Not too many players are driven to excel like Mia Hamm, who at 23 is already one of the top players in the world.
In Mia Hamm’s world, there is not much peace and quiet.
Oh, it’s better than it used to be, better than when she’d get sick at the halftime of college games from the raw fury coursing through her body. Or better than when she’d scold herself on the field so severely that she’d drift away from the action for minutes at a time.
Mia Hamm doesn’t scream at teammates anymore, or let the mood swings associated with sports run her life like they used to. She’s easier on herself too. Marriage has helped, some say, and so has simply growing up.
But one thing is certain: You’ll never meet anybody who cares more about winning and losing.
“Emotion is such an erratic thing,” said Hamm, 23, seated on a couch in the lobby of her suburban Atlanta hotel. In a few hours, the U.S. will face Finland in an exhibition match, but, for now, Hamm is trying to put her trademark intensity into perspective.
She speaks quietly, choosing her words with care.
“Emotion is a blessing and an Achilles heel all at once,” Hamm continued. “It is hard to control, and for me, it’s pure reaction. I just hope my reaction — if not the correct one — is at least close.
“I always judge myself in terms of my maturity and how I control that. Do I say the right things at the right time? Or if I say them, do I say them the right way? When you’re put in certain situations, how do you handle yourself? I hope I can say a lot of the time I am mature, but I also know sometimes I’m not.”
To be fair, Hamm has literally grown up on the U.S. national team. She cracked the lineup in 1987 at the age of 15 — still the youngest men’s or women’s player in U.S. history. Hamm was just 19 when the U.S. captured the inaugural Women’s World Championship in 1991 in China, and she scored a couple of big goals.
But Hamm otherwise hid in the shadows back then, content to let older teammates such as Michelle Akers and Carin Gabarra deal with the pressure and the press. As the U.S. Player of the Year the last two years, however, Hamm knows she will be center stage this time around.
Is she ready?
“I hope so,” she said. “I don’t consider myself a team leader, but I want to be a personality, and with being a personality comes a lot of responsibility in terms of being more consistent.”
But former U.S. coach Anson Dorrance, who coached Hamm with both the U.S. and the University of North Carolina, believes she’s ready for the big time.
“I think Mia has the sort of potential to do for soccer what Olga Korbut did for gymnastics,” he said. “She’s already one of the most feared strikers in the world. Every team the U.S. plays has to deal with her and address that, and she gets all kinds of tight marking and double-teams. But you’ll notice she’s still scoring goals. That’s the mark of a world-class personality.”
Every discussion about Mia Hamm centers on her drive and intensity — the tell-tale storm clouds that begin forming around her as kick-off nears. Woe be unto the reporter looking to interview her before the game, or the old friend hoping for idle chit-chat.
Where does it all come from?
One of six children, Hamm’s early life was a jumble of Air Force bases — her dad, Bill Hamm, is a former colonel in the U.S. Air Force — and chaotic moves. Her family relocated seven times by the time she was a teenager — wedging everything into a Volkswagen van and simply taking off for dusty places like Wichita Falls and Selma and Monterey — and that’s not counting frequent trips to both coasts to visit relatives.
Such an odyssey left a mark on Hamm.
“It was hard to leave so many friends behind, especially as we got older,” she said. “When we lived on base, it was comforting to know that all of the people were going through the same thing. They could all empathize with you.
“…I basically made all my friends through the [soccer] teams I was on. We’d move to a new town, I’d find a soccer team, and suddenly I had 18 new friends.”
Quitting and losing
The fact that Hamm’s parents decided to adopt two young boys in 1977 — one an infant, the other slightly older than Hamm — also had a profound impact. What had been a household of all girls was suddenly realigned, and Hamm found herself in quiet, if unspoken, competition.
“I’ve always felt that maybe Mia was afraid she was losing the attention of her father to the boys,” said her mother, Stephanie Hamm. “It wasn’t true, of course, but the older boy was such a good athlete that Mia just naturally started to compete with him in everything.”
That competition, which grew to include most all of her siblings, took some strange twists. In fact, Hamm insists she began life as a quitter, not a winner.
“Growing up, I would always quit if I was losing,” she said. “My brothers and sisters hated playing with me because they knew if my team started losing, I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to play any more.'”
Hamm paused. “I always thought in my head that if I quit I didn’t lose,” she said. “Losing was my way out. But now I realize that’s just the negative side of being competitive.”
Soccer proved to Hamm’s true outlet, and she quickly emerged as a star with the North Texas state select team. Fast, strong and possessed of a vision that was truly phenomenal, Hamm was something special.
The Dorrance-Hamm union paid off handsomely for both the U.S. and North Carolina — the former got a 65-22-5 record and a world title, the latter reaped four straight NCAA championships in the deal — but Hamm took something far more personal from the experience. She feels she grew up at UNC, learning to like herself a little more in the process, and still calls Chapel Hill home.
“There were so many positive things I got out of that school, and almost all of them came out of that soccer team,” she said. “It was very family-oriented. I always said that when things seemed to be going poorly or if I had a bad class or a bad day, I always seemed to find myself walking to the soccer office because it always made me feel a part of something very special.”
Clearly, family means a lot to Hamm, who is struggling to build her own now following her wedding to Christian Corey on Dec. 17, 1994. But the demands of national team travel are tough, including living in Orlando near the permanent U.S. training site while he stayed behind in Chapel Hill.
Hamm admits it’s hard, but it’s clear she believes it’s worth it. When asked who her heroes were growing up, Hamm named cyclist Greg LeMond, among others, and for a very special reason.
“[LeMond’s] been able to maintain such perspective on all his success,” she said. “When he won [Sports Illustrated’s] Sportsman of the Year award, I remember reading the article, and the last paragraph said something like, ‘I got off my bike and ran to the two people that never gave up on me — my wife and my dad.’
“I read that and I was just like, ‘Wow, that is so cool.'”
by Soccer America correspondent Doug Cress