Hamm: If League Works Players Will Be the Key
Mia Hamm can’t remember exactly when she was anointed soccer’s golden girl, the one everyone wanted to touch, to talk to, to be. The fascination began brewing when she was a 15-year-old on the U.S. women’s national team, and only increased as she led the United States to a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics, became the most prolific goal scorer in the history of international play, and then helped capture the Women’s World Cup in the heady, hazy summer of 1999.
At 29, she’s the most marketable woman in sports, with each swish of her brown ponytail evoking the values and aspirations of a thousand suburban soccer fields. There is no one more essential to the success of a new women’s professional soccer league that will make its national debut with a game at RFK Stadium on Saturday. And there is no one who could want that role less.
“If the league is going to work, it has to be about all the players,” protested Hamm recently, folding her arms across her chest and distractedly kicking a chair as she took a break between training sessions for the Washington Freedom, her new team.
“Everyone is important,” she said. “But I do realize I may have to do more things at the start to get the league off the ground.”
This is what Discovery Channel founder and Freedom owner John Hendricks jokingly calls “Mia Hamm’s burden,” and what Hamm’s father, Bill, refers to as the thing “that wears on her.” He explained that while she may not like her role as the face of the new league, “she still does it, and she’s committed herself to it. But she has wistfully said, “I just wanted to be playing.’ ”
She’s become a one-woman marketing vehicle. “Come see Mia,” chirp ads for the Freedom, one of eight teams in the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA), which will play a four-month schedule in Washington, Boston, Long Island, Philadelphia, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Atlanta, San Diego and San Jose. The league’s business plan is realistic--”We will succeed if we draw 7,000 to 8,000 fans a game with a ticket price at about $11,” said Freedom General Manager Katy Button--although heavily dependent on the stars from the U.S. team.
Players were sprinkled around the country for maximum impact, and Hamm agreed to come to the Washington area, where she attended Lake Braddock High School in suburban Burke, Va. Hendricks felt he had scored a major victory; there is literally no other woman in the world better at driving a product than Hamm. In a recent Burns Sports & Celebrities poll of 1,000 advertising executives, she was voted “most appealing female athlete,” garnering almost twice as many votes as the runner-up, tennis player and sex symbol Anna Kournikova.
Hendricks couldn’t offer Hamm more than the league’s $85,000 maximum salary, a figure dwarfed by the endorsement contracts that pay her more than $2 million a year, and he also needed something more in return than just her services on the field. For the WUSA to be a success, Hamm had to agree to take a more active role in promoting the new league, a thought that at times has made Hamm’s usual mischievous smile twist into lip-pursing resignation.
On the U.S. national team, Hamm was happy to float behind more vocal teammates Julie Foudy and Carla Overbeck, and she has never been the captain of any of the college or national teams on which she’s played.
“This is a team sport, and we have an amazing group of women here,” she said. “There are all kinds of stories all over this league.”
Yet in many ways the league’s story is Hamm’s story -- each step in her career has coincided with the evolution of women’s soccer to the point where it has a professional league of its own. Hamm began playing soccer just when it was becoming a popular sport for young girls. She was at the University of North Carolina in its heyday as the mecca of women’s soccer, and her time on the national team coincided with both the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991 and the introduction of women into Olympic soccer in 1996.
Most important, however, was Hamm’s integral role on the 1999 Women’s World Cup squad whose success and popularity completely changed the status of her sport. As the U.S. team romped from coast to coast, Hamm and her team began to capture the national imagination, and the deal was sealed with the team’s dramatic penalty kick victory over China.
Players were plastered on the front of Time, Newsweek, People and Sports Illustrated, elevating already popular veterans such as Foudy and making stars out of lesser-known players such as Brandi Chastain, who will be playing for the rival Bay Area CyberRays in the Freedom’s Saturday opener. And the most beloved was Hamm, who wowed fans with a competitive drive so strong it seemed to seep out of her skin.
It’s been that way ever since she can remember. Hamm can still vividly picture sitting in the back of her parents’ car at age 5, sulking after her team lost a game. “When we were living in San Antonio in 1982, the class had a play day in the late spring, and one of the things they did was run an obstacle course,” her father recalled. “She was so upset because she came in second. The thing that got to her most was that she didn’t think the young boy who beat her played the game fairly.”
But the person Hamm likes to test most is herself. When she was in high school, the other girls on her basketball team got mad at her for running so many sprints during practice. “They were upset,” she said, “because I ran so fast and so hard, and they thought it made them look bad. I tried to tell them that running at their pace didn’t help me.”
As Hendricks acknowledges, the league’s burden is also Hamm’s burden. Only time will witness whether, as the WUSA evolves, she can evolve with it.
“Everyone has talent, and God gave me the athletic ability and competitiveness to go out there and push myself,” Hamm said recently on a radio talk show. “It would be a disservice to myself if I couldn’t be the best athlete and best person I could be.”
