Saving Grace

U.S. Soccer salutes the 25th anniversary of the fabled 99ers' epic World Cup victory today before an Olympic sendoff game. It all came down to PKs. Here's how the U.S. keeper remembers it.

Twenty-five years ago in Pasadena, California, in a stadium made famous by a different kind of football, more than 90,000 fans jammed into the Rose Bowl to watch the 1999 World Cup final between the United States and China. It wasn’t just a sweltering day in southern California; it was a historic one, because the 22 players on the field were women.

In the moment, you don’t often know when you’ve arrived at a watershed moment in the life of a sport, but taking in that spectacle that afternoon, you did know. It wasn’t just the wonder you heard in the voice of Robin Roberts, one of the hosts in the ABC broadcast booth, or the fact that the parking lot was full hours before the game, mostly with little girls in their Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy and Kristine Lilly jerseys, knocking soccer balls around with their mothers and fathers and brothers. It was the unmistakable feel of a big-time occasion, the largest crowd ever to see a women’s sporting event, just eight years after FIFA agreed, albeit reluctantly, to hold a Women’s World Cup, with the understanding that it would not be called that. After all, you can’t sully a precious brand like the World Cup by having it be contested by women, right? So that’s how the first edition of the event came to be known as the World Championship for Women's Football for the M&M's Cup. Pretty catchy, eh?

The USWNT plays the first of its two Olympic sendoff games for the upcoming Paris Games at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J. today (Saturday, July 13). With it will come a 25^th-anniversary celebration of the group of women collectively known as the 99ers, who changed the narrative of women’s soccer in this country forever in the Rose Bowl that day – a gripping battle that remained scoreless through 120 minutes, meaning that the World Cup title would be decided by penalty kicks.

Two years ago, I had the good fortune to work with Briana Scurry on her memoir, My Greatest Save. The title has nothing to do with any heroics she ever performed in net. I discovered very quickly that Briana Scurry, a Hall of Famer, is an even better human than she is a keeper.

Bri was the woman in the U.S. net that day. She had had a spectacular World Cup, playing perhaps the best game of her life in a semifinal victory over Brazil. Now it was up to her to stop a Chinese kick. Or two.

So what happened in that shootout? Here’s what Briana wrote in My Greatest Save.

***

I hadn’t been in a shootout since my senior year of high school, when we won the Minnesota state championship. The stakes were a wee bit higher now. As we huddled on the sideline and the coaches settled on the final order of our kickers, their biggest challenge was to decide who would replace Michelle Akers, the GOAT of PKs. I had inadvertently knocked Michelle out of the game while punching out a corner. I felt awful about it, but I couldn’t think about that now. Nor could I worry abour who would replace her. I was sitting by myself on the ground, knees bent, focusing on the challenge ahead, gathering energy beams so I was at peak readiness, gearing up to go into goal feeling like the most intensely coiled spring ever, ready to unlock and unleash when the kick came. Kristine Lilly (Lil) came over and playfully slapped at my legs. It was Lil who got us into the shootout by saving a certain, World Cup-ending Chinese goal by heading a shot off the goal line in extra time.

“Catlike reflexes, Bri. Catlike reflexes,” she said.

“I’ll get one,” I said. “You do the rest.”

*

I was inside my office now, my 192-square-foot rectangle, oblivious to the electrifying buzz from the ninety thousand who surround me. I took a minute to go through my PK checklist: Make sure your feet are solid beneath you, that you are balanced and slightly crouched, your hands strong yet supple, your body ready to fire, left, right, up, down. It sounds basic, but going through it helped lock me in.

Our coaching staff, especially Tony DiCicco’s top assistant, Lauren Gregg, put a ton of energy not just into executing our PKs, but researching our opponents’ tendencies. Do they like to go left or right? High or low? They built on the work I used to do with Jim Rudy, my former college coach, looking for cues that might help me make an educated guess where the ball is going. Are the shooter’s hips open or closed? Is her runup short or long, from the side or straight on? Is she striking the ball with the laces or the side of her foot?

Watch for the cues, I reminded myself. I took a deep, calming breath. It helped me settle in. I did it before every kick. China won the coin toss and went first. As Xie Huilin, a Chinese defender, approached the spot, I did not look up. I never watched a player’s walk up to the spot. I never watched my own team’s kicks, either. The crowd would let me know what happens. There was no good that could come from my mind processing all that was going with our kicker and the other keeper.

All I wanted to do was see the ball and stop the ball. Keep it simple.

An instant before Xie kicked, I got a little deeper in my crouch. On contact, I sprung forward a couple of steps. I did that on every kick, by design. Tony coached me this way and we practiced it every day in training. Technically, keepers were not supposed to come off their line, but Tony knew most of them did it and it was one of those rules that just wasn’t enforced. On NBA free throws, players aren’t supposed to enter the lane until the shot hits the rim, and everybody has done it for decades. Tony believed we were well within the spirit of the rules. Xie’s strike was hard and beautifully placed, in the upper left corner. China took a 1–0 lead.

First up for the U.S. was Carla Overbeck. She had scored only seven goals in her long career as a center back, but Carla was money in the clutch. She heeded the advice from the coaches to not look at Gao, the Chinese keeper, who was an effusive, almost goofy person and would often smile at kickers to try to get into their head. If she smiled this time, Carla never noticed. She pushed the ball comfortably into the left side of the net.

U.S 1, China 1.

Qui Haiyan was China’s second shooter. She came on as a sub so she would be in the game for PKs. Qui lined up straight behind the ball, a good six or eight feet deep. She ripped it towards the same upper left corner Xie did. I dove and got close, but not close enough. China was two for two.

Joy Fawcett, a stellar defender who rarely made a fuss about anything, playing with surpassing skill and no theatrics, drilled her shot into upper right, Gao never moving and almost seeming as if she were caught off guard.

U.S. 2, China 2.

Liu Ying was the third Chinese kicker. It was her corner kick that almost ended the game in the one-hundredth minute, before Lil saved the day. Liu made the walk from where her Chinese teammates were lined up, and something—who knows what?—told me to look at her. My eyes were fixed on her the whole way—the only kicker in years I can remember watching during her walk up. Her body language wasn’t good. She didn’t look as if she wanted to take this kick. She seemed hesitant. She put the ball down and stepped back.

This is the one, a voice told me. I had no clue where the voice came from, but it was powerful, and even audible inside my head . . .

This is the one.

Liu lined up straight behind the ball. Her hips opened as she reached the ball and side-footed a low, hard shot toward the right. I knew where she was going because her hips tipped me off. I bounded out two steps again and dove to my left, horizontal to the ground, extending my arms. Everything slowed down. I saw the ball heading toward the goal and thought I could get. The shot was on me now. I was stretched out as far as I could go, my eyes locked in on the ball. I got a lot of my left hand on it, and a little bit of my right. I didn’t know for sure I’d gotten enough of it until I watched the ball bounce away. The Rose Bowl erupted and so did I, jumping to my feet and screaming and pumping my clenched fists like they were pistons, over and over. It was the most emotion I’ve ever shown on a soccer field by a multiple of a thousand. (Predictably enough, there was a lot of talk afterward about my forward movement. I had done it on the first two kicks and nobody said a thing. Maybe because of my quickness, my movement seemed more glaring, but either way Tony and I thought it was very nitpicky.)

Lil stepped up next. She hit a bolt into the upper left corner[MM1] . Gao guessed correctly but didn’t get close.

U.S. 3, China 2.

Zhang Ouying, a forward, followed with China’s fourth kick. Under insane pressure, she did a good job disguising her direction, driving a low shot to the left that I couldn’t touch. It was tied at 3, but we had two shots left, and China had only one.

Next up was the reluctant superstar, Mia Hamm. Though she was the all-time leading scorer in women’s soccer, Mia wasn’t keen on taking one of the first five PKs, and told Lauren Gregg so. Lauren wasn’t buying it. “We need you,” she said. Mia walked up to the spot, put the ball down, and took a second to move a few wisps of hair from her eyes. She buried her shot in the lower right corner, then turned around and ran back to the team, jumping into the arms of Shannon MacMillan and everyone else.

China’s fifth kicker, Sun Wen, the top scorer and probably the top player in the World Cup, had to score or it would be over. She kissed the ball as she walked up, took a long run up, and rocketed a shot into the upper left corner.

So now we were down to our fifth kicker, Brandi Chastain. Brandi had made a spotless sliding tackle at the top of the box in extra time that robbed China of a great scoring chance. Now she had a chance to be a hero again. The coaches were initially undecided whether Brandi or Julie Foudy should take the kick, but Tony’s thinking was to have Brandi change it up and take the PK with her left foot. In a loss to China in the Algarve, Brandi shot right footed on a PK against Gao and hit the post. Tony figured Gao wouldn’t be expecting this at all. Brandi was all for it. She walked so briskly up to the spot you would’ve thought she was late for a meeting. She planted the ball on the grass, retreated a few steps. It was just a tick over three minutes since I’d made the save on Liu. I was still not looking when Brandi prepared to take her left-footed kick.

There was no reason to change now. The crowd would let me know.

Brandi ran up and powered her left foot into the ball, the contact strong, the direction even better. The ball ripped high into the side netting behind the right post. Gao Hong, as formidable as she was, had no prayer. No keeper on earth would’ve had a prayer. We were not just five-for-five in our PKs now. We were World Cup champions, and the instant Brandi’s shot dropped into the back of the net, she ripped off her No. 6 jersey, twirling it overhead and dropping to her knees with her fists clenched, an American hero in a black sports bra, as the entire U.S. Women’s National Team sprinted to engulf her, the Rose Bowl rocking so hard and loud I thought it might leave the earth.

I always wondered how it would feel to be a World Cup champion. Now I knew.

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