time, didn’t help the organizing committee market the event. Marketing was left to the organizing committee, which had a budget that was only about 1/10th of the budget for the men’s World Cup in the United States five years earlier. Promoting the event would require some creativity. The organizers quickly realized that their best asset to spread the word about the event was the national team itself.

  Says Donna de Varona, the chair of the tournament’s organizing committee: “We knew with the personalities on the team, they would be the draw.”

  Most Americans didn’t know much about the national team yet, but the players were about to change that.

  * * *

  In 1999, if there was a soccer camp for young girls in a city scheduled to host a Women’s World Cup game, there’s a good chance that Mia Hamm was there. She would’ve been handing out flyers and letting the girls know: Hey, there’s a big soccer tournament coming up—you should ask your parents to take you.

  For the players of the national team, making the Women’s World Cup a success became a personal mission. They canvassed their way across the country, visiting every youth soccer team, school, clinic, and event they could find. It was the sort of relentless boots-on-the-ground technique you might expect from an upstart campaign for political office. But with no marketing budget, it was the only way to do it.

  “It was the equivalent of being a door-to-door salesperson,” recalls goalkeeper Briana Scurry, a native of Minneapolis. “That’s how we sold it: On the ground, in the grass roots, here and there. We spoke to as many people as possible, especially in the cities that would be hosting World Cup games. We were the ones doing the soccer camps for kids, personally going from club to club to hand out flyers and to make these kids and their parents feel like they knew us so they would come to our games when they were in their area.”

  It’s difficult to imagine players going out and selling their own games now. For perspective, the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada set a tournament attendance record of 1,353,506 total. Organizers spent more than $200 million to host the event—about 10 times the budget in 1999. The Women’s World Cup is now a big-time event. For the players to campaign for ticket sales now would be like Tom Brady showing up to youth football clinics to convince kids and their parents to come see the Super Bowl.

  But these players wanted to do it. They were eager to make the 1999 Women’s World Cup a hit and prove to everyone—from skeptical reporters at press conferences to the dismissive executives at FIFA—that they could and would succeed.

  “If you have ownership of what it is you’re doing, then it’s not being put on you, it belongs to you,” says Briana Scurry, who became the first black woman inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2017. “And we had ownership of that World Cup. It was ours to put on and it was ours to win.”

  The reason the grassroots campaign worked, however, was the players themselves.

  The women of the national team were the sort of athletes America hadn’t seen before. Young girls had role models just like them for the first time. Julie Foudy, a Stanford graduate, says when she was growing up, she had no choice but to look up to male basketball players—as she puts it: “My sports role models were 7 feet tall and 300 pounds.”

  But even more than that, the national team players were humble and relatable to average Americans. After games and practices, they would stay and sign autographs until every single fan waiting got one, sometimes for hours.

  As soon as tickets for the World Cup went on sale, it became apparent the players’ efforts were working. In the end, more than 660,000 people bought tickets and packed into stadiums for the 1999 Women’s World Cup, far exceeding even the most optimistic sales projections CEO Marla Messing built into her models.

  Some doubters, like the reporter in San Jose, thought the sales figures announced ahead of the tournament were false.

  “I do remember there was a sense that we were lying about our numbers, which, by the way, we never did,” says Messing.

  FIFA’s communications director, Keith Cooper, was honest about the organization’s surprise: “We have to admit we never thought it would be this successful,” he told reporters once the tournament ended.

  The players who believed fans would show up had the last laugh, of course. Foudy couldn’t help but think of that reporter in San Jose who put the players on the spot and accused them of lying about the ticket sales.

  “When we walked out onto the field at Giants Stadium and it was an 80,000-people packed house and they gave us a standing ovation, I literally, in my brain, was like, Where the hell is that goddamn Jamie Trecker?” Foudy recalls, laughing. “I want to grab him by the neck right now.”

  Foudy was used to doubters by that point, and like the other women on the memorable “’99ers” team, she never let the naysayers stop her.

  “There’s always going to be the Jamie Treckers,” she says now. “There are a lot of people who listen to those doubters and never take that next step, they never get out of their comfort zone and pursue their dreams because they’ve got those types in their lives telling them they can’t do it. That’s what was amazing about that team—whenever anyone did that to us, we were like, Screw you, we’ll show you differently.”

  * * *

  As the players of the national team took on roles as spokeswomen to help sell the Women’s World Cup, they couldn’t forget their primary job: winning.

  After all, they worried, if they lost at the World Cup they’d worked so hard to promote, all the momentum they had been building might crumble. For star players like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain, and others, that meant pulling double duty to train for the World Cup while promoting it.

  It was a huge ask of the players—they not only had to make the tournament a business success but an on-field success. Lauren Gregg, who was the assistant coach of the national team at the time, remembers it being a delicate balance for the coaching staff. But Gregg and head coach Tony DiCicco understood how important it was to the players that they could promote the tournament.

  “They wanted to sell the game, and they did it happily,” Gregg says. “But when you’re also trying to compete and be the best in the world, hours every day selling the game—doing media events and interviews or school appearances or commercials—that’s time you have to calculate in.”

  “Every minute and every second is planned toward becoming a world champion. It’s not something that just happens. But the pressure to sell out the stadiums was enormous.”

  As much as the players wanted to prove doubters wrong and put on a successful women’s tournament, they also had to consider their own futures. If the 1999 Women’s World Cup wasn’t a success, their hopes for launching a women’s professional league—the first opportunity for players like Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain to be true professional athletes—would disappear.

  Despite the pressure that came with being a national team player, it wasn’t a full-time job. They weren’t paid much and only competed with the team a few months out of the year. Many players made extra income by coaching clinics or holding part-time jobs because there was no professional soccer league for women yet in the United States.

  A successful World Cup figured to change that. If the national team could sell out stadiums, hoist the trophy, and show America how exciting the sport was, a professional league could come next.

  “We had to make players available every day just for media,” Gregg says. “We had to sell the game and sell our story and sell the sport. The beautiful thing about it is the players wanted to carry the sport on their backs. They wanted to inspire the next generation of boys and girls.”

  Sure, the players managed to sell tickets, but that was only half of the task. They still needed to win.

  CHAPTER 4

  “From Darkness into the Light”

  There is something fascinating in sports about the tunnel�
��the dark and often dingy area where players are tucked away inside the belly of a stadium before they walk onto the field before a game.

  It’s the place where a player’s wildest dreams can linger for a final moment and, shielded from the crowd and the light, she can collect her composure. It’s also the place where nerves can kick into their highest gear. All that’s left is anticipation and what feels like an endless wait in purgatory before players can step on the pitch and get to work.

  At Giants Stadium on June 19, 1999, the tunnel had a bit of everything to offer. It was a more heightened version of any wait in the tunnel the players had experienced before.

  “The tunnels in the stadiums are very dark—you kind of go from this cave-like environment to walking out into this brilliant bright light,” defender Brandi Chastain says. “It’s an almost blinding light with the incredible green grass and the explosion of colors in the stadium and the crowd.”

  “I remember looking at Kristine Lilly, and we both had tears in our eyes. Oh my gosh—this is actually happening. I will never forget that moment of the darkness into the light,” Chastain adds wistfully.

  As the players emerged from the shadows of the tunnel and onto the grass field in New Jersey, they were immediately surrounded by a view that gave them chills. It was the largest crowd that had ever come to see the U.S. women’s national team—and everyone was there to see them.

  On that day, 78,972 people packed into Giants Stadium. The Giants themselves had never packed the stadium like that. No one else had either, except on one occasion five years earlier, when the Pope drew a crowd of 82,948.

  The players had seen the crowds tailgating, they heard the ticket sales figures, and they knew it would be a massive crowd. But experiencing it was something else—something unfathomable. It was the tangible proof that all their campaigning had worked. Americans became invested in their story and had come to watch them play.

  “When you come out of that canopy, it’s a very interesting thing to hear a crowd that big go from talking amongst themselves to when they see players come out,” says goalkeeper Briana Scurry, who played at the University of Massachusetts from 1989 to 1993. “It’s a very powerful change of sound. It really gets your heart. When we started to come out, people started to clap and pictures were snapping and there were all these flashes. The enormity of that stadium, and all those people were there for us—it was such an overwhelming feeling.”

  On that afternoon, Giants Stadium sounded different than it usually did, too. As Donna de Varona, the chair of the organizing committee, puts it: “It was the sound of young voices.” Children and young women made up a bigger part of the chorus than at any game held in that stadium before.

  “It’s one of those moments that gives you chills and you think, Oh my gosh, this is real,” says midfielder Shannon MacMillan, who won the prestigious MAC Hermann Trophy in college at the University of Portland. “The first time you come out of the tunnel and step on the field, that roar just truly sucks the breath out of you.”

  If you could pinpoint the moment women’s soccer started to change the sports landscape in the United States, it would perhaps be when the players emerged from the tunnel at Giants Stadium.

  And yet, the players hadn’t even touched a ball. That was the whole reason they were there. The players were experiencing one of the most intense, powerful moments of their careers, but their journey at the World Cup hadn’t even started yet. Their emotions couldn’t get in the way.

  “We were all either laughing uncontrollably or crying,” Scurry remembers. “And then we had to play a soccer game. So, the funny thing about selling it so well was now we had to go out there and win the damn thing.”

  The players had long prepared for this moment, and the crowd at Giants Stadium quickly got to see the dominance that the national team was known for.

  * * *

  Only 17 minutes into the opening match of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, Mia Hamm scored in a splendid bit of skill. The ball bounced toward her on the right flank, and she tapped it with her right foot, around a Danish defender, onto her left foot, and, off the bounce, fired a half-volleyed shot. It was a powerful blast that hit the roof of the net, and the national team’s path to winning the World Cup was firmly underway.

  Hamm ran toward the team bench, screaming and pointing her finger in the air until her teammates caught up with her and jumped on her, creating a massive group hug. The players’ emotions were bubbling at the surface and, in that moment, it was a release—equal parts excitement and relief.

  From there, the U.S. bulldozed their way through the group stage. After a 3–0 win over Denmark in the opener, they went to Chicago and walloped Nigeria, 7–1, in front of a sellout crowd of 65,080 on June 24, 1999.

  By the time the Americans prepared to play North Korea in the final match of the group stage three days later, Shannon MacMillan and Tisha Venturini had jokingly discussed what they might do if they scored. MacMillan scored first in that game. Venturini, who scored next, wanted to do a backflip, but she didn’t get the chance.

  “I didn’t know she was going to do the backflip,” MacMillan says. “I assisted her goal, and I jumped on her back before she could do it—it was just pure adrenaline.”

  When Venturini scored again a few minutes later, she made sure no one got in the way.

  “After her second goal, she waved everybody off and pulled out this crazy flip,” MacMillan says. “We were like, Where did that come from? We’d never seen her do that before.”

  The Americans were having fun, outscoring their group-stage opponents by a whopping 13–1. They easily topped Group A and advanced to the quarterfinals, where they would face one of the best teams in the world: Germany.

  That was when the fun stopped.

  The German team was one of the world’s best, and four years earlier at the 1995 World Cup in Sweden, they had finished as runners-up to Norway.

  “We are no more afraid of the Americans than they are of us,” said German goalkeeper Silke Rottenberg before the quarterfinal. “We don’t want to hide from the Americans.”

  But it wasn’t the Germans who hurt the Americans first—it was the Americans themselves. Just five minutes into the quarterfinal in Maryland outside of Washington, D.C., defender Brandi Chastain tapped the ball back to Briana Scurry in goal with the German attacking line pressing. But Scurry was already coming out of goal, and the ball rolled right past her, back into the USA’s own net.

  Chastain remembers: “I thought, I’m just gonna make a simple play and pass it back to Briana Scurry, and Briana was thinking, I’ll just come out and get the ball and make a simple play, and we didn’t communicate.”

  It was an own goal, and Germany was ahead, 1–0. All of a sudden, on July 1, 1999, the Americans were in danger of being knocked out of the tournament.

  Chastain instantly blamed herself. But Carla Overbeck, the team’s cocaptain and the mother of a 2-year-old, wouldn’t let that feeling linger.

  “That could’ve been the most awful moment—and it wasn’t great, that’s for sure,” says Chastain, “but after we raced back to the goal and we got there just too late, it was almost instantaneous that Carla grabs me and says, Don’t worry about it; there’s a lot of game left. We’re going to win, and you’re going to help us.

  “Not for one second longer—and I mean it—did I think about the fact I just scored an own goal. I never let myself think, Oh my gosh, I just lost the game. When you trust people and they’re there for you in moments like that, you can only feel empowered. Carla empowered me to move forward.”

  The Americans equalized 10 minutes later when a Michelle Akers shot was deflected and Tiffeny Milbrett fired the loose ball into the net. Chastain’s own goal had essentially been canceled out and the two sides were square again.

  The first half dragged on, and the Americans felt that if they could get back to the locker room for halftime with the score level, they could win it in the second half. But in stoppage time be
fore the halftime whistle blew, German striker Bettina Wiegmann fired an absolute rocket from some 25 yards out, and a diving Briana Scurry couldn’t get a hand on it. The U.S. was down again, 2–1, and it looked like it could be the dagger that ended their World Cup on home soil.

  “When the halftime whistle blew, that was the first time I saw panic,” remembers midfielder Tiffeny Milbrett, a native of Portland, Oregon. “We didn’t panic in terms of, Oh, we’re going to collapse—but I saw stress like I hadn’t seen. It was probably a remembrance of losing in 1995. It was a moment of realization that we could lose.”

  The Americans came out of the locker room with fight and energy in the second half. They pressed the Germans hard to win the ball back and they were quick in transition, pushing numbers forward to create chances in the attack.

  It was only four minutes into the second half when the Americans found another crucial equalizer. And it came from Brandi Chastain, who scored by firing a volley in the box. She credits Carla Overbeck with allowing her to be ready to score when the moment arrived.

  “I always talk about it in a funny way, like, Woo, thank goodness Carla plays for our team. But she allowed me to be ready for my moment, and that was the moment my team needed,” Chastain says. “I just feel like that is one of the most important moments I’ve had in my life.

  “I always say, you’re going to make mistakes, so embrace that fact. What are you going to do when that happens? Are you going to quit? That has been my life ever since that moment.”

  Chastain fell down on the grass after her goal and lay there for a moment with her eyes closed and arms out while her teammates rushed over and piled on top of her. Redemption.

  With the score tied at 2–2, a chance for the Americans to move on was there for the taking. Shannon MacMillan was watching from the bench, and she noticed that Joy Fawcett wasn’t being marked well on set pieces.