They’ve Lost Their Golden Groove
There has been an honorary cereal. A hearty bowl of U.S. Soccer’s Golden Goals by Quaker Oats, anyone? And don’t bite down too hard on one of those Golden Goals!
There have been magazine covers and there are books being written. There are enough speaking engagements and ribbon-cuttings, dinner invitations and autograph sessions available, says Tisha Venturini, to keep every woman who has ever worn a U.S. national soccer team jersey busy 24/7.
There is also a celebration trip, a Toys R Us Victory Tour of 12 cities, an indoor game played against a team of world all-stars. The victory tour is stopping at the Arrowhead Pond at 7 tonight. There have been eight stops so far, eight games played. The World Cup champions have a 3-5 record. What kind of victory tour is this anyway?
“It started out as the Fun Tour,” Mission Viejo’s Julie Foudy says. “Now it’s more like the Loser’s Tour. It’s turned totally competitive.”
These are no Washington Generals, these World All-Stars. “They have come in tackling high and hard,” Foudy says. “There is no love lost, that’s for sure. Those World guys set out to make a point. Now we’ve got to make a point too.”
This is all a learning experience for the Americans. The adulation, the expectations. It’s easy to learn to love being feted, greeted, seated with celebrities, treated as a superstar. The trick is to find the balance now, to be celebrities and competitors too.
Venturini, who is from Modesto and who moved to Newport Beach two years ago to join her boyfriend, says the reaction to her and her teammates has been incredible.
“I go running near the beach and people stick their heads out the window and tell me they love me or say how much they enjoyed watching me,” Venturini says. “And I’m nobody. I mean, Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain, they’re used to this. But I’m not.”
Rancho Santa Margarita’s Joy Fawcett, one of the team’s two mothers, says, “It’s weird. You hear people calling your name, you turn around expecting it to be someone you know and it’s a stranger. They’ll come up, they’ll tell you where they were when we won, how excited they were. They just love to tell you that stuff. It’s neat to hear.”
There is still a sense of wide-eyed wonder among the players who caused a nation to pause this summer and learn to applaud, to appreciate and to cry over a women’s team sport. “When you’re wrapped up in the middle of playing you don’t realize what effect you’re having around the country,” Michelle Akers says.
Even now, after she has gotten a new hairstyle and ditched her distinctive (if slightly ‘70s-ish) shag, Akers says people still know who she is, still stop her on the street or in the convenience store or at the gas pump or the airport.
It is this adjustment to fame and a little fortune that the women are still making. As many NBA and major league baseball champions have found out, it is easy to be caught up in celebrating an accomplishment until you forget about moving ahead to the next challenge.
And while it is OK to lose an exhibition game at an indoor arena when there are only six on a side instead of 11, soon enough the women will be gathering in Australia for the 2000 Olympics. As defending gold medalists and coming off World Cup triumph, the U.S. team will be playing hungry, eager, even mean-spirited opponents who have become tired of the Americans and their advertisements and their cereals and their TV gigs and their magazine covers.
“I was just telling some of our players,” Foudy says, “that these Olympics are going to be our most difficult challenge of all. All of us have been going a million miles per hour, lots of appearances, lots of demands and we have to realize that the rest of the world doesn’t care what we’ve done.
“It’s going to be a huge challenge as the Olympic season comes up. We’ll all have more requests to deal with, media and stuff. We’ve got to learn to handle it all.”
The game at the Pond tonight begins the last phase of the Victory Tour, but it also might begin more than that.
It might be time for the U.S. soccer team to become soccer players again. On Jan. 2 the U.S. travels to Australia to play in a big tournament. This won’t be an indoor exhibition. This will be an outdoor competition with many of the world’s top teams.
“You know what?” Foudy says. “The good thing with this team, there has never been complacency. Especially this summer, you talk to anyone on this team, we played, barely . . . we did not play well at all. We might have won [the World Cup], but it was frustrating because we were never in a groove at all, never showed our best soccer.”
So there it is. The next chapter according to Julie Foudy.
Besides, these women are tired of losing. “After our fourth loss on the tour, in New York,” Foudy says, “the press was all, like, does this shatter your confidence, can you even think about going back and winning the Olympics?
“Well, yeah, we can. We’ve got these last four games of the tour and we’ve gone out and gotten the Mexican national team coach [Leonardo Cuellar] who knows the indoor game, to coach us for a couple of weeks. Our competitive juices are back.”
Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com
