I just remember sitting in the stand going, 'She's just in that zone. Nothing is fazing her and everything off the foot is just perfect. Hamm's final year with the team was in , while Lloyd's first year was in Both had similar careers as they led their teams to two World Cup titles and two gold medals in the Olympic games.
Hamm led the United States to World Cup wins in and She also helped the team win gold medals at the Olympics in Atlanta and the Olympics in Athens. Lloyd led her team to World Cup victories in and She also won gold medals at the Olympics in Beijing and the Olympics in London.
Last night, Hamm waved one last good-bye to her fans, and left the field for the last time. Christine, welcome. It's always interesting why one particular athlete becomes iconic, but I would imagine it must start with the basic athletic skills. So what made Mia Hamm special as a player? You're absolutely right. It's certainly the incredible skills, the ability to see the entire field, not only of course scoring goals, which she did more than anyone else, but also the ability to pass and find the teammate, very much like Wayne Gretzky in hockey: The knowledge of where your teammates are even before they know where they're going to be.
And the ultimate team player who then, of course, scored so many goals on their own because of that great, great talent. So speed, ability, and then intelligence. She's a very well-educated woman. The entire team, all of them have college degrees, that she's been on for so many years, and when you look at it, you can make a strong case that that is the best educated team the United States has ever fielded in any sport, and I think that mattered.
Oh, no doubt about it. First of all, they knew each other so well. They played together for so long — Brandy Chastain, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, et cetera, all of them very well-educated, all of them college graduates. They knew what each other was going to do before they did it. Mia Hamm knew were they would be, and that's why that experience combined with the education and the intelligence made them so unbeatable on the field.
So you take the athletic skill and then you add the historical context. I noted today in reading that Mia Hamm was born in , the same year that Title IX came into existence. You see a real connection there. I see Mia Hamm, really, as the personification of the law, Title IX, that changed the playing fields of America; that made it not only possible but mandated that our daughters would have the same opportunities as our sons to play sports in this country.
And when you look at Mia Hamm being born of March of , Richard Nixon signing Title IX into law in June of , Mia Hamm's entire life has been about having equality, having the opportunity, the great coaching. It was a launching pad for her, and obviously she took full advantage of it. And you once called the U. What were they able to create? Very much like Billie Jean King, a generation earlier in tennis, these women — not only Mia Hamm, but also Julie Foudy, Brandy Chastain, Joy Fawcett, Christine Lilly — they understood as well as any athlete on the playing field today in any sport, men's or women's, what they meant to the next generation.
It wasn't about making lots of money, although Mia Hamm has done very well, but it was about bringing kids along, fighting for Title IX when the Bush administration wanted to weaken its effort. That's what Julie Foudy did and was successful. It was about understanding you have to sign every autograph and watching them literally autograph as the stadium lights are being turned off, and yet they're still signing for the little kids who are still waiting and bringing the next generation along with them.
Now as we said in the setup, Mia Hamm liked to turn the attention — or keep the focus on the team. She was in some ways a sort of reluctant hero, wasn't she? Oh, yeah, in fact, what you see on the field is not what you see off the field.
This is a woman who would much rather have the stardom, have the limelight, have the interviews with her teammates. During the women's World Cup, when all the networks were out there, that incredible week at the Rose Bowl, Mia Hamm was asked often to be the only one interviewed by most of the network news shows, and instead she said, "Uh-uh, I'm not going to do it unless all my teammates can join me.
So I think — I think one of the reasons she is so endearing to so many people is that she is the ultimate teammate, and in this era of "me, me, me," and big money and all about the arrogance of professional athletes, Mia Hamm is one of those great superstars who was completely opposite of that image and impression.
Now, even with all the success, there were some setbacks, notably the failure of the professional women's league. As Mia Hamm and her teammates retire, where do things stand? The league right now doesn't exist. They're talking about getting it going again in a year or two. I think it's very important to look at the perspective here of the economy, of the fact that the sports landscape is so cluttered right now and there's so many men's teams and women's teams, college teams, and to think of trying to start a new league, professional league, especially in the sport that Americans have never felt particularly fond of as a spectator sport, and that is soccer.
Men's or women's, it is not one of those sports that people are going to flock to.
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