Wednesday night marks the end of Abby Wambach’s storied USWNT career.
Neil W. Blackmon
— NEW ORLEANS
Tomorrow night in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, Abby Wambach will play in her final soccer match. She’ll leave the pitch the leading goalscorer in international soccer history.
Wambach departs the game a consummate winner. She captured the NCAA Championship as a freshmen at the University of Florida. She later dominated two Olympic tournaments, scoring nine goals en route to gold medals in Athens in 2004 and London in 2012. Finally, she served as a captain on the World Cup side that had eluded her since her first national team cap in December 2001.
When Abby Wambach walks off the pitch Wednesday night, she’ll leave it one of the greatest players the women’s game has ever seen, and a figure who has had a powerful impact on the popularity and future of the sport in this country. That much is assured and uncomplicated. The rest of the story is a nearly two decade odyssey layered with accomplishment, candor, sometimes sadness, confusion, assists and almost always, goals.
Wambach on the field was an imposing and dominant figure, one who redefined the way the position of forward was perceived, scouted and ultimately played in the women’s game. It wasn’t just her physicality, at six feet tall with a muscle-bound frame that made her nearly impossible to contain in the box, even with the strictest marking. It wasn’t just the patented headers, responsible for so many of her goals from her high school days in Rochester, New York to that goal against Brazil at the 2011 Women’s World Cup and beyond. It was the combination of her understanding, fierce determination and fearlessness that made her such a devastatingly difficult defensive assignment.
“(Abby) was talented before she came to Florida,” her college coach Becky Burleigh, who won the school’s only national championship with a side featuring national teamers Heather Mitts, Danielle Fotopoulos and Wambach in 1998, said last summer. “Her ability in the air was unlike anything people had ever seen. But she combined it with work-ethic and leadership and strength and became a physically dominating player in a game where speed at that position had always been privileged. Combined with her drive to get better, it was game changing. It was incredible to coach a player who didn’t peak in college.”
Wambach understood timing and off-ball movement exceptionally well, traits that helped her receive the ball in threatening positions and make runs at terrific shooting angles, like the one that she made on her group stage clinching goal this summer against Nigeria.
Wambach also used her understanding of the game to help teammates. When you score goals at the rate Wambach did, being a bit selfish would be understandable. While some have rated players like Carli Lloyd as “only scorers” (whatever that means), the same odd criticism couldn’t be made about Wambach, who will retire with the third most assists in US Women’s history largely because she worked incredibly hard on becoming a better passer of the ball. Nearly 50 of Wambach’s 75 assists came in the second half of her women’s national team career (2008-2015), a marked improvement in distribution that speaks for itself.
The operational definition of leadership involves helping others excel by the way you perform, and certainly Wambach made the players around her better. And that trait remained this summer, as she watched much of the critical soccer in Canada from the sideline, gracefully accepting the limited playing time assigned to her by head coach Jill Ellis so she could be a part of a World Cup winning team. Her decline in skill was well-documented, and the calls for her to be removed from the team and the lineup were loud and relatively constant. Once it happened, however, what wasn’t written much was how well Wambach handled it. A lesser person might have been selfish and bitter. Wambach, to the acclaim of teammates, put her team and country first.
If the decline in world class quality helped Wambach-bashing become a popular sideshow to the actual soccer in Canada this past summer, Abby’s long history of being candid with the press expedited the trend, and perhaps, always made it possible that some of the American soccer public would turn on her. It’s a regrettable fact of sport that fans often turn on beloved athletes as their star dims and their quality declines. When the figure is a magnanimous personality like Wambach, the change in opinion can be quite public.
Wambach’s passion and candor don’t reflect a career without fair criticism.
Wambach wasn’t blameless on this front. Indeed, her very public support of the late Dan Borislov during her magicJACK days remains a bizarre and troubling footnote that merits discussion. Why not forego easy money in defense of a teammate or a league? And while wholesale criticism of the failed turf lawsuit filed in the run-up to the Women’s World Cup is often disingenuous, Wambach’s name-drop of Scott’s Lawn Care as a potential grass field solution to the turf issue less than a month from the opening ceremonies was strange, to say the least.
But the Wambach-bashing sideshow in Canada seemed oddly personal. She’s hurting the team in the name of herself, the argument went.
As evidence, a New York Times article about Wambach where she spoke about being the focal point of the attack was cited continually. And it is a story ripe with regrettable quotes, sometimes a byproduct of Wambach’s candor. Perhaps characterizing people (presumably her teammates) as “scared” of scoring wasn’t optimal, helping bolster the claim of those wishing to label Wambach a selfish, out-of-touch and aging superstar, one of the older character tropes in sport.
Examined more closely, it was an odd accusation, really, for a player whose leadership qualities are, to quote teammate Alex Morgan, “infectious.” But maybe the marketable and opportunistic Morgan is just towing the company line.
Another teammate, Hope Solo, told us before the World Cup that Wambach “understands winning in every way possible: scoring, leadership, pride, intensity. She’s the best teammate because she’ll do whatever it takes to win,” Solo said. But she’s been in the news a bunch lately. Maybe the best goalkeeper in the world isn’t the best character witness.
Her college coach, Becky Burleigh, seems a better one. ““She is just such a tough competitor. She has always been willing to lay it all on the line. She hates losing more than anyone I’ve ever met,” Burleigh told NPR. “It’s about winning.”
Wambach testified on this question herself before the tournament. Asked if she needed to win a World Cup to feel her legacy was complete, the player who had won everything but a World Cup since arriving at the University of Florida in 1998 responded “You’re damn right I do.”
She told Grant Wahl ahead of the tournament she knew there were days she was “one of the worst players on the field”, and that there were times she still blamed herself for costing her teammates a World Cup final shot in 2003, when they lost a semifinal on home soil to- who else?-Germany.
Having covered and watched Wambach since her final year at Florida, the selfishness criticism was a new one to me. I asked her about the critique before the World Cup.
“As a player, I want to play every minute of every game. But I’m a realist. I’m going to be 35 when the tournament kicks off,” she told TYAC in May. “Our coaches have gotten us ready to play seven games at the World Cup. Plenty of people have questioned them, but when it comes down to it they’ll play the sharpest players. We have incredible depth. And if I’m not sharpest, I’ll be the biggest cheerleader until I’m called on, trusting we are deeper and fitter than other teams in the world.”
And so there Wambach was this summer, profanely putting her money where her mouth against China, giving a halftime pep talk with a substitute’s bib on.
Potty mouth Abby Wambach #USAvCHN #WorldCup2015 pic.twitter.com/eaKsQ1OaFj
— Adam (@adamt326) June 27, 2015
Of course, as the summer dragged on, people focused less on Wambach the teammate and more on Wambach the turf-critic or referee-critic.
Wambach’s continual criticism of the turf fields while in Canada brought more vitriol, despite the reasonable argument she continues to make that turf affects the quality of play, along with the empirically and scientifically proven argument that turf or the second-class playing fields women compete on increases the risk of injuries, like the one suffered earlier this month by Megan Rapinoe in Hawaii, an argument made and supported vocally by many of her teammates.
So over the turf. 8 out of 10 Victory tour games on turf. https://t.co/OSrMwnzofg
— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) December 6, 2015
That Rapinoe was hurt on the surface or that the women play on the surface when the men are accommodated consistently with grass on turf or other solutions is inarguable fact, yet Wambach throughout the summer was characterized as “nagging” for continuing to make the argument. That’s a feminized and discriminatory criticism. No matter that she understands that “everyone is at a disadvantage”, as she has said. Wambach’s criticisms are framed as complaints: annoyances rather than legitimate, fair grievances about the good of the game and the product on the field.
Wambach has faced consistent criticism in her career for being outspoken. That’s how as a young national teamer she received a shirt from Julie Foudy that read “HELP! I’m talking and I can’t shut up!” Problem was, as her skills declined, her candor became less about her identity and more about her character.
One ridiculous column asked if she was “the female Kobe Bryant”, the ultra-competitor whose inner jerk got the best of her. As far as I know- and that’s about 15 years of watching– Wambach hasn’t made anyone cry on a practice field or told a teammate to “reevaluate their life purpose“, although I’m sure there will be stories. The absurdity of the Wambach-Bryant comparison doesn’t stop there, but the differences are fairly easy to discover on Google.
There is, I think, undoubtedly a level of privilege and patriculture involved in discussions of Wambach’s legacy, and one that perhaps wouldn’t happen if Wambach presented in a way that was less threatening. This is a process Cordellia Fine (author of Delusions of Gender) has argued is part of how the larger sporting culture compartmentalizes feminists-men are more receptive to outspoken women who fit gendered norms of sexuality. Wambach, a lesbian with a short haircut who has never become a cross-cultural icon like Mia Hamm or Alex Morgan, is innately more threatening to men and male privilege because she’s outside those norms.
Which makes it worth wondering, if Abby Wambach were a Lily Pulitzer or Louboutin wearing, Mia Hamm look alike doing chocolate milk advertisements, would people have been so quick to hold her candor against her?
To me, the clip of Wambach in a substitute’s bib, urging her teammates to find a goal, is compelling, in that it captures the fire that made Wambach unique, and did so with her on the bench. It is even more fascinating because it came at a time in her career Wambach recently acknowledged in an outstanding interview with Julie Foudy of ESPN it was hard to capture and bottle passion on a daily basis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78k_7w6XiIQ
Perhaps passion is one of the two things I’ll constantly think of when I think of Abby Wambach as a soccer player. Passion, whether to win or to advance the women’s game or to fight for equality or stand up for the right to love who you want to love. Abby Wambach is likely to succeed in whatever adventure she undertakes in life after soccer because she lives her life with passion. It literally defines her humanity.
The other thing?
Goals, of course. Loads and loads of glorious, wonderful goals. 184 splendid goals in the red, white, blue, black and highlighter yellow. Over 300 before that. Goals with her head, her feet, her shoulders and anything that would advance the cause of winning. Goal-scoring production the likes of which the international game has never seen. And perhaps, to the detriment of the US Women’s National team, goal scoring production we’ll never see again.
Neil W. Blackmon is co-founder of The Yanks Are Coming. He can be reached at nwblackmon@gmail.com and you can follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.