You get a free pass when you’re a successful athlete and belong to a winning team. If you play and win for the US, you’re a hero; you occupy a category that is almost immune to criticism. When I came out, I hadn’t braced for a backlash exactly, but I had been prepared for some negative commentary, and when it didn’t come, I was pleasantly surprised. I was twenty-seven and politically engaged, while also remaining relatively politically naive. Looking around, I came to a general conclusion: perhaps the world was a better place than I’d imagined.
This was not an eccentric mindset for me to have had in late 2011. Months before I came out publicly, though, I had a lot to learn and another season to play. As a soccer player, I was looking forward to the 2012 London Olympics; as an out gay woman, I was following the run-up to the 2012 presidential election with a keener and more personal interest than any election I’d followed before. I broadened my political reading beyond the campaign for equal marriage and gay rights to other minority interests and progressive causes, on the basis that what helped one probably helped the other. What was Mitt Romney’s record on civil rights? (He didn’t have one.) How was he on the environment? (Terrible; he campaigned against Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency because it was “killing jobs.”) How did he plan to help the uninsured? (By pulling Obamacare on day one of his presidency and replacing it with . . . tax breaks.) My dad had started watching Fox News, and when he went off about Obama to me one day on the phone, I was ready. “That’s funny,” I said, “because you got a lot more in benefits for putting in energy-efficient windows and doing construction jobs for energy-efficient updating with Obama than you would with Romney. And Obamacare—I know it’s not perfect—but it’s better than anything else on the table.” I hadn’t become any less annoying since college; I had just become more informed.
The big issue for me was gay marriage, and in spring 2012, six months before the election, President Obama had become the first sitting president to announce his support. (Romney went on Fox News to affirm that marriage should exist only between a man and a woman.) Obama’s support was a huge deal and the tide was turning. Just look at the way the American public had changed its mind on this issue over the years. In 1988, a University of Chicago poll found that 67.6 percent of Americans were opposed to same-sex marriage. In 2006, a Pew survey found that figure had dropped to 51 percent. And in May 2011, a Gallup poll was among the first to show that a majority of Americans supported gay marriage. Consciousness could be changed. Speaking out, coming out, being an out gay figure in public life: all of these actions helped. I thought of all the love and support I’d had when I’d decided to come out, and it seemed to beg an obvious question: If we worked together, what else might we change?
Getting back to the US after the World Cup had brought more immediate challenges. The Women’s Professional Soccer league had always been underfunded and badly organized, but that summer it seemed as if many of the league teams were on the brink of collapse. At the end of 2010, the Chicago Red Stars had gotten into financial difficulty and left the WPS, and I had left the Chicago Red Stars. I had signed briefly with a team in Philadelphia, before being bought, just before the World Cup, by a Florida-based team called magicJack, for a hundred-thousand-dollar transfer fee. It was pocket change compared to the men’s game (a few years later, Christian Pulisic was bought by Chelsea, the English Premier League side, for $73 million, the most expensive transfer in American soccer history) and none of it came to me, but it was still the highest transfer fee in the history of women’s soccer and a rare injection of cash into the ailing league. magicJack was owned by Dan Borislow, a billionaire mired in legal disputes with the WPS and some of his own players, but who had splashed a ton of money on the team, which that season included Abby Wambach, Shannon Boxx, and Hope Solo. After the World Cup, down we all went to Boca Raton.
It was strange to settle into life after the tournament. For several months, we’d been the toast of the nation, flying in chartered planes, appearing on TV, playing in front of millions of people. Now we were back to the reality of life in the league. It was a relief in some ways. The league wasn’t perfect, but for those of us on the national team, it was a welcome retreat from the craziness. When you play internationally, you go to training camp, play two games in a row, and boom, you’re done. If you’re not in the starting lineup, you might not even see that much game time. In the league, you can settle into the season and have the time and space to work on your game.
The downside is tiny crowds and a sense of frustration that gains made by the national team never trickled down to the league. This made sense in some ways. There’s a difference between cheering on Team USA during a big international tournament and turning up for an underpromoted Wednesday-night game between two teams you’ve never heard of. But that didn’t entirely explain the disconnect. The average league player earned twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and so many had to quit to find a job long before they were ready to retire. There was inadequate investment in marketing and promotion. And the fortunes of most individual league teams were dependent on the whims of their billionaire owners—not an entirely reliable funding model.
Dan Borislow had bought the team in 2011, relocated it from Washington to Florida, and changed its name from Washington Freedom to magicJack, the name of the phone company he owned. He was an inventor and a horse breeder, exactly the kind of guy who buys himself a sports team, which I don’t say to disparage him—the enthusiasm and investment of eccentric billionaires are what keep even the biggest NFL teams afloat. My beef that year, looking at the chaos of the WPS, was that when money was tight, or the league failed to turn a profit, those billionaires were quicker to bail on us than they were when backing men’s teams—specifically, the less successful players of men’s Major League Soccer. The WPS was home to some of the best soccer players in the world, but we were women, and in the minds of many investors, we represented a financial risk, irrespective of skill.
I didn’t play many games for magicJack. I had no roots in the team, and along with the other national team players, saw the league season that year as a stopgap between the World Cup and the Olympics. In July, we played against the Western New York Flash in Rochester, New York, and attracted the biggest crowd ever in attendance for a WPS league game—some fifteen thousand people—but it wasn’t a number we ever managed to pull in again. In October, as Borislow’s legal problems grew, the WPS took away the team’s franchise and magicJack shuttered. A few months after that, the WPS folded.
For those of us on the national team, this was more of a symbolic blow than a practical one. It was depressing that another women’s soccer league had failed, but it didn’t alter our lives on the national team and there were plenty of other opportunities to play. In the new year, I flew with the national team to Canada to compete in the CONCACAF qualifying tournament for the Olympics, and in the spring we went to Portugal for the Algarve Cup. We won a lot of our games by wide margins, as usual: 13–0 against Guatemala, 14–0 against the Dominican Republic, 4–0 against Canada, and 5–0 against Denmark. For the first time, however, we sensed a sour edge to victory. With each passing game, our world dominance intensified, and we could no longer ignore how badly we were paid.
Player salaries and conditions on the national team were governed by a collective bargaining agreement that was negotiated every six years and was due to expire at the end of 2012. Since the last agreement, the team had been finalists in the World Cup, won the Olympic gold medal, and never lost the FIFA number-one world ranking. We’d attracted huge amounts of publicity and seen TV audiences soar. And yet for tier 1 national players, the basic salary being offered by the US Soccer Federation was still roughly $70,000 a year, with a bonus structure that bore no relation to that of the men’s teams. Male national team players received a minimum bonus per game regardless of outcome; women received payment only if we won, and then only if the team we beat was in the FIFA top ten. In any given year, a top-tier women’s national team player would earn 38 percent of the compensation of her equivalent on the men’s teams. If the men’s and women’s teams each played twenty friendlies in a year, the men would earn on average $263,320; the women, $99,000. And so it went on. Heading into the Olympics, we were the number-one women’s team in the world. The men, ranked thirty-five in the world, had failed even to qualify.
I had never thought too much about these numbers before. As a young player just getting into the big tournaments, my focus had exclusively been on playing and winning. Now, as senior players including Christie Rampone, Heather Mitts, and Abby explained the situation to us and solicited our opinions before talking to a lawyer, my attention shifted. I was still focused on winning, but for more than one reason now. The quickest way to make our argument to the US Soccer Federation was by winning and winning big, and while the World Cup had brought us unprecedented publicity, this time we couldn’t afford to come second. As we headed to London and the 2012 Olympics, I felt a surge of defiance. Bring it on.