Solo by Hope Solo (best books to read for women .txt) 📗

think I was ready. It was the biggest argument he and I had ever had. I knew he didn’t want to wreck my confidence, but I needed as many minutes as possible after sitting out for six months. I had been following a plan we had laid out back in September, and now the plan was changing. I felt I had done my part, and I trusted my coaches to uphold their end.

Paul told me to clean myself up and go meet with Pia. She took one look at my face and knew I was upset. “What are you feeling?” she said.

I told her that I needed every minute I could get and that she was taking a crucial forty-five minutes away from me.

“You don’t think you can be ready in three-and-a-half games? You need these forty-five minutes to be ready for the World Cup?”

I could hear the doubt in her voice. Pia was losing faith in me.

“Pia, I’ll be ready for the World Cup if you only give me two games. I’ll do whatever it takes. But you know as well as I do that every minute counts.”

“Get yourself ready to play in the second half then,” she said, dismissing me.

She doubted me. And when people doubt me, I became more determined. I’m going to prove to her that I’m ready, I thought.

Paul and I were fine, despite our argument. He liked that I had voiced my opinion and often told me so: he said it was better than trying to guess what someone was thinking. I later apologized to him for saying I had lost trust in him: I never had. Not for a moment.

I entered the game in the second half, my first live action since my last game of the WPS season. We were down 2–1 when I came in. We hadn’t played very well in the first half and Barnie had seen a ton of action. I didn’t see much action at all, which was irritating. I needed to make some tough decisions, get challenged. Still, it felt great to get back on the field. Paul was pleased—nothing had happened to damage the most important part of my game, my confidence. But our team lost the game, our first loss ever to England and our first loss in a friendly since the team lost to Denmark during the 2004 Olympic victory tour, back in another era.

What—the media started to wonder—was wrong with the U.S. national team?

IV.

Pia snapped at me. “Shut the fuck up, Hope.”

I was stunned. Pia, Paul, and I were having a meeting about the medical staff—I didn’t feel that I was getting proper care for my shoulder, and I was lobbying for my therapists, Bruce and Dave, to be added to the staff. They had come to Portugal, and everyone on the team had raved about them. I was completely indebted to them and to Ivan, the men’s team trainer. They had all worked as a team to get me ready for the World Cup, and it looked as though all our combined hard work was paying off. I was almost there. But without my team of therapists in camp, my progress had stalled. I had a list of issues about the team’s training staff. We had people who could tape ankles and hand out Advil but they weren’t qualified to guide an athlete back from major surgery in a compressed schedule. I was getting frustrated and running out of time.

“You have captains for a reason,” Pia barked at me.

That pissed me off. Abby regularly expressed her opinion, and she wasn’t a captain. Boxxy expressed her opinion, and she wasn’t a captain. Pearcie—who was our captain—often asked for my opinion about the training staff, because she knew how closely I worked with them and how critical the staff was to our entire team’s well-being. I told Pia that, but she didn’t want to hear it. Six weeks before the World Cup and I was having a conflict with my coach. Was the shitstorm coming my way again?

The next morning, on my way down to breakfast, I was in the elevator when Pia stepped in. I didn’t say anything, just looked down at my newspaper.

“How you doing?” she said.

“Fine, Pia,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m good.”

And we were fine from then on out.

V.

The WPS was still going. Sort of. I had signed with a team called the MagicJack. The Washington Freedom franchise had been purchased by Dan Borislow, the inventor of the MagicJack phone technology, and he moved the team to his hometown of Boca Raton, renamed it for his company, and signed a bunch of national-team players.

The league officials and most of the fans hated him. What little tradition there was in the WPS included the Freedom, Mia Hamm’s original team, which had been owned by John Hendricks, the Discovery Channel founder who had originally bankrolled the WUSA. But even Hendricks wanted out of the WPS, and in December 2010, Dan bought the team. WPS thought he was going to be their savior, but Dan did things his way.

The league hated the fact that Dan was using the team to promote his company and that he wouldn’t abide by league rules. He didn’t have a team website or media director. He didn’t put up the sponsors’ advertising and didn’t share game film with the rest of the league. But I think the biggest reason the league hated him was because it needed him so desperately, and he knew it. Investors were dropping out, teams were folding, and the league was now down to just five teams. It was a slow death march.

But I liked Dan. Sure, he disrespected people and did some crazy things, but he called bullshit on just about everything the league did. He was a rich guy who bought the team because he liked soccer, had a daughter who played, and he was looking for unique ways to promote his business. He was innovative and different—our version of