Prices paid along the way
Journeys to the World Cup don’t always finish on the field, in glory
Near the back of a suburban Toronto coffee shop, Kara Lang, t he onetime teenaged soccer prodigy, was leading a walking tour of her right knee. The landscape was rough and uneven, like a moonscape, marked by fissures and craters.
“I’m still not running,” she shrugged. “I may never run.” She is 28 years old. It hurts when she wakes up. It hurts after long walks. She already has arthritis. Following her last reconstructive surgery, she jokingly called it her zombie leg, because it has a pair of second-hand tendons — cadaver tendons — where the factory-issued parts of her knee had exploded. And to hear her list them, almost all the original parts have exploded.
Even so, she said it was worth it.
“I think maybe it would have been harder to watch this World Cup if I didn’t have this concrete evidence that it wasn’t the path for me,” she said. “I really can’t look back and ever say that I didn’t try absolutely everything.”
Knee injuries forced Lang into retirement in 2011, but with the tournament looming, and on home soil, Canadian coach John Herdman lured her back to the field. Even if she only had 10 minutes a game left in that knee, Herdman fig- ured, those 10 minutes would make a difference for Canada.
Had she stayed on that path, Lang might have been on the field as a player last week in Edmonton or Monday in Montreal, closing a circle that began with the national team more than a decade ago. She is still with the team, but as an analyst with TSN — an analyst with a bad knee and a clear conscience.
“Sometimes,” Lang said with a smile, “I think I have a horseshoe up my butt.”
For a long time, though, the good fortune belonged to the Canadian team. Lang was a 15-year-old star, a tall, stubborn and fearless attacker. By the time she was in high school, in Oakville, Ont., she was signing autographs for students only a few grades behind her. The school principal fielded interview requests from the media. She was a celebrity.
She was part of the team in 2002 when, at the under-19 world championship — an event that began almost in secret — the Canadian women captured the imagination of viewers across the country. The team advanced to the final, in Edmonton, drawing 47,784 fans to Commonwealth Stadium. Canada lost to the United States, but something had changed.
Christine Sinclair was on that team. Erin McLeod was on that team. The core of that team is the core of the team on the field this month, at the World Cup. Lang is still the fourth-highest scoring woman in Canadian history, with 34 goals in 92 appearances, but she had to surrender her team membership. She was still in her teens when her knee started to fail.
She tore her anterior cruciate ligament for the first time in 2005, and then tore it again as a member of the soccer team at UCLA. Lang announced her retirement in January 2011, at 24, and moved toward her post-retirement career.
By 2013, she had a foot in the door. She was a host with Fox Soccer Channel, appearing on other channels, as well. And then Herdman began his pursuit.
“Every couple of months, I’d be talking to her, and she’d say, ‘John called me again,’ or ‘John sent me some more tapes,’ ” said Lang’s father, Brian.
Eventually, Herdman won her over. She agreed to attempt a comeback.
“Quite frankly, I wasn’t happy that she was doing it,” Brian said. “She was totally embracing where she was.”
She left her job and began commuting from her home in Toronto to Montreal, where she would work with Scott Livingston, the certified athletic therapist who helped rebuild and reshape Montreal Canadiens defenceman Andrei Markov after a series of knee injuries.
“If all the dominoes had fallen the way you’d hope they would fall, I would have thought Kara would have been more than a 10-minute player,” Livingston said. “She would have been a contributor to the team.”
For more than six months, Lang would spend two weeks at home, then move to Montreal for two weeks of intensive rehabilitation. She lived with a family in Montreal, with J.D. Miller, a local businessman who co-founded B2ten, a group that uses private funds to boost Canadian amateur sport.
Herdman had reached out to Miller to help co-ordinate Lang’s program.
“It was very clear that it was unfinished business,” Miller said. “She needed to know: Was it really the end?”
The physical work was punishing and repetitive, with the repetition sometimes being the most punishing part. As Livingston said: “She would describe it as her most hated thing.”
“When she got back to working with the team, she herself could see how much time had passed,” he said. “She was getting older. And the type of athlete John was recruiting, there was a big speed focus on the team.”
Still, she made it back onto the field, making an improbable return to the women’s team in the fall of 2013, more than a year before the World Cup. And then, in only her second fullcontact practice, she found herself with the ball at her feet, not far from goal. Nobody tackled her, nobody touched her. She made a cut, and then felt the popping.
She knew. She called her boyfriend, Ricky Romero, a pitcher with the Toronto Blue Jays.
“You can’t mess around with me like that,” he told her, not believing the news.
Deep down, though, he admitted he knew, too.
“You can tell in her voice,” Romero said. “It was the third time she had done it, and by the third time, you would know what it feels like.”
“It felt like our hearts were cut out, you know? We felt so terrible for her,” Miller said. “She’d made the decision, she left her career, she had committed herself fully, and it didn’t work out … it was pretty darned cruel.”
Lang underwent surgery. She posted a photo to social media. And, as she had two years earlier, she got back to starting her post-retirement career. Not long after the news broke, she received a call from TSN.
“Would I like to have seen her on the field? Of course,” Miller said. “But I came away with a real good feeling that Kara’s taken the journey, and she’s ended up in a pretty good place.”
Lang and Romero are engaged, and they have bought a house in Hermosa Beach, Calif., not far from Los Angeles International Airport, and not far from Romero’s family. It will be key to have family close by, because they are expecting their first child in the fall. (“It makes me nervous how spoiled this child is going to be,” Lang said with a broad smile.)
Romero has also been working his way back from injury. The left-hander signed with the San Francisco Giants in May, and has been working out in the team’s spring training base in Scottsdale, Ariz., looking for a way to watch TSN’s soccer coverage.
“She’s been there for me, just as much as I’ve been there for her,” he said. “Just having her on my side and sticking through it, through what I’ve been through, it’s been awesome.”
“I’ve got a lot going on, and a lot to be excited about,” Lang said. “I’m starting a family. And when you’re thinking about things like having a baby, your priorities are so completely different.”