At a church in Naperville, soccer star gets radical

Balancing Act

A baby started to cry during Abby Wambach’s book tour stop in Naperville on Thursday night. Without missing a beat, Glennon Doyle, who was interviewing Wambach onstage, addressed the baby directly.

“You use your voice, sister.” “Stay angry,” Wambach added, raising a fist.

It was a lighthearted moment in an evening filled with enough of them to leave the crowd feeling as though we’d just spent an hour and change hearing a star athlete, Wambach, discuss her empowering new book alongside her adoring and hilarious wife, Doyle.

And we did. But something a little more radical was going on too. Subversive, almost.

I’m all for it. Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, Women’s World Cup champion and sixtime winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award. Her new book, “Wolfpack: How To Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game” (Celadon),” is based on the graduation speech she delivered at Barnard College in 2018. She encourages women to throw out old rules. (“Be grateful for what you have.”) And live by new ones. (“Be grateful for what you have, and demand what you deserve.”)

Community Christian Church hosted the event, and the crowd was about one-third girls and young women, many wearing soccer jerseys — their own or their idols’. I sat behind a WAMBACH and a HAMM. A high school coach stood up during the Q&A and said she was there with her entire girls soccer team. Women’s National Team members Julie Ertz and Alyssa Naeher were there.

Wambach talked about the lessons she’d gleaned from being immersed in athletics. She urged us to use failure as our fuel. To lead from the bench, whatever “the bench” looks like in our lives. To remember, always, who helped us get where we are.

“I’ve never scored a single goal without the help of a teammate,” Wambach said. “If you really think about it, you will never accomplish anything great or, really, anything at all without somebody else.”

She talked about the lawsuit filed by the U.S. women’s soccer team against U.S. Soccer for gender discrimination and explained why it’s beyond time for women athletes to be paid equally, particularly in soccer, where the women play — and win — more games than the men.

But the night wasn’t all about soccer.

Halfway through the program, Wambach flipped the script and started asking questions of Doyle, her wife of two years. Doyle, a best-selling author and motivational speaker, was previously married to Craig Melton, with whom she has three children.

“You have had an interesting journey in your sexuality, your gayness, whatever you want to call it,” Wambach said. “Tell me about your journey.”

After joking that she took “7 million BuzzFeed quizzes” to figure out her sexual identity, Doyle told the crowd about a woman who attended one of her talks.

“She said, ‘I have a question, and I don’t know where else I can ask it,’” Doyle recalled. “‘My granddaughter is now my grandson, and my niece went to homecoming with a boy last year, and this year she’s going with a girl. And now you’re gay. I don’t mean any offense at all. I just came here tonight to ask, Why is everybody so gay all of the sudden?’”

The crowd laughed.

“I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do have a hunch,” Doyle said she answered. “I think it might be the GMOs.” Laughter.

“What else could it be?” More laughter.

Then some truth. Sexuality and gender, she said, have always existed on “a wide, beautiful spectrum.”

“It’s just that sexuality, a lot like faith, is a very powerful, mysterious, gorgeous, life-changing energy that is beyond our control or our understanding,” she said. “And human beings, we don’t like things that are beyond our control or understanding. We take these gorgeous mysteries, and we try to contain them.”

Faith and sexuality, she said, are like water. Religion and sexual identities are like glasses that try to contain them.

“We’re like, ‘Fit your big, juicy, wide, mysterious self in this glass,” she said. “We’ve got two. We’ve got straight, and we’ve got gay.”

Eventually, one and then two and then a whole bunch of folks start saying — out loud — that they don’t fit neatly in one of those glasses. So we add more glass options: bisexual, pansexual, bicurious.

Meanwhile, Doyle said, people are looking around saying, “Is it possible this glasses system is broken? And I’m not broken?”

“What I think will happen eventually is we won’t keep adding glasses,” she said. “We’ll remove the glasses system. I think everyone is scared gayness is contagious. I don’t think gayness in contagious. But I’m absolutely positive that freedom is contagious.”

She talked about rising rates of homelessness among LGBTQ youth.

She talked about reading a book by anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu, which taught her to look for the root of the problems you’re trying to solve.

“He said, ‘You can only pull people out of the river for so long until you have to look upriver and find out who’s pushing them in,’” Doyle said. “Every time you see a whole lot of suffering, it’s because some institution upriver has pushed them in.”

For LGBTQ youth, she said, often that institution is the church.

(Remember we’re sitting in a church for this.)

“I’m a church lady,” Doyle said. “I speak at churches all over the place. I’m a Sunday school teacher. But I also know that many, many churches, from their pulpit, preach shame to these families. And then these families turn around and preach shame to their kids. And then their kids leave, and they’re on the street.”

She and Wambach are preaching a different message. One that doesn’t leave room for shame. One that takes those glasses and tips over the table they’re set upon.

“We’re pulling people out of the river,” Doyle said. “But also, every single day, we’re looking up the river and giving living hell to the institutions that are pushing people in.”

I don’t know how many parents brought their daughters Thursday night expecting to hear that message. I don’t know how many girls and young women knew their soccer idol and her wife would be schooling them on equal pay and equal rights and the fluidity of gender and sexuality.

Regardless of what they came for, what anyone in the audience came for, I hope they left inspired and armed with the knowledge that they’re infused with power, and they should and can use that power to push for inclusion and justice. I know I did.

The evening made a pretty strong case for encouraging athletes — anyone, really — to go ahead and stray from their lane.

“You use your voice, sister,” Doyle told that baby, and the rest of us.

“Stay angry,” Wambach added. And then look upriver to see where to aim.

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