U.S. Goalkeeper Is Back, but Not Back in Good Graces May 25, 2008
By JERÉ LONGMANCARSON, Calif. — Eight months after the benching of goalkeeper Hope Solo and the corrosive fallout at the Women’s World Cup, no one is pretending that all wounds have healed as the Olympics approach. Close friendships have frayed. The telephone calls that used to come on days off — let’s go shopping, let’s go to the beach — no longer come.
“It hurts,” Solo, 26, said in one breath, then in the next, “It’s not uncomfortable by any means.
“Nobody reaches out to me quite as much,” Solo continued. “It’s normal. I expect that.”
Last September, as the United States women’s soccer team prepared to face Brazil in the semifinals of the World Cup in China, Coach Greg Ryan benched Solo and replaced her with Briana Scurry. The move was widely criticized and was sure to cost Ryan his job if it did not succeed.
After the American team lost, 4-0, Solo, emotional in defeat and still grieving over the recent death of her father, said, “It was the wrong decision, and I think anybody that knows anything about the game knows that.”
This was no longer 2004; a team cannot live in the past, Solo said, a reference to the gold-medal-winning performance by the American team at the Athens Olympics and, many believed, a rebuke of Scurry.
“There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves,” Solo said.
She was ostracized by Ryan and by her teammates, prohibited from joining them for the third-place game against Norway, from eating team meals, even from traveling home on the same flight. To others on the squad, Solo had violated the ethos of the national side, putting herself above the team. Ryan, too, eventually paid a price, losing his job and being replaced by Pia Sundhage of Sweden.
Another major international soccer tournament will be played in China in August at the Beijing Olympics. Solo is expected to start in goal as the United States defends its gold medal. But she knows that things will never quite be the same. Her teammates appreciate her skills but keep her at arm’s length. She is respected but not embraced.
Success for the United States in Beijing will depend in no small part on the players’ ability to defy a widely held belief in elite women’s soccer that teammates must be friends and enjoy an emotional connection with one another in order to prevail.
“If you ask me about the Hope story, they will never forget that,” Sundhage said as the American women prepared for a tournament to be played next month in South Korea. “It will never leave them. But they can deal with that feeling. That’s the most important thing.”
Solo’s criticism was a relatively rare instance of a female athlete complaining publicly about a coach or a teammate, something that happens more frequently in men’s sports. The incident raised a number of questions, some along gender lines, about what is considered appropriate behavior and punishment of athletes.
Should Solo have been reprimanded simply for speaking her mind? Did Solo’s teammates overreact by shunning her, placing their feelings ahead of the team, just as they accused her of doing? Would a male player have been similarly banished? Is it fair to ask female athletes to carry a burden of moral or ethical superiority that male athletes are not expected to carry?
“Would we even have batted an eyelash if it was David Beckham?” said Aimee Mullins, president of the Women’s Sports Foundation.
Mullins added: “For Hope Solo to be angry, and to express that anger, I’m not judging her for that. I do think it was unfortunate; you don’t want to throw Briana Scurry under the bus. That said, leaving your teammate behind at the hotel is no better. That wasn’t classy. I go with the premise if there’s no I in team, stick with it all the way.”
Solo said that her raw feelings at the World Cup were deeply affected by the death of her father three months earlier. Their relationship was complicated. Even her father’s name was variable. People knew him variously as Jeffrey, Johnny and Jerry. He had also changed his last name twice. Perhaps he had been in a witness-protection program, Hope said. He died before everything could be explained.
“It was a long-running joke in our family, we don’t even know our dad’s real name,” Hope said.
She knows that her father was a Vietnam veteran from the Bronx who once boxed competitively and later moved to Seattle. He grew estranged from the family for a decade, before Solo reconnected with him when she attended the University of Washington from 1999 to 2002.
Jeffrey Solo was homeless and lived in a tent in the woods, Hope said. Still, he attended all of her games and assessed her performances candidly. He sometimes carried a foul smell and stuffed his coat with free food, but she got over that. There was no one she preferred to talk to more about soccer. Sometimes, she visited his tent and gave him macaroni and cheese. They talked for hours. He was funny and open. She could go to him for any kind of advice.
“He was my inspiration; he was so competitive, so passionate about life,” Solo said.
Last June, while the national team was training for an exhibition in Cleveland, Jeffrey Solo died for reasons that remain unclear. Hope dedicated the World Cup to him. She wanted to make her father proud. She gave armbands to her family and friends that bore Jeffrey Solo’s initials. She carried his ashes to China and scattered them around the goalmouth before each match.
Actually, Solo forgot to perform the ritual before the opening match and surrendered two goals in a 2-2 tie with North Korea. Then she collected three consecutive shutouts, against Sweden, Nigeria and England. That is why it was surprising when Ryan benched Solo for the semifinal against Brazil.
He preferred Scurry, a star of the 1999 Women’s World Cup and a gold medalist from 2004 who had greater experience, tremendous reflexes and an unbeaten record against Brazil. The switch backfired. After the defeat, Solo said, she was overcome by the despairing idea that the United States could not win the world championship.
As she thanked her family and friends in the stands, she said, she became further distraught by the sight of her older brother, Marcus, who cried as he told her, “This was for Dad.”
Hope said, “It broke me.”
Then she publicly criticized the benching. Eight months later, she stands largely by what she said.
“My emotions were in a place I never experienced before, that hurt, pain, anger,” Solo said. “I’m not saying it was right, but I know it was something I had to do at the time.”
Her one regret was the criticism of Scurry. It was unintended, Solo said.
For Scurry, Solo’s remarks carried a particular sting. Her father had died shortly before the 2004 Olympics.
When Solo’s father died, Scurry dedicated a game to him, wrote Solo a letter and passed along her phone number. Call anytime, Scurry said. If anyone understood what Solo was going through, she did.
“I was there for her, holding her hand,” Scurry said of Solo. “When she did what she did, that made it a little deeper.”
Finally, before a game in Washington this month, Solo and Scurry had a long talk. Scurry said she told her, “You might have been disappointed you weren’t playing, but you are never above the team.”
Now she has moved on, Scurry said.
“The longer I let this bother me, I’m only hurting myself,” Scurry said. “I forgive her. I’m moving on to things I can control. It can drive you crazy trying to control other people.”
It was difficult returning to the national team last fall, Solo said. She nearly quit the sport, having lost her desire to play. She holed up in her home in Seattle, felt depressed and lost 10 pounds because of the stress. She felt tension in the hallways at the team hotel and during meals.
Previously, one of her closest friends was defender Cat Whitehill. No longer. According to Solo, Whitehill’s response to her explanation was, “I think you’re trying to get sympathy because of your dad’s death.”
Whitehill was not made available for this article by a team spokesman.
The star forward Abby Wambach, echoing others, said the team still believed it did the right thing in banishing Solo from the bronze-medal game at the World Cup.
“It was a distraction,” Wambach said.
At the same time, Wambach said, the episode forced her to reconsider her own actions and to accept some responsibility for not making Solo feel enough a part of the team entering the World Cup.
“My comment at the time was, ‘I’d like to think that I would like to forgive her,’ ” Wambach said. “That was the smallest amount of compassion I could come up with. Now it’s a lot bigger. I have forgiven her. If we don’t move on, there’s no chance we’ll win.”
Players will have to decide individually whether to re-form close personal ties with Solo, Wambach said. Such reliance on emotional bonding is a strength and weakness of women’s soccer, Sundhage said.
“It’s a strength for this team because I feel so many good things happening off the field that they bring to the field,” she said. “But you can’t get so caught up in things off the field that you forget about the game. It’s a balance.”
She is done apologizing, Solo said, and her teammates will have to meet her halfway if some reconciliation is to occur.
“I think women’s sports is so far behind men’s sports, but I think we’re starting to turn the corner to where, look, we don’t have to be friends, we don’t even have to like each other, but you will respect one another on the field,” Solo said. “You just play. You’re good enough to play, so get your act together and perform. I think slowly we’re getting that way.”
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