End of an era for U.S. Women’s National Team

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — They have spent the past 17 years together, been through life cycles together — births, deaths, marriages, divorce. They have won and lost world championships together, started and lost a professional league together and through the years became the most significant women’s sports team in history.

“To good friends,” Brandi Chastain says, as the others raise their glasses in a toast before dinner last week.

Clink, clink, clink, clink.

“After a while it wasn’t about soccer anymore,” Mia Hamm says. “It’s what brought us together; it’s not what will keep us together.”

The five pioneers who won the first Women’s World Cup in 1991 and the inaugural Olympic gold medal in women’s soccer in 1996 will play their final world championship together next month in the Athens Olympics. They beat Australia 3-1 Wednesday in Blaine, Minn., in an Olympic preparation game.

Hamm, Julie Foudy and Joy Fawcett are retiring from international competition. Chastain hopes to play in another 23 international games to reach the 200-game milestone before leaving the stage. Kristine Lilly, who has competed in more games (274) than any player, male or female, in international soccer, might just play forever, her friends joke.

Since their first tournament in 1987 in China, when Hamm, the youngest, was just 15, they have gone 236-41-31 through the eras of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush; big hair (Foudy’s was once so voluminous the joke was she could catch a lofted ball in her poofhead) and bad music (“How can the younger players not know Styx?” Lilly says.)

Their legacy is all the girls they inspired, yet Foudy feels the team has to win a gold medal in Athens to gild their goodbye. The USA hasn’t won a major championship — Olympic gold or a World Cup — since Chastain’s famous penalty kick in the 1999 World Cup.

“People will say they lost the last three big events if we don’t win,” Foudy says of the 2000 Olympics (silver medal), 2003 World Cup (third place) and the Athens Games. “They’ll say maybe (coach April Heinrichs) should have revamped, maybe she should have gone younger.

“But I don’t want to go on the next 20 years of my life thinking my last game I lost. Losses stick with me. They don’t go away.”

Quality time for a final time

For the past four months of Olympic training camp in Carson, Calif., Hamm, Foudy, Chastain and Lilly have rented a three-story house overlooking swank Manhattan Beach. Fawcett, the quietest of the quintet and mother of three daughters, lived a few sand bars away in Long Beach. The rest of the team rented two-bedroom apartments in various towns in between.

“The four of us never lived together, and we knew that this would be the four best months of our lives so let’s enjoy it, live somewhere nice that you love coming home to,” Foudy says. “Just that time together, going to the grocery store, cooking dinner together, you realize how precious it is and you’re not taking it for granted.”

The Manhattan Beach setting couldn’t have been more perfect. Sunset on the beach at the sunset of their careers.

One day last week, they rode their beach cruiser bikes, complete with fat tires and wide handlebars, a few blocks to their favorite restaurant, XO Wine Bistro, for dinner.

“What’s the four sauces for the grilled steak?” someone asks as they survey the menu.

“Red pepper, mustard, horseradish and chives,” Chastain says before the owner, Carlos, can answer.

“Very good. You want a part-time job?” Carlos says.

“I may need a job after August, pal,” Chastain says. “Don’t forget you said that.”

“You know, I never had a job,” Lilly says, forgetting for the moment that playing for her country and helping make the game the fastest growing sport for girls was her job.

“I don’t think normal people go to work and say, ‘This is so great, we get to spend 10 hours together,’ ” Foudy says.

Jobs past, present and future

By starting so young, the group’s entire non-soccer resume is rather brief. Hamm worked in customer service for Eurosport, the soccer retail store. ” ‘No, that’s on back order. No, sorry, that’s on back order,’ ” says Hamm, re-enacting her phone patter.

“I worked as a secretary, wearing a full suit and pantyhose every day, eight to five,” Chastain reports. “When it was slow, the boss used to make me clean the leaves on the ficus tree, every frigging one of them.”

“I had a job. I worked at the snack shop at the pier in Aliso Beach,” Calif., says Foudy.

What can they see each other doing in 10 years?

” ‘With 550 caps (soccer lingo for appearances in international games), playing alongside Carli Fawcett (Joy’s 7-year-old daughter), Kristine Lilly,’ ” Foudy says in her mock announcer voice as Hamm does an impression of Lilly waving to the crowd with a cane in hand.

“Mia will have five kids,” Chastain says.

“Two to three,” corrects Hamm, who married Boston Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra last November and plans to start a family.

“And Mia will own a WUSA team,” Foudy adds about the professional league that folded last year and is hoping for a revival.

“Brandi will be coaching the national team,” Foudy says of Chastain, who is married to Santa Clara women’s soccer coach Jerry Smith and has worked as a Broncos assistant.

“Julie will be a congresswoman,” Hamm says of Foudy, who served on the Presidential Commission on Title IX and played a major role in preventing changes to the law that provides girls and women equal opportunities in sports.

“Definitely,” Chastain adds.

So it’s settled.

Always there for each other

Because the years run together, they have no recollection of the first game they played in China in 1987, a 2-0 win.

“I don’t remember ‘91 to ‘95,” Hamm says.

“You won a couple of championships” at North Carolina, Chastain says.

“Not a couple. Four,” Hamm says with a smile.

Thank goodness they took pictures along the way, to fill in the details. There was the trip to Haiti in 1991 with no running water.

“We had to jump in the pool to get clean,” Lilly says.

“We’d all be sitting by the pool, and I remember Julie sitting under the veranda studying biology,” Chastain says.

“The generator kept going out, and I didn’t have power to read and I was in the middle of some intense Stanford stuff,” Foudy says, before being cut off.

“Ooh, intense Stanford stuff,” the group says in unison.

They are too busy enjoying the laughter to get all sentimental on each other just yet. Those comments are saved for private asides amid the clearing of dinner plates and the stirring of coffee.

“As optimistic and excited as I am about my future, I am desperately hanging on to every minute and every hour that I have with them because especially when you’ve had loss, they’re your lifeline,” says Chastain, whose parents died during a seven-month span over 2002-03.

“What am I going to miss most about them?

“Everything.”