U.S. women capture America’s heart en route to final
Tiffeny Milbrett considered how things have changed in so short a span. One moment, she could walk down any street unperturbed. Now? Impossible. Her face, it seems, is familiar to all.
She and the other U.S. women have learned firsthand about life in the spotlight these past few weeks. America finally has caught soccer fever, and Milbrett and her teammates, it appears, provide the only antidote.
Everyone wants a piece of them, or to be near them, or just to see them. They have captured the nation’s heart and possibly more. And America can’t get enough of them.
“We are zoo animals, that’s what we are,” Milbrett says, trying to assess the commotion that has surrounded the U.S. team since the Women’s World Cup kicked off June 19. “We are the circus freaks. We’re fish in a fishbowl. People are looking in, so curious: ‘Oh, oh, they moved! They’re feeding now! Look!'”
It’s a phenomenon nobody saw coming, not least the U.S. women, who always had been confident they would capture America’s imagination, just nowhere near to the extent they have.
“It’s out of hand,” gushed Tisha Venturini, whose backflip after her second goal against North Korea is one of the WWC’s most indelible images. “Well, not out of hand, but … you dream something and you can’t think it will get any better. But this is awesome, this is so awesome.”
That it is. They’ve gone from virtual unknowns to big-time celebrities in no time, thanks to a series of witty commercials touting their charms and to constant media attention, not least from late-night talk-show veteran David Letterman, who has been hot for the “Soccer Mamas” since Brandi Chastain’s pre-Cup appearance on his CBS show.
They’ve received glowing reports from ABC’s “Nightline” and NBC’s “Today,” and they’re the biggest story in every newspaper, on every local news show. Nobody can get enough.
‘Every show wants a piece’
“Every show wants a piece of the team right now,” reports Jim Moorhouse, U.S. Soccer’s director of communications. “There’s no way to give it to them.”
They are surrounded almost constantly by a fan base that has quickly swelled from the so-called “pigtailed hooligans” ù the preteen and adolescent girls adorned in Mia Hamm jerseys and bathed in red, white and blue paint ù into a broad contingent of men and women, boys and girls, all ages and races.
It’s made daily life a tad challenging. They learned early not to wear their U.S. gear in public, not that that matters anymore. They are besieged in their hotel by autograph seekers, some of whom follow them into restrooms or knock on their doors. They are applauded at malls. They can’t do anything without gaining attention ù one local newspaper reported what Joy Fawcett and Kristine Lilly ordered on a Burger King trip in Palo Alto.
They’ve had bus-chasers. One teenage girl in Chicago raced after the U.S. bus for a half-mile until the players, concerned, had the driver pull over.
“We were like, ‘This isn’t funny anymore,'” said Julie Foudy. “We were cracking up because she was darting behind cars, we wouldn’t see her for awhile, then she’d come back. She ran for awhile.”
When the girl finally caught up with the bus, Hamm presented her a pair of shoes and Chastain a pair of shinguards.
Another bus-chaser, a teenage boy with “I (heart) Tisha” emblazoned across his bare chest, entertained the team in Palo Alto.
He’s just one who has pointed out the obvious, that the U.S. team is an attractive team, a sexy team. Letterman called them “Babe City”; Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly noted the players’ curves; and David Hirshey, editor of Mia Hamm’s book, Go for the Goal, went further.
“There’s a serious babe factor here,” he said. “They’re wholesome, all-American, fabulously heterosexual and damn proud of it.”
“It makes me laugh,” Foudy says of the focus on the team’s beauty. “It makes me think, ‘God, are we not beyond that?’ Ask the 70,000-plus here why they came to watch us play, and they wouldn’t say, ‘It’s because that Tisha Venturini is a hot babe.'”
Well, some might. There’s noted ladies man Bill Clinton, who caught the quarterfinal win over Germany with Hillary and Chelsea in tow. He greeted the team afterward, more impressed by its abilities than its looks.
The U.S. women have sold out Giants Stadium and Soldier Field, drawn more than 50,000 to Foxboro and Jack Kent Cooke and 70,000 to Stanford, and now they have a championship-game date with China in front of a capacity crowd of more than 85,000 at the Rose Bowl on July 10.
That’s 85,000 ù for women’s soccer.
“Who knew, huh?” says Milbrett. “The only way we’ve experienced anything like this is if we were watching the men’s World Cup, sitting in the stands with all the festivities and atmosphere. You never could have predicted this. It’s shocking.”
‘A lot of kids can relate to us’
The secret? Everyone has a theory, and the likeliest explanation encompasses many of them. At the core, it’s that this team embodies something that’s been missing from sport, and from America; the starving hordes feed ravenously.
“I think it’s the fact that people can relate to us, a lot of kids can relate to us, can say, ‘I can do what she does,'” says Foudy. “We’re a fun group, with so many personalities ù in terms of educated, smart, funny, well-spoken ù and we love each other. …
“Here’s a group that doesn’t walk in with sunglasses on, isn’t afraid of thanking the fans, of saying, ‘Yeah, this is new, but, shoot, we love being part of it.’ There’s a purity to that, I think.”
Americans sense that this is a team of girls next door, of bright, intelligent women who care about each other and their fans and love what they are doing.
The crucial point is the relationship with the fans. The U.S. women have always nurtured their link to their fans, have long basked in the responsibility of being good role models.
“It’s really a relationship of unconditional love,” explains Chastain, media darling since her appearance on Letterman and nude photo in Gear magazine. “And I think it’s significant, what we’re doing out here. It gives these kids a point of reference: You can be part of something this big. It may seem like you’re a small piece of it, but really you’re very significant. …
“All these people are important to what we do. We have to reach out to them. They have to be part of this experience. We’d love to sit here and sign everybody’s T-shirt ù unfortunately, we can’t, but it’s the genuine feeling of the players that we want to do that. It’s been a part of our foundation from the beginning.
“We want people to know they’re important to us.”
by Soccer America senior editor Scott French