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The Girls of Summer:
The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World
By Jere Longman
HarperCollins
307 pp $24

In July 1999, when 90,000 fans packed the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, for the women's World Cup soccer final between the United States and China, the match was played before the largest U.S. crowd ever to watch a sporting event featuring only female athletes.

The media had a field day explaining this newfound fervor for the U.S. women's soccer team. After all, soccer itself had never been as popular in the United States, as it was nearly everywhere else on the globe. But that year things were suddenly different, and the intense scrutiny that followed the team spurred sports journalist Jere Longman to write The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World.

Longman, the chief Olympics correspondent for The New York Times, spent months covering the team, both before and after its victory that July. The Girls of Summer opens during the tense final moments of the match, then goes on to describe games past and present. It is not just a history of the team but a history of women's soccer and the progress of U.S. women athletes since the appearance of Title IX, federal legislation enacted in 1972 prohibiting discrimination against girls in high school and college. The law effectively increased the number of female sports teams on campuses nationwide and ultimately led to a boom in women's soccer teams. Between 1976 and 1999, the number of girls playing high school soccer mushroomed from fewer than 12,000 to more than 250,000. By 2008, 346,545 girls laced up their cleats and got into the game – about a 25 percent increase in less than a decade.

In telling the team members' stories, Longman did not ignore the marketing feat that readied them for the public.

"They were smart, funny, gracious, attractive, accessible to fans and reporters. Their passion for playing was evident in the way they smiled and hugged and celebrated on the field, and their sense of responsibility was evident in the way they stayed around after games, autographing posters, jerseys, soccer balls, the foreheads of awestruck girls," he writes.

They were squeaky clean, wholesome role models for the mostly white, suburban parents and girls who embrace soccer, observes Longman. "To their fans, and their corporate sponsors, and to many members of the media, the ponytailed Americans presented a safe-sexy picture of bouncy femininity. The ponytail was even incorporated into the official Women's World Cup logo."

The "safe" image, however, came at the cost of diversity, argues Longman, who also takes the media to task for its complicity. "The United States faced China with no Hispanic players and with two black players on its 20-player roster. In most places around the world, soccer was a game of the urban poor. But in the United States, it was suburban sport, played mostly by middle class and upper middle class whites. The 1996 women's Olympic basketball team was just as accomplished and just as well-educated as the women's soccer team, but most of the players were black, and they did not receive the same portrayal as the girls next door by the predominantly white media."

The girls next door had their own media crosses to bear, however, including lascivious commentators. The team's attractiveness, for example, received more and more attention as the World Cup drew closer. Late-night talk show host David Letterman had Brandi Chastain on his show three days before the opening match. Letterman held up a copy of Gear magazine, which featured a naked Chastain, and said, "Soccer moms? Soccer mamas!" Letterman later said to his audience, "The U.S. team...is babe city, ladies and gentlemen, babe city!" His comments weren't atypical.

The debate over using physical attractiveness to market the team rose to a heated pitch when Chastain ripped off her jersey after scoring the winning penalty kick in the championship game, revealing her six-pack abdominals and sports bra to millions of viewers and newspaper readers in the next day's news. (It also led to her deal with Nike to endorse a line of sports bras.)

"Some in the media and on the team believed the focus on the physical attractiveness of the players devalued and trivialized their accomplishments as athletes," writes Longman. "As the millennium approached, had women finally reached the point where they could show a sensual side and could still be taken seriously as athletes? Or was it still necessary to use sex to sell women's sports, the way it had been used to sell everything from jeans to cars in advertising?" Not surprisingly, that question is still being debated.

The book, Longman's first, is well reported, fast-moving, and provocative. It also features more than two dozen color photos that aptly augment the test. These strengths outweigh the minor weaknesses, such as a few awkwardly florid phrases that may take the reader aback: "In these untethered seconds, the handrail of teamwork is ungraspable," writes Longman, describing penalty kicks. In addition, the publisher must answer for a sprinkling of entirely preventable gaffes: More than a few sentences have words missing, and several words are either repeated or should have been deleted. (Note to HarperCollins: We're not sleeping out here.)

In the final analysis, the importance Longman places on women's soccer and on this team in particular must also be held to the light. The book's subtitle, "The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World," seems a bit over-reaching. Ask anyone in the country to name more than two members of this U.S. soccer team. Who, besides Mia Hamm, is a household name? How well reported was the fact that goalie Briana Scurry didn't make the 2000 Olympic team? Does more than a tiny percentage of the American public know that co-captain Carla Overbeck was recently diagnosed with Graves' disease?

Still, Longman is onto something. While the average American may not recognize the above names, the team fueled the enthusiasm of thousands of girls in soccer leagues nationwide. In the end, even if you disagree that they changed the world, you come away knowing these women were not your typical pro athletes. Their popularity, writes Longman, "produced old-fashioned nationalism of the unprecedented kind, of transatlantic flights and moon walks, putting 90,000 spectators in the stands for the championship game and drawing 40 million more on American television. Shattered was any lingering belief that no one would pay to watch women play soccer."

For the media, and for the soccer parents and young girls with faces painted in stars and stripes sporting Mia Hamm's jersey number, they were a breath of fresh American air.

-- Anne E. Stein is a fitness columnist for MSNBC and a former managing editor for Inside Triathlon magazine. A cyclist herself, she has written for Sports Illustrated for Women, Bicycling Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune.

First published October 20, 2000
Last updated October 27, 2008
Copyright © 2000 Consumer Health Interactive

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