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

general manager, Cheryl Bailey. She told me there would be a team meeting in the morning and gave me some words of advice. “One smile at a time,” she said. “One hello at a time. You put your hand out and even if no one takes it, you keep on trying.”

I checked into my room. I was rooming with Tina, who had volunteered to stay with me. I couldn’t help but remember that she had never spoken up for me in China. But I could tell she wanted to make things better between us. “Hope,” she said. “Guess what? I’m pregnant.”

Tina and Brad had gotten married about a year earlier. I was so proud of how they had made it through the challenges of being teen parents and now they were adding to their family. That was her gift to me, her olive branch—I was one of the first people that she shared her news with. I hugged her.

The next morning Tina and Cat insisted I pray with them. We clasped hands and said a prayer of forgiveness. It felt phony. I went downstairs to a conference room. The chairs were arranged in a circle and my teammates were already seated. There was an open chair next to Carli. I sat down. I was so nervous that I was shaking. I didn’t want to see any of these women—all I could think of was the hell I had gone through in Shanghai. I wanted to be back in my bathtub. Carli reached over and patted me on the leg. Everyone saw her do it.

Greg spoke first. He said that he knew it took courage for me to be here.

Well, I thought, that’s a good start. But the start was also the end of “good.” No more sympathy. Greg recited a laundry list of my transgressions: he said the goal in North Korea was one of the worst mistakes he had ever seen in a World Cup, yet he had stood by me. He accused me of breaking team policies by staying out too late the night before the England game. “I don’t know how you could do this to your team,” he said. “It takes a certain type of person to be able to do what you did. Something serious must have happened to you in your childhood.”

His words lashed at me. Damn right something happened when I was a kid, I thought. I learned how to fight for myself.

I stared at him. Where was the part where we talked a bout moving forward and winning the Olympics in 2008? I fought my instinct to flee the room.

Greg said we couldn’t move forward until everyone had expressed their feelings. So then the onslaught began.

Lil, the captain, started. She accused me of throwing the team under the bus. The accusations rushed in.

“We don’t think you should be here. We think you should go home.”

“You’re a bad friend.”

Each person who spoke stood up, as though we were in some sort of twelve-step meeting. “You’re a terrible teammate.”

“You threw us all under the bus.”

“You just kept using your dad’s death for sympathy.”

That last jab was from Cat, my good friend. That hurt more than anything anyone else said. So much for forgiveness.

When it looked like they were done, I started to speak. “I . . .”

“Are you even sorry? You’ve never once been sincere.”

“I can’t stand this,” Carli said under her breath and left the room. I put my head down as I was accused of planning my statement to the press. While it was true that I had told the back of the bus group that I had no problem commenting on Greg’s decision if asked, it sounded as though I had concocted an elaborate plan for speaking to the press.

My close friends on the team remained silent, but had cold looks in their eyes. Tina looked miserable but didn’t say anything.

I started rocking back and forth in my chair as the players went around the circle. I fought back tears. Carli came back in the room and sat back down beside me. “Stay strong, Hope,” she whispered to me, and patted my leg. “Stay strong.”

One of Greg’s assistant coaches, Brett Hall, who had coached with Greg for years, finally spoke up. “Look, we all make mistakes,” he said. “You have to pick that person up and move on as a team. You can’t continue to make it worse; you want to forgive and move on.”

His words hung heavily in the air. Greg shot him an angry look.

Finally, the meeting was adjourned. The message was clear: my teammates wished I had never shown up, and now they wanted me to go home, to make them look and feel better. Somewhere in the past few weeks, it must have registered with them that the image of the U.S. women’s team had taken an enormous hit. The once beloved team was being called Mean Girls, its tactics likened to sorority hazing. Now everyone was in damage control but no one wanted to take any responsibility—for the disaster in China or for their behavior. But if I took the fall and left, they could go on pretending to be best friends and great teammates who would all have two fillings for each other.

The meeting had gone on so long that the team was late for training. Apparently heaping abuse on me was more important than game preparation. I stayed behind at the hotel and took notes on what had happened, something James Galanis had suggested I do for self-preservation.

Greg told reporters that he had “excused” my absence that day, as though it had been my choice to skip the workout.

At three p.m. I met with our general manager Cheryl Bailey and Dan Flynn. Dan was not happy when he learned what had happened. He told me to stay strong and not go home. He gave me a pep talk, saying I was the future of the team and that I was going to prove everyone wrong and