Solo by Hope Solo (best free ereader .TXT) 📕

“Greg, what I said wasn’t directed at my teammates,” I said. “It was directed at your decision. I wasn’t putting down Bri. I was putting down your decision-making process.”

Greg, who had already told me several different reasons for his decision, decided to drop another one on me now. He said that I had broken team rules, that on the night before the quarterfinal, I had missed curfew and a team dinner. He implied that I was out partying and not taking care of my body.

“I was at the family hotel playing cards with my grandparents,” I said. “I took a cab home. I wasn’t the only player there. I haven’t even had a fucking drink in five months.”

Now, twenty-four hours after the game, he decided I had violated a team rule? I felt that he was throwing darts, hoping to land on a decent reason for benching me, playing a game with my career.

After the meeting our team general manager, Cheryl Bailey, walked me back to my room. Cheryl seemed sympathetic. She handed me tissues and walked me around the hotel. She was the only one giving me any answers. She didn’t say anything directly against Greg or my teammates, but I felt that she thought what was happening was bizarre. She helped me move out of Marci’s room and into my own room.

Later that night, I logged onto MySpace, went to my page, and posted a comment.

I have felt compelled to clear the air regarding many of my postgame comments on Thursday night. I am not proud or happy the way things have come out. In my eyes there is no justification to put down a teammate. That is not what I was doing.

Although I stand strong in everything I said, the true disheartening moment for me was realizing it could look as though I was taking a direct shot at my own teammate. I would never throw such a low blow. Never.

I only wanted to speak of my own abilities yet also recognize that the past is the past. Things were taken out of context or analyzed differently from my true meaning of my own words. For that I am sorry. I hope everybody will come to know I have a deep respect for this team and for Bri.

My phone buzzed. It was a text from Carli. “How are you? I’m thinking about you. Hang in there.”

I felt the warmth of her embrace. I still had a friend in the world.

Adrian came over that night to have dinner with me. I wasn’t allowed to eat with the team, but I wasn’t hungry anyway. While we sat in the lobby with our food, Lil walked past us without a glance, as though we weren’t even there, as though we were furniture.

“Wow,” Adrian said. “What a bitch.”

IV.

On Saturday, the day before the third-place game, I was left behind at the hotel while the team went to training. Our massage therapist, Kara, stayed to babysit me. I’m not sure what they were afraid would happen if I were left alone: That I would call the press? Riffle through my teammates’ belongings? Harm myself?

I really wanted to be alone, but Kara seemed to think it would be calming to watch a surf movie. She tried to make me comfortable. She burned incense. We watched Step into Liquid. I felt I was in prison.

Our general manager Cheryl met with me after training. She had more bad news. She told me I couldn’t fly home with the team on Monday.

All I wanted was to get home as quickly as possible. Instead, I would have to wait for more than half a day after everyone else left China before I could get a flight home late Monday night.

That afternoon, there was a press conference at the team hotel. “We did not have Hope attend practice today,” Greg said. “She will not be attending the game tomorrow. We have moved forward with twenty players who have stood by each other, who have battled for each other, and when the hard times came—and the Brazil game was a hard time—they stood strong.”

Lil spoke. “How we look at everything with our group is we do what’s best for the team,” she said. “And what is best for the team is the twenty of us right now. I think the circumstance that happened and her going public has affected the whole group. I think having her with us is still a distraction.”

Yes, I was definitely a distraction—it seemed to me that I was a welcome distraction from having to face up to the disaster of the Brazil game. As long as the focus was on me, Greg wasn’t held accountable. The horrible loss wasn’t the headline.

Lil spoke on and on about the team, the team, the team, missing the irony in her words. If we were such a team, why weren’t my teammates willing to pick me up? I made a mistake, and I apologized. Why couldn’t they reach out a hand and say, “We’re pissed at you. You fucked up. We think you’re a terrible person. But you’re still our teammate.”

Only Carli had reached out to me. My other longtime friends were treating me as though I was dead.

At least I had my family. They came to visit me at the hotel where our team was celebrating Pearcie’s daughter Rylie’s second birthday. I was sitting with my family in the bar outside the restaurant and we could hear everyone singing “Happy Birthday.” We weren’t invited in, but Grandma Alice went in to get a piece of cake and wish Rylie a happy birthday. She wasn’t going to let them dictate how she would act. She was going to practice what she preached and still be my sweet grandma.

At some point—I can’t remember when—I called Julie Foudy, who was in China doing commentary on the games. I told Julie I was sorry. It seemed like a strange thing