Echoes of 99ers accompany celebration
LYON, France — Rose Lavelle was 9½ — the half is important, when you’re 9 — when the women that changed everything arrived in Cincinnati.
It was October 2004, a few months after the U.S. women’s soccer team had won the gold medal in the Athens Olympics, five years after it had conquered the world. Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and the rest were traveling the country, playing exhibition games, as a sort of victory tour.
Lavelle was there at Paul Brown Stadium to watch a game against New Zealand. It was more of a carnival than a contest: the Americans won 6-0 the sort of procession that — in the eyes of a child — befitted their greatness. Lavelle fell for them, and fell hard.
She became “obsessed,” she said a few weeks ago, with the team that would go down in history as the 99ers, the team that won the World Cup on home soil in the year that became their calling card, the team that transformed the arc of women’s soccer in the United States and, more slowly, around the globe.
Coming full circle
On Sunday, in the baking heat of Lyon, Lavelle scored the second, clinching goal as the latest incarnation of the U.S. women’s team beat the Netherlands 2-0 not just to lift the World Cup, but to do what the 99ers did not manage, and retain it.
“It’s crazy how things come full circle,” Lavelle said.
Pretty much everyone on this team has a story about the 99ers, even those who were too young to remember them, whose knowledge has been drawn — like Lindsey Horan’s — from videotapes. They have all taken inspiration from what those players did. They have all inhaled their greatness and come to revere their status. Horan, for example, had been told that several of the 99ers had come to Lyon to watch this final.
“They are the legends that we all look up to,” she said.
In March, when the United States played England in the SheBelieves Cup, the players were asked to nominate a woman who had inspired them. Their jerseys, for that night, would be emblazoned with their heroines’ names, rather than their own. Sam Mewis, who was 6 in 1999, went for Hamm; keeper Adrianna Franch went for one of her predecessors, Brianna Scurry.
A month later, the 1999 team was presented to the crowd at halftime of a friendly against Belgium in Los Angeles. The jerseys the players wore to win the World Cup were designed by Nike specifically to pay homage to the jerseys Hamm and the others wore two decades ago.
“They are still a big presence in our lives,” Horan said.
Even at a distance of a generation, it is a presence the players feel, a link with what might otherwise feel like an age of myth.
“They laid a foundation for us,” Lavelle said. “They laid this mentality out of never give up, never say die.”
Horan said she thinks the “fight and the mentality started with them.”
The 99ers are credited with creating the atmosphere young players find when they enter this team: not intimidating or inhibiting, according to Tierna Davidson — at 20, the youngest member of the squad — but “close-knit, resilient, incredibly uplifting.”
Spirit lives on
“There’s a natural selection,” she said. “I think if you don’t have that attitude, you get weeded out. The identity of this team is badass women, who fight to the death, who have each others’ backs no matter what. The type of person this team attracts is resilient, gritty.”
That can be traced to the U.S. team as the 99ers envisioned it, as they defined it. Those characteristics that were inculcated in this program two decades ago are the same that swept this edition of the team, these latest successors of that side, to glory here in France: a willingness to run harder, faster, farther than anyone else; a refusal to countenance the idea of defeat; a ruthless, defiant streak.
Those traits are now hardwired into the team, however much the players change, however fast the clock ticks, what Davidson described as an “unnamed American culture of desire and want and grit.” That is the tradition that any player who steps into this team has to maintain; those are the standards that, Alex Morgan said, this current team is “doing a pretty damn good job” of keeping.
There has been a sense, right from the start, the United States was not in France to compete against flesh-and-blood rivals; it always seemed to have too much for any foe that crossed its path. The host nation was supposed to end its dominance; the United States scored early in each half, and eased through. England was meant to challenge; the United States scored early, and then reacted furiously when its opponent was presumptuous enough to equalize.
The Netherlands lasted longer than anyone, though watching Stefanie van der Gragt, its central defender, draw every last jolt of energy from her exhausted body in the last few minutes simply to stop Morgan or Tobin Heath or Carli Lloyd turning a defeat into a rout told a story.
Adoration of new generation
Things come full circle, and the circle turns, a tradition passed down through the decades, a torch that burns.
High in the stands of the Stade de Lyon, two girls stood watching the United States celebrate, glitter spread across the field, firework smoke in the air.
They looked 8 or 9. Heath and Horan on their jerseys They looked down at the celebrations. They stood still. They could not take their eyes away.