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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Under the Lights and in the Dark: Untold Stories of Women's Soccer takes an unprecedented look inside the lives of professional football players around the world – from precarious positions in underfunded teams and leagues, to sold-out stadiums and bright lights. Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Gwendolyn Oxenham tells the stories of the phenoms, underdogs, and nobodies – players willing to follow the game wherever it takes them. Under the Lights and in the Dark takes us inside the world of women's soccer, following players across the globe, from Portland Thorns star Allie Long, who trains in an underground men's league in New York City; to English national Fara Williams, who hid her homelessness from her teammates while playing for the English national team. Oxenham takes us to Voronezh, Russia, where players battle more than just snowy pitches in pursuing their dream of playing pro, and to a refugee camp in Denmark, where Nadia Nadim, now a Danish international star, honed her skills after her family fled from the Taliban. Whether you're a newcomer to the sport or a die-hard fan, this is an inspiring book about stars' beginnings and adventures, struggles and hardship, and, above all, the time-honored romance of the game.
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Seitenzahl: 436
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Gwendolyn Oxenham
UNDER THE LIGHTS AND IN THE DARK
Untold Stories of Women’s Soccer
To the players: the heroes of the past who made the stories of this generation possible; and the heroes of the present who shape the game for tomorrow
Contents
Introduction
IN JULY OF 2004, I stood with my teammate on the side of a dirt road in Itanhaém, Brazil, holding out my thumb, attempting to hitchhike to professional futebol practice. We played for Santos FC, the most storied club in Brazil, and this was our daily routine: Karen batted at my thumb and mumbled at me in Portuguese, never satisfied with my technique. A two-toned car with missing hubcaps slowed down and honked (you learn quickly that the nice cars pass you by, but the sketchier ones are always willing to stop). We took off after the car, running and laughing, yelling, “Obrigada!”, having saved ourselves the 45-minute walk to the field. Karen sat in the front seat with her elbows propped on her knees and kept up continuous chatter with the driver, stopping only to wave victoriously as we passed teammates still on foot. I had learned that if I kept my mouth shut I could pass for Brazilian. When the driver looked questioningly into the rear-view mirror at the mute girl in the back, Karen slung her thumb at me and said, matter-of-factly, “Americana.” As Karen went back to chatting, I sat on the animal-fur-covered backseat and considered my summer.
One year earlier, I had graduated from college, the same year the US professional league folded. I went to grad school and found a new life. But on a snowy morning in South Bend, Indiana, I received an email with the subject line: PROFESSIONAL BRAZILIAN TEAM LOOKING FOR AMERICAN GOALSCORER. I opened it and stared at the text – live in a bungalow on the beach, play for Santos Futebol Clube – and then I typed, “I’m a forward,” even though I was a retired outside mid who almost never scored goals. One month later I was on a plane to São Paulo. I wouldn’t get paid – few did. I didn’t care. All my life I’d grown up on Brazilian futebol folklore. There was no way I could pass up the chance to play for Santos, home of Pelé himself.
I spoke no Portuguese; my teammates spoke no English. My summer was an incredible, wordless haze: we trained twice a day, six to seven hours. Sometimes a horse grazed on the grass at midfield. My teammates could juggle the ball on their shins. We often trained barefoot on the beach, running plyometrics over cardboard hurdles. When the Brazilian winters dumped too much rain on the field and there were high tides at the beach, we ran sprints on the main highway, occupying one lane, passing cars dousing us with water. After training we walked home slowly. When it was warm enough, we jumped in the ocean – even Cris, our six-foot-tall keeper who did not know how to swim and who once had to be rescued but who kept going in anyway. Back in our dorms, we ate rice and beans for dinner. In the alley behind our rooms, we washed our jerseys by hand in the concrete basins as my teammates tried to teach me to samba. At night, on our bunk beds, we passed back and forth my Portuguese–English dictionary. I learned about their lives. They came from all over Brazil, from the highlands of the Northeast to a tiny island without cars. They had all learned to play on the street with the boys, and most had a familiar dream: to one day make the national team.
THIS GLIMPSE INTO the life of a Brazilian futebol player lasted for only one season, but it made me wonder what the women’s game looked like in the rest of the world. When I watched the Women’s World Cup on television, I knew nothing about the majority of the teams taking part. What were their lives like? You hear a lot about “inequality” in women’s soccer – what are the stories that grow out of that broad term?
I wanted to find out what it means to be a top women’s player, not just in the United States, where I live, but everywhere, from Nigeria to Russia. I often tried to web my way around the world via teammates of my former teammates, which means that many of the stories I found have an American tie (a tie that often runs through Portland, the heartbeat of women’s soccer in the United States). Dozens of players across the world shared their stories and their time. Whether from Liverpool or Lagos, Tokyo or Kabul, Kingston or Paris, here’s one thing that was always true: at an early age, they found the game and held on, driven neither by money nor fame – only the desire to be great. Here are their stories.
La Gringa
FEBRUARY 2016, AT 8.15 on a Friday night in a rented high school gym in Queens, New York, two teams of Latino men get ready to play futsal – a fast-paced, small-sided version of soccer. The fans lean against the wall, empanadas in hand, eyes on the court, eyes on the white girl – la gringa – who warms up alongside the men.
Though Allie Long gives off no signs of being anything but at ease, as a spectator, you can’t help be nervous for her – just by nature of sheer contrast: the men warming up are burly and brutish, all hairy legs and tattooed forearms. Some have their hands tucked beneath the waistbands of their shorts, like at any second they will reach down and jostle their balls. Their stretches are choppy and brusque, aggressive bursts of toe touching. And though the game has not yet started, they already smell like sweat.
Then there’s Long: the gym lights glint off her blonde ponytail. She arrives at the court wearing a zip-up, cowl-neck hoodie. A forest green infinity scarf is slung over the top, looking effortlessly glamorous. She has on black Lycra leggings and Nike sneakers with neon yellow mesh. She strips off several top layers until she is down to a t-shirt, an oversized men’s v-neck that somehow makes her seem all the more feminine.
When the referee catches sight of her, he does a double-take, head whipping back in her direction. Incredulous, he says, “Are you going to play?” When she nods, he pushes for further clarification: “With them?” he asks, gesturing to the men surrounding him. Again, Long nods.
In high school gyms across Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, immigrant men from all over the world play for money in cutthroat futsal leagues, games often stretching until three in the morning. In most of those gyms, Long is a familiar face, having played in these leagues for the past four years. But P.S. 130 is one of the few gyms and leagues she has not yet played in. Her usual Friday night team is currently in Vegas, playing for a $36,000 pot (which they will win). Long, in training, always in training, needed a game, and her friend Diego invited her to play with his team of Argentines.
Long briefly exits the gym, presumably to change out of her leggings. The group of Ecuadorians she’ll be playing against stand in a huddle and talk about her in Spanish, every sentence peppered with gringa or rubia (“blonde girl”).
When Long returns, she is wearing Paris Saint-Germain soccer shorts. While it’s common practice for players to don the shorts of the professional team they support, often bought in gift shops or ordered on the internet, Allie’s shorts are actual Paris Saint-Germain shorts. In 2014, she was the starting center midfielder for the women’s side.
Long hurriedly pulls on crew socks, tiny shinguards, and turf shoes. She tugs her team’s Argentine jersey over the top of her t-shirt. She then removes the t-shirt, slipping it out of the head hole – a deft move she’s clearly done thousands of times.
Allie doesn’t start, instead stretching along the sideline as the game begins. The game falls into its rhythm: it is fast-paced and blunt, heavy bodies lurching on the basketball court, nearly clumsy-looking, were it not for the grace with which they ping the ball: it’s almost all one-touch, zipping from one player to the next, each player attuned to the others.
Five minutes into the game, the spectators are chanting, “Cambio Rubia, Cambio Rubia” – sub in the blonde girl, sub in the blonde girl.
Their wish is granted: Allie subs in, woven into the fabric of the game – bodies moving in, moving away, constantly in flux. She shows no signs of being intimidated – she doesn’t let herself hide, doesn’t drift to the side or fade into the background. She’s constantly pushing to make herself available. Within ten minutes, she scores two goals and sets up three others.
The audience response isn’t gaudy – they don’t scream and laugh, although that does frequently happen. It is only a collective intake of breath, small sounds of appreciation and approval – the same noise they make when any other player does something beautiful.
When the whistle blows, Long gathers her stuff and heads out, holding her bag in one hand, a napkin-wrapped empanada in the other. She climbs into a silver Lexus – off to her next game.
ALLIE LONG IS a professional soccer player for the Portland Thorns. She is a contender for the United States national team. Four times, she had worn the United States national team jersey and represented her country – but she had never done it when it mattered; she had never played in the World Cup or the Olympics or in any international tournament with stakes. That is what she wants more than anything else – and to do that, to get there, she plays in underground men’s leagues across New York, sometimes playing four or five games a night during the offseason. “It is hands down the best training I get,” says Long as she starts her car and inches out of her curbside parking spot. “Anybody can train – but these games are different – I wanted to do something I knew no one else was doing.”
Nothing about these games is light-hearted. There’s both prize money and pride on the line. Teams are run by community kingpins who own restaurants or construction companies or some other undisclosed operation. Each team owner wants to have the best team in the neighborhood – so they’re willing to shell out cash for the best players. In no way is Long the only one to have played pro; many of the men have played in different tiers of professional leagues all around the world. Team managers put in calls to the ringers: “I’ll give you $100 to play for my team on Thursday night.” By moving from game to game, a good player can make up to $800 a night – which is more than they make in their day jobs as construction workers and dishwashers. (The fans, too, stand to make money – come play-off time, there is rampant betting – money passed from hand to hand in the crowds that surround the court.) In the 2015 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), for the six-month season, the starting salary was $6,842. An NYC men’s league ringer can make more than that in two weeks.
Long, as a star of the NWSL, makes more toward the top of the salary range – $37,800. For her, the money is not the prime draw of the NY leagues – it’s the intensity level the money brings with it. “I love the pressure. I love that I have to perform,” says Long.
In France, the league was very unbalanced – two or three teams significantly better than the rest – and her Paris side would win games by six goals. Long sometimes wouldn’t break a sweat. That doesn’t happen here. Here, when it’s four against four, plus keepers, you can’t get lost. Every touch counts. You lose the ball or get stripped or play the ball poorly, and someone’s scoring against your team, and there’s no question whose fault it is. When you’re the girl – when the whole gym is looking at you to see whether you stack up, you can’t let that happen. And you know – always you know – what they’ll say if your team loses: that it’s because of the girl.
REWIND TO SUMMER 2008. Allie Long was a University of North Carolina soccer player. To train for her senior season, her long-time coach Adrian Gaitan invited her to train with his men’s semi-pro team. Her first day out, they played small-sided games. Allie’s team lost three games in a row. As her team stood in line, one guy said, “Why the hell do we keep losing?” A guy from the other team – the winning team – jogged by and called out, “It’s because you’ve got the girl on your team.”
Allie stood there, pissed, mind-blowingly pissed – it was not because of her. She stared at the back of the kid’s buzzed head, thinking, That mother-fer. I hate that kid. I really hate that kid. He turned back toward her and grinned. He winked, like, I don’t mean that. I’m just saying that to get you worked up. But the wink didn’t make it better. Does he think this is a joke? Long thought. This is not a fucking joke.
The guy taunting her was Jose Batista, known to most as Bati. Half-Colombian, half-Brazilian, he’s always joking, always smiling. He’s funny, and with every practice Allie became more aware of that. She’d tell herself, “Don’t laugh at him. You hate him.” But he broke her down, joke by joke, play by play. He wasn’t the machismo-brimming asshole she thought he was, even if she still got angry when thinking about that first joke. He was the first one to tease – to say the one thing he knew would piss her off the most – but he was also the first to recognize her contributions. And beyond a smile that was impossible not to notice, he was so smooth on the ball, graceful and calm. He could break down a defense with one pass, and he was the type who had the audacity to chip a penalty kick up the middle no matter how much was at stake. It was undeniably attractive.
They gravitated toward one another: one night Bati and his friend Gustavo, “Goo,” came out to Long Island to see her – “The Jungle” they called it, so different from the Queens neighborhood where Bati grew up. (“I’m a city boy – I remember looking around – all the nice houses, the open space, the fact that you had to have a car – and being like, what is this place?” says Bati.) Then Allie and Bati started training together outside of practice, hitting long balls, doing one-v-ones, talking shit, learning each other’s tendencies. They understood each other and played off of one another – on the field and off of it.
When Long left for her senior year at UNC, Bati and Goo regularly made the eight-hour drive down to see her. He understood what a big part of her UNC was. He knew about the UNC obsession she’d had as a kid – how she’d owned the UNC Dynasty DVD box set, how she’d read long-time UNC coach Anson Dorrance’s book, The Vision of a Champion. He knew the only reason why she’d gone to Penn State her freshman year was because she didn’t think she could possibly be good enough for UNC, and that her transfer to UNC her junior year was the best decision she’d ever made. So, he and Goo made the trek to Fetzer Field, two of the 10,000 powder-blue wearing fans rooting for Allie.
And whenever Long was back in New York, she came to Bati’s futsal games – which were as big a part of Bati as UNC was a part of her. His father, a Brazilian, had played in these leagues 30 years earlier. Bati had been coming to these games since he was born; he and his brother grew up chasing a ball through the school hallways. When he was sixteen, his dad decided he was ready to play with the men.
Allie’s first time out to watch, she got sucked in – wowed by the pace, the intensity. Bati’s “crew,” as Long refers to them, was unreal: there was Mohammad Mashriqi, who plays for the Afghanistan national team. And Alan, who would eventually play his way onto the US national futsal team. There was Bati’s childhood friend, Mike Palacio, who played a year for the New York Red Bulls. They played the kind of soccer that made you better just by witnessing it – Allie went to every game she could. But it was an odd feeling to sit there in street clothes – to be the one blonde girl in the stands, to have nobody know that she too could play. It wasn’t long before she started imagining herself out there. The game was so fast – kind of terrifyingly fast – and she wasn’t sure she could keep up. But as soon as that question was in her mind, that was it: playing out there was all she could think about.
For two seasons, Bati fended Allie off. “Not that he’s the boss of me or anything,” Allie clarifies. But with thousands of dollars at stake, fights break out every night and the play gets dirty. “These guys have nothing to lose. Allie’s got everything to lose,” said Bati.
But while she was training for her first season as a professional soccer player, drafted to the Washington Spirit, Allie played in Bati’s pickup games – games without anything on the line. Always, she played well. The guys out there started saying it: “Dude, you should bring her out.” Finally Bati and his pickup friends made a new futsal team and Allie was on the roster. Bati was nervous about it. It wasn’t just the fear of injury – “He wanted to know I could handle myself,” says Long. He never quite said that directly, but as they climbed out of the car at their first game, he just looked at her and said, “You know you have to play sick right?”
That first game, she was nervous, shy – so determined to prove she could hang. At the beginning, she one-timed every ball. And then, once her credibility and confidence built up, occasionally, she allowed herself to take a risk. Initially defenders took her too lightly – a patronizing half-smile on their face – like, is this serious? It was only after she burned them that they started to play for real. That first night, the gym went wild for her – throwing things onto the court, yelling “La Gringa, La Gringa.”
Soon Bati’s phone kept ringing for Allie. The first time a team manager called and offered to pay her $80 to come out, Allie and Bati assumed he must be calling for her to play in one of the few women’s leagues. But when they got out there, it was all men; like any other ringer, they’d pay her to play. Not only was she good, she also filled the gyms in a way that other players hadn’t: fans pay a $4 admission and on nights she played, people just kept streaming in the door, wanting to see la rubia, la blanquita.
It wasn’t immediate acceptance from everyone – especially from the guys she beat. “Nobody wants to get embarrassed,” says one of the guys she plays against, “and almost always, that’s exactly what happens.” One guy got in her face, yelled, “Ir a jugar con sus muñecas!” and then, to make sure she got it, he sputtered it out in English, “Go play with your dolls!” And, sure, there are sometimes jokes. There was the one night when she fell hard into the crowd of men and they drunkenly yelled in español, “Touch her ass! Touch her ass!” (When she responded in Spanish – “I know what you are saying,” they erupted in chastened laughter.) But more than jokes, there is acceptance, inclusion – a palpable, wholesale, gym-wide shift in attitude.
Like any women’s player, Long has seen the internet comments, how every article about women’s soccer ends with anonymous comments that become a cesspool of hate – how it’s boring, how the women’s pro league will never survive because there is no audience, no one cares, no one wants to watch. But Long exists in two worlds where that’s not true – in Portland, where the Thorns attract more fans than some men’s MLS teams, and here – where these men from machismo-rich cultures are glad to have her.
“They love her,” says Bati. “Now, when I come out to games, people don’t even say hi to me. They just ask me, ‘Where’s my gringa?’”
LIKE BATI, ALLIE inherited the game – her great uncle, Croatian, is a football diehard, yet another player who, according to family folklore, got close to making the national team. He started the first girls club in Long Island, and Barb, Allie’s mom, grew up playing for it. This was no rudimentary bumble ball, and this wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan chapter of Barb’s life: Barb has played her entire life. To Allie, this meant her mother was cooler than the other moms. Mother and daughter played together on the strip of road in front of Allie’s childhood home – at age six, at age fifteen, at every age, sending balls back and forth, counting, always keeping track. Even now, they play together. Two days before I followed Allie around Queens, Allie and her mom played in a Long Island pickup game. Barb was never the talent that her daughter is, but she’s the kind of player you can trust – today, at 52, she’s still an orchestrator who finds and sets up her teammates. According to Allie’s father, his daughter’s intuitive awareness of the game, which she’s had since she was a kid, comes from her mother. “And her looks – she got her mom’s beauty,” he adds, Long Island accent thick. “But her ferocity, her competitiveness, her stubbornness – she got that from me.”
Mr. Long is 6′2″ and 250 pounds. His forehead looks like that of Frankenstein’s monster thanks to the scars from 60 plus stitches. His nose has been busted too many times to remember. He’s had multiple knee operations, and he’s fresh off of shoulder cuff surgery. So far, no injury has kept him away from the game he loves – competitive men’s rugby. “I’m a rough and tumble kind of guy; I like to mix it up,” he says. “The first time I caught sight of it – [American] football practice without the pads – I thought, That’s for me, I like to kick ass.” He’s plays on competitive club teams and has traveled all over the world for rugby. He’s never made any money from it. He just does it because he loves to compete. At 60, he’s still going and will continue to play as long as his body holds up. (And Mr. Long seems to have different standards than most on what “holding up” consists of.) Like his daughter, he does not quit.
EN ROUTE TO her next game, Allie drives past laundromats, liquor stores, and grocery stores with pictures of giant guinea pigs in the windows. It is not easy driving. She weaves through Queens traffic, makes cross-traffic turns, merges into small spaces on busy streets, all the while speaking steadily and passionately with her Long Island accent, not quite as heavy as her father’s. She wants me to know about everybody – she tells me about the best player she’s ever played with, a kid dubbed “Messi,” a tiny teenager who disappeared for a couple years when he got sent to juvie. “There are so many guys who are just incredible – incredible,” she says, “and they never make it! I want to, like, start a club, a program or nonprofit or something, for all these guys. I don’t know what I would call it, like, ‘Guys Who Don’t Get a Shot – Now You Do,’” she says.
Bati is one guy who did get a shot – in and out of US national teams, he was clearly talented. His father told him, “Go to Brazil.” The mecca of futebol, the country where the game will exist forever in our imagination as the game at its most beautiful. When he was eighteen, he went for it: he tried out for Atlético Mineiro in Belo Horizonte and he landed a year-long contract. The American who grew up in Queens entered an entirely different world. Gone were the first-world niceties and the easy city life. Now he was living in a six-by-six-foot room in 100-degree weather, with no air conditioning, no cable, no internet – nothing but his Nokia cellphone.
The older Brazilians didn’t go easy on the new American kid. No one spoke to him – not a word, not in the cafeteria, not in the locker room, nowhere. They’d throw all his clothes in the shower; they’d cut through the leather on his cleats. On the Nokia, he’d call his Colombian mother. “Mom, I can’t do this, I can’t make it here. Mom, send me new cleats.” He thought it was just freshman hazing – he told himself he just had to get through it but eventually he broke. When his Colombian mother arrived in Brazil, she wanted to take her baby home. It’s not hard to imagine her scooping him up in her arms.
It is his biggest regret in life. His father didn’t talk to him for two years.
Some decisions seem smaller over time – less impactful on a life’s eventual trajectory – but this decision wasn’t like that. Having played professionally, however briefly, Bati was no longer eligible to play Division 1 soccer in the States. He played Division 3 and earned All-American honors, but nobody cared. “He just completely fell off the map,” says Long.
Allie, who relays the story, shakes her head as she looks over her shoulder, merging into the next lane. She hurts for him. “I want to go back in time, I want to make him stay. I never would’ve let him go home.” It’s hard for her to imagine that he will never get another shot.
WE ARRIVE AT Lawrence High School on the other side of Queens. The gym is packed and loud, hundreds sitting in the bleachers behind the netted court. Growing up in a nearly all-white town in Long Island, this world that blooms up around the court is a big part of what Allie loves. Latin rap music blares out of the speaker. Men chant and play drums. The smell of ground beef emanates from the pop-up kitchen/card table in the back of the gym, where tacos and enchiladas cook on portable burners. Families sit court-side, little boys propped up on their fathers’ shoulders, little girls playing with Barbies and braiding hair, and, occasionally, taking note of Allie.
As we walk through the crowd, Long points people out. In whichever gym you enter, there are players whose whispered reputations follow them: that guy got a tryout with the Seattle Sounders. That guy played for Colombia in the ’94 World Cup. Long stops to hug a guy she identifies to me as “Fat Ronaldo” – he is not the Fat Ronaldo, but when video footage of him nutmegging a player got uploaded to YouTube, that’s who everyone mistook him for. “Fat Ronaldo’s still Got it” ran one caption. The clip got over one million views.
Fat Ronaldo, also called Il Fenomeno, is one of the ringers who bounces from game to game. On any given week, he makes $600–700 a night.
“I’m a paid whore,” he says, grinning, as Allie and I stand next to him.
Fat Ronaldo turns to Allie, redirects the subject back to her: “What’s the deal? Why aren’t you in camp?”
Allie’s first invite to the national team came in 2010, when she was 23. First day of camp, she tweaked her MCL and the dream turned nightmare. Stubborn, unwilling to get that close and then have to sit on the sideline, she tried to play through it. It didn’t work: she was there, she could taste it, she rubbed shoulders with her heroes – but it was yanked away. She didn’t get invited back for four years.
In May of 2014, Allie again got the call-up. This time she played in her first national team game and did well, getting her first assist in her third appearance, against France. She stayed on the national team radar – in January of 2015, ahead of the Canada World Cup, she again got called in. She was in the hunt, she was so close.
At the end of camp, head coach Jill Ellis told Long that she was no longer considering her for the World Cup. Long cried the whole plane ride home.
A year later, Ellis called in 26 players to the first residency camp of 2016, to compete for one of eighteen spots for the Olympic team. Since the US won the 2015 World Cup, there had been unexpected pregnancies, unexpected retirements, unexpected injuries – and the roster that once looked on lockdown seemed wide open. Of the 26 players called into camp, there were ten new faces. Allie wasn’t one of them. Bati was the one who broke the news to Allie, quietly, directly: “The roster was announced. You weren’t on it.”
Long stands next to Fat Ronaldo and her response has no bitter undertones. She is positive, upbeat, and understanding. “Jill needs to get a look at some of the younger girls – you know, gotta give them a shot, gotta see what they can do.”
There’s Mallory Pugh – seventeen-year-old high school sensation. And there’s Lindsey Horan, the twenty-year-old who was the first US women’s player to skip college and go straight to the pros, signing for Paris Saint-Germain for a reported six-figure salary. Horan plays the same position as Long.
“Does this mean you’re out of the Olympic picture?” Ronaldo asks.
“Not for sure,” Allie says. Allie got an email from the team general manager, telling her to make sure all her paperwork was filled out for her Brazilian visa – just in case. She knows that she can’t hang her hat on that – a good 30 or so players probably got that email. She knows that if she had a good shot, she’d be in camp. But that email meant it wasn’t impossible.
Ronaldo nods sagely. “Well, you’ll get your chance. And when you get in there, you gotta pull out all the stops – do a roundhouse or a couple of rainbows if you have to. Do whatever you need to do.”
Long smiles, shakes her head. “Nah, I’m a center midfielder – I just gotta keep it simple. Like Busquets.” Sergio Busquets is defensive center midfielder for Barcelona, Long’s favorite team.
“But Busquets is a hitter – you don’t strike me as a hitter.”
“Oh I can hit,” she says, smiling, running her hand through her ponytail. “Hitter” refers to the hard-hitting tackles that mark both Busquets and Long’s style of play. As defensive-mids, they snuff out attacks, bearing down upon anyone who tries to move through their midfield.
Many of the guys Allie plays with and against inquire about the national team – Allie is their girl and they want it for her. They follow her games for Portland, texting her when she scores, when she wins, when she loses. They know that she was only a hairsbreadth away from making the World Cup team. And they know that she played her 2015 pro season with something to prove: that she finished as the second leading scorer in the women’s pro league, that she was named the Thorns MVP. When she didn’t get called into the January 2016 camp, some were aghast and indignant, sure she’d been wronged. (One guy said, “Who ain’t giving you a fair look? You need me to take out the coach?”) Others, like Ronaldo, are just encouraging, administering advice: just keep at it, just keep doing what you’re doing.
AT 10.30PM, ALLIE’S next game begins. This time she’s playing against women. While she has played with the best women in the world, that’s not what tonight looks like. This league is composed of women who come from countries where females simply do not play. Now, in the United States – a country where women’s soccer is a thing – they’ve picked up the game late in their lives and it shows: the level is significantly lower than that of the men.
Allie has too much class to say so directly, but this is one game she’s not excited to play in. She’s doing it because $100 for a 30-minute game is too good to say no to, and because she’s not a snob – she’s not going to be the girl who thinks she’s too good to play with other girls. Plus, she knows she grew up with every opportunity; the rest of these women did not. She recognizes that there’s something important in these games – these games are progress.
At this gym, each team wears replica jerseys of a pro team. The team Allie is playing for is wearing Orlando Pride jerseys, the new NWSL team. She has me snap a picture of her holding out the Orlando emblem and raising her eyebrow, to send to Alex Morgan, US national team star forward. Morgan, Long’s best friend and future maid of honor, played with Allie in Portland, but will play the 2016 season for Orlando. While Allie is caught up in the irony of the front of her jersey, I’m drawn to the back, where REAL LATINAS is bannered in all-caps across her shoulders, her blonde ponytail bouncing across the letters.
As the game starts, again what you notice is the contrast. Beyond the juxtaposition of Allie’s fair features with everyone else’s dark ones, it’s the body types: Allie is a machine; the other players aren’t. Their bodies are normal-looking, some twiggy, some curvy, none subjected to the two-a-day, sometimes three-a-day workouts that Allie’s is. She’s in the best shape of her life. It’s fitness and speed training in the morning, games at night – that week, Allie played in two games on Tuesday night, three games on Wednesday, two on Thursday and two tonight. “If that phone call comes, I’m going to be ready,” says Long.
In this game, Allie’s face looks different than in the last – not as charged, not as alive. Allie’s team goes down 2–0 in the first five minutes. Allie’s face is 100 per cent expressionless. Long doesn’t like to lose, and she definitely doesn’t like to lose to players who are nowhere near as good as she is.
Thirty seconds later, Long nutmegs a player, and it’s a nasty one – with her sole, she rolls it clean through the middle of the charging defender’s legs. The entire, packed gym responds: groans, whistles, thigh slaps. That’s the moment the other team develops a vendetta against Allie. They don’t like her – this blonde girl who isn’t around half the time but then comes in and tries to steal the win that would otherwise be theirs. One girl is shoving Long and getting in her face, elbowing her, and muttering in Spanish about taking her down. I wonder if Allie will respond – will take a cue from her ass-kicking father and prove that she’s the “hitter” she says she is – but she doesn’t. She just mounts a utilitarian-style comeback, making one simple pass and hard tackle after another.
Not every player is a beginner – there’s a girl on her team who played at Notre Dame, and the other team has a keeper who played in Ecuador and a midfielder who played in Brazil. But the game is still largely marked by ugly moments that suggest an overall lack of skill – toe balls, players split too easily, wide gaps in the defense. Allie tries to figure out how she can still get something out of the game. While the men’s games are exercises in quick thinking and release, this women’s futsal game demands Allie take her team on her shoulders. And she does that – she is the force in the center, the orchestrator who runs the passing game, slipping balls to the Notre Dame girl as the team comes from behind and wins. But when the game ends, Allie just looks relieved it’s over. This game didn’t make her a better player, and she knows it. She is here, and her best friends are at national camp.
At the end of the game, a little girl and her mother come up to Allie – would it be okay if they take a picture with her? “Yeah, yeah, of course, of course,” Allie responds.
In Portland, this is par for the course; little girls always want autographs. But in this gym, filled with families from countries where girls and women do not play, it’s not as common. These one or two starry-eyed girls who bite their lips and can’t quite look her in the eye – too starstruck, too in awe – matter more than anything else to Long. Even more so than the women’s game she just played in, these girls are signs of change – change she can have a part in. She takes this part seriously: she crouches down, eye-level with the girl, who’s probably ten or eleven, and puts her face right alongside the kid’s. She remembers being a kid, she remembers when her Grandpa took her all the way to Florida during the Olympics so that she could see the national team, she remembers how just like that, she knew what her dream was – to one day be them.
WHEN ALLIE WAS ten, her parents drove her six hours to watch the women’s national team play a friendly against Australia in Connecticut. Mia Hamm was Allie’s hero – “Hamm was her frigging star of the universe,” says Long’s father. Allie had seen the team play in the Olympics, but at this game, there would be a chance to get autographs – and Allie had eyes only for Hamm.
Post-game, throngs of kids huddled at the edge of the bleachers, leaning over the railing with a Sharpie, holding out jerseys and soccer balls and cleats and posters, waiting for autographs. But Long took stock of the players and noticed that Hamm wasn’t one of them.
Mr. Long, who was trying to keep his daughter in his field of vision, suddenly lost her. “You got an eye on her? You see her?” he called, frowning, to his wife. Allie was there, in the mess of kids, and then she was nowhere – just gone.
Minutes later, Mr. Long saw a streak of blonde racing across the field. Long had crawled through the other kids’ legs, climbed under the fence, dropped down to the field, bolted past security, climbed over yet another fence, and, on the sprint, gone to find Hamm – who she figured must be on the other side of the field.
Mr. Long chased after her, explaining to security that his ten-year-old was on the loose. He was ready to give Allie hell, to ground her for months, but when he found her, triumphant and exuberant on the outskirts of the field, signed Mia Hamm poster in hand, the anger and parental fear were overpowered by other feelings. He stared at his daughter’s smudged red-white-and-blue face in wonder – the whole time starting to get an inkling of what’s coming, of the lengths his daughter will go to, of just how similar she is to him. “She won’t take no for an answer,” says Long.
THAT MOMENT SHE shoved her poster in Mia’s face wasn’t Allie’s last Hamm encounter. A few years ago, for an entire summer in Los Angeles, Hamm trained a handful of hopefuls – among them, Tobin Heath, Alex Morgan, Kelley O’Hara, and Long. (Because that’s the kind of person Hamm is, training the next generation, helping them get there – no money involved, just grace.)
Did Long tell Mia Hamm that she once scaled two fences and sprinted across the field to hunt her down? “Mention I was a crazy, psycho stalker? No, I did not,” laughs Long. “I played it cool.”
Hamm has a killer dry wit. (When Gary Smith wrote his Sports Illustrated profile on her, she deadpanned The Jerk: “Are you going to start with ‘She grew up a poor, black, child …’?”) She’s also kind, generous, encouraging. And, of course, relentless. When Mia Hamm is shouting at you to push harder, you do it – you find that last drop of energy to burst forward.
At the Home Depot training center, Morgan, Heath, Long, and O’Hara stood across from Hamm, heaving in and out, smiling at her, acting nonchalant – like they were all just friends, just mutual tellers-of-jokes, sprinters-of-sprints, kickers-of-balls. But to Allie, to all of them, Mia Hamm is still Mia Hamm.
The title of that UNC book Allie had as a kid – Vision of aChampion – was based around Hamm. Coach Anson Dorrance caught sight of Hamm running cones and sprints in an empty park. He wrote her a note: “The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is watching.” For many women’s soccer players, it may be the defining quote of their lives – and in more ways than they ever imagined.
WE LEAVE THE GYM at around 11.45pm. As we sit in traffic, Allie pulls up a picture on her cell phone. Earlier that morning, Long went wedding dress shopping with her mother and found one. It’s no puffy, princess style for Long. Her dress is straight Audrey Hepburn – ivory and silk, long-sleeved, form-fitting, and classic, a plunging, v-neck back. It’s stunning.
In October, Allie and Bati will get married, and Tobin and Alex are two of her three maids of honor. There are seven bridesmaids total. “I know, I know,” she says sheepishly.
She glances over at me, gestures toward my belly – I am six months pregnant during my visit with Allie – and says, “Bati and I want to have kids so bad.” Her original idea was to make the 2015 World Cup team and the 2016 Olympic team, and then have kids after that. Now, having to face the fact that she hasn’t been invited to the camp of Olympic hopefuls, she’s having to retool the dream. “Maybe I’ll freeze my eggs,” she says, lobbing out the comment, seemingly unsure of whether or not she is joking. What she does know: there’s no way she’s giving up now. If her dreams didn’t come true in 2015 and 2016, then she’s gunning for 2019 and 2020. By 2019, she’ll be 32 – one year older than the age at which Mia Hamm retired. It would be her last shot to break in to the US national team. “I’ll have hope until the last second. I’ll always be ready for when that call comes,” says Long.
THREE DAYS LATER, she’s in Houston, staying in Bati’s family’s new home, spending the remaining days before preseason training with a personal trainer who’s putting her through exercises that are different from anything she’s ever tried. Ironically, the US national team happens to be in Texas playing an Olympic qualifying match against Costa Rica. Allie goes to the game. Alex Morgan had put her and Bati on the guest list. That morning, she surprises Tobin at the hotel – they go for coffee and Tobin gives her one of her game jerseys. She wears that to the game – HEATH bannered across her shoulders. She is rooting for her friends. She is all fan. But not quite – because people keep recognizing her, keep asking to take her picture.
When the game starts, she sits back, watching from her spot in the stands. Which, you know, hurts. She vacillates on whether or not this is good for her. “She tries not to watch, but she always does. I tape the games for her,” says her mom. She studies the game – looking for what’s missing – so that she knows what she needs to be able to offer.
ONE MONTH LATER, she reports to Portland for preseason. Portland is the best women’s soccer city in the world. Last season her grandmother flew out to watch her play – although she never went to one of her daughter’s games, at age 84, she’s a convert, willing to trek across the country to watch her granddaughter. Barb sat beside her, choked up and proud, watching her daughter play in front of 20,000.
There is no better place for Long to prove her worth. The Thorns roster is the female equivalent in talent to Barcelona, stocked with international superstars. Last season, Long’s MVP accolades didn’t get her the call-up. This season there are new additions to the roster including: Horan, the PSG twenty-year-old who skipped college, and Amandine Henry, who won the Silver Ball – the runner-up award for best player – at the women’s World Cup the previous year. Both play Long’s position.
Equalizer Soccer, the most in-depth source for NWSL soccer news, publishes an article: “The Amandine Henry signing and what it means.” Under the bolded header, “Who Will Lose Playing Time?” it says: “… the name to watch is Allie Long. A fixture in the Thorns midfield since day one, Long can play the top or bottom of the midfield though not necessarily out wide. With Lindsay Horan in the team and battling for an Olympic spot, Long would seem to be the odd woman out among those three.”
In Long’s mind it is the perfect test.
IN PRESEASON SHE is playing some of the best football of her life. There are four US national pool players on the team – Meghan Klingenberg, Tobin Heath, Lindsey Horan, Emily Sonnett – and Long goes toe-to-toe with all of them. She plays well enough to warrant a phone call – Portland coach Mark Parsons tells Jill Ellis that Long is killing it, that he thinks she deserves to be called in.
They are on a team-bonding overnight trip to Bend, Oregon when she gets the news: Ellis wants her to report to national camp in April. The team gets out at various scenic spots – she climbs up rocks and walks between lush green trees, but it’s hard to see any of it. At a gas station, she whispers the news to Tobin – Tobin bear hugs her and whisper-screams into her ear. They climb back in the team van, and Long sits there, trying not to cry, trying to play it cool.
Still, Long knows how far she has to go. It’s late in the game – January, February, March – those were the camps to prove yourself. Coming in during April, only a couple months before the Olympic roster is set, her chances hover just above zero.
ON APRIL 6, THE United States play Colombia in a friendly, and Allie starts in the center of the midfield. Ellis tells her that she’s got 45 minutes. She’ll be subbed out at half-time.
In the stands, Allie’s parents, Bati, as well as Diego and Allen from the NYC men’s leagues, form the Allie fan club. It is freezing cold but they don’t notice – too busy staring at Allie, at her runs, at her tackles, at every touch. Every once in a while, they turn to each other with wide, euphoric eyes, no words needed: Allie’s doing it – she’s conjuring Busquets. Her presence is undeniable: she orchestrates, keeps it simple, and strips the ball off the Colombians. She threads hard-to-see through-passes, never playing the ball laterally when there is an option to go forward.
And then, at the top of the eighteen-yard box, she hits a rocket – it swerves, beats the keeper, and clangs off the cross bar. In the stands, Diego, Allen, Bati, and her parents jump and scream – it was beautiful; it missed; it was, like her entire career, so close.
In the 32nd minute, Horan sends in a ball from the flanks, and Allie pivots while backpedaling and heads the ball clinically into the corner of the net: it’s the United States’ second goal, and Allie’s first goal of her international career. The stone face is gone – her radiant smile, and her leap into Horan’s arms, will be the cover photo on the Sports Illustrated website later that night.
In the stands, Diego, Allen, Bati, and her parents lose their minds.
Long’s night, it turns out, isn’t over. Ellis changes her mind and keeps Long in for the next half. In the 65th minute, Long scores again, another header. This time, she’s more collected in her celebration – she is just doing her job, just finishing a ball like she would in any other game.
That night Bati is flooded with 102 texts and 300 comments on Facebook, most of them from the futsal guys: “So happy for her – but not surprised. We see it week in and week out”; “Dude, she’s better than you”; “My boy Jose Batista’s wifey doing it big”; “OMFG – send her to Rio!”
She plays in two more qualifying games against Japan, starting both of them and playing the entire game. Of course, this gets her hopes up – but she tries to talk herself down, telling herself it doesn’t mean anything. Ellis is just trying to give her as much time to be seen as possible.
During the semi-final of the men’s European Championship, she gets the call. She answers on the first ring. Ellis teases, “Waiting by the phone?” And then Long hears the words that seemed almost impossible just six months ago: “You’re going to Rio. You earned this.”
In Rio, she’s a starter. Against France she is named “Player of the Game.” Suddenly the media is interested in her. Everyone wants to talk to the player who kept getting turned down. She says again and again, “It’s a dream come true, it’s what I wanted and worked for my whole life.” But nothing she says can quite capture how incredible it feels to spend more than a decade watching your best friends from the stands – and then to finally step on the stage and prove you belong.
She is aware of how differently this story could have turned out. As an elite athlete you have to believe that hard work and perseverance will get you there. But Allie is keenly aware that sometimes, that’s not how it goes.
AT THE END of my night following Allie around Queens and Brooklyn, we pulled up alongside a curb in Brooklyn. Long was wolfing down a leftover cold empanada – tired and beat but still running on adrenaline, happy to keep talking, wanting to make sure I had a full sense of what these leagues were about, of just how much talent is out there. “Really, those guys are so, so good. You just can’t believe they never made it.” She revisited the idea she mentioned earlier: “I mean it, there’s gotta be some kind of program to start, something that says, ‘You missed me but I’m still here – and I can ball with the best of them.’”
