With all the grace and class of a Tinder profile, Hope Solo once again proved that if she’s the voice, face, and heart of the United States Women’s National Soccer team, then they are the quintessential Ugly Americans.
It was as colossal a disaster as Women’s soccer could possibly absorb: a perfect storm of athletic defeat, ghastly sportsmanship, and the corresponding annihilation by press and fans that has the Women’s Team facing a painstaking reappraisal right now. Not only did they flame out of the 2016 Rio Olympics, unceremoniously bounced out by Sweden in the quarterfinals on penalty kicks, but their dingbat goalie opened her vile mouth again, spewing insults at the victorious Swedes like the two-bit tinpot dictator she is.
“I thought we played a courageous game,” Solo boasted pridefully. “I also think we played a bunch of cowards. The best team did not win today. I strongly and firmly believe that.”
The Swedes beat the U.S. 4-3 on penalties following a 1-1 draw in the quarterfinal match-up. That means the world’s top-ranked team will miss out on an Olympic medal in women’s soccer for the first time since 1996, when the sport was added to the Games.
“Sweden dropped off. They didn’t want to open play,” Solo said, explaining why she criticized her opponents. “They didn’t want to pass the ball. They didn’t want to play great soccer.”
Beating the number one team in the world, and then beating Brazil, the home squad, in the semi-finals looks like great soccer to everyone else though, and that’s exactly what the Swedes did. And it was only an own goal that prevented them from taking Germany to extra time in the gold medal game (both a fluke and a rule that ought to be changed – they should credit the goal to the last offensive player to touch the ball, like hockey, not doom some unlucky play to ignominy).
Retribution against Solo was swift, and it came from all sides: men, women, athletes, journalists, broadcasters, teammates, and fans. Solo, a serial troublemaker, again did the seemingly impossible – say something indefensible.
Her excuse for her behavior?
“Losing sucks. I’m really bad at it.”
Losing, sportsmanship, attitude, manners, reality: there’s actually a lot of things she’s really bad at. She’s great at soccer though; just ask her.
“To call them cowards for playing a tactically smart game is ridiculous and classless,” said Julie Foudy, a former USWNT member, now an ESPN analyst, “and it really doesn’t represent the house that we built with the U.S. team.”
Classless. That’s the perfect description for Shameless Solo, Hopeless Hope. It’s one thing after another with her. In 2007 she was sent home from the World Cup after slamming teammate Brianna Scurry. Granted, in that case a stupid action caused an equally ludicrous reaction. Who ever heard of a men’s professional team sending a player home for saying something dumb to the press? But what she said was, again, indefensible.
“It was the wrong decision, and I think anybody that knows anything about the game knows that,” Solo told the Associated Press, referring to the coach’s decision to start Scurry in goal in the semi-final against Brazil. “There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves. … You have to live in the present. And you can’t live by big names. You can’t live in the past.”
They sent her home from the tournament for that. A bush league, emotional reaction to be sure – amateur night meets reality TV – but then again nobody can (or should)) say they would have made the plays the other guy didn’t.
Next, in 2014, an allegedly wasted Solo violently attacked her half sister and teenage nephew. It must have quite the scene: hair pulling, face scratching, heads being pounded into concrete floors, alleged concussions, and every four-letter word ever invented snarled like an animal by a totally polluted Solo. She was charged with domestic violence in a case that is still in the courts. The Washington post described her behavior upon her arrest in most telling fashion:
“(Solo) repeatedly hurled insults at the officers processing her arrest, suggesting that two jailers were having sex and calling another officer a ’14-year-old boy,'” the report said. (Isn’t that homophobic? Or trans-phobic?) “When asked to remove a necklace, an apparently drunk Solo told the officer that the piece of jewelry was worth more than he made in a year.”
She also threatened to kick the cops’ asses and called them “B—ches.” This is supposed to be the face of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team?
Cut to 2015, and she was suspended for 30 days for letting her inebriated husband, former football player Jerramy Stevens, drive the team van with her as a passenger. He got arrested for DUI, she got to sit on the sidelines and rethink her life. The message didn’t get through.
This year she thought she was funny to make Zika jokes on Twitter, not realizing she was offending an entire country, one she might face in the tournament. In one post, she posed in a mosquito net, saying “Ready” and in another snapped a shot of suitcase filled with enough bug spray products to kill Rodan, Mothra, and the giant tarantula from “Eight Legged Freaks.”
The Brazilians loved that, singing “Ziiiiiiiiikaaaaa, Ziiiiiiiikaaaaa” at her when she was in goal, and her and Team USA’s ignominious exit was met with considerable glee.
One of these days that kid’s going to have to grow up.
But there’s one other issue at the center of which Solo swirls: her lawsuit for equal pay for the women soccer players. She brought a complaint against the U.S. Soccer Federation before the EEOC, a brilliant move because it won’t be decided by a court of law with a trial and jury and legal precedents applying, but a hearing before an Obama-appointed czar.
Had she brought this case in Court, she might have set a record for swiftest judicial kick in the fanny. The standard in these cases is simple – equal pay for equal work, accounting for market conditions and market share. This exact fact pattern had already been decided against the ladies in a case involving college basketball coaches. Marianne Stanley, the women’s basketball coach at the University of Southern California in the early 1990s, argued she should be paid at a level equal to the men’s coach. Her legal effort was unsuccessful.
Stanley had to prove equality of work and market conditions/share, both a rigid legal requirement and a standard that the women’s game – neither soccer nor basketball nor softball- can’t attain; market conditions between the men’s and women’s sports being so vastly different.
Stanley lost her case because women’s basketball generates a mere fraction of the revenue men’s basketball does while drawing less than half the television ratings. (If they ever thought to lower the basket by a foot and let the women play above the net, things might be different, but that’s too sensible an idea…)
The same is true of the market conditions in soccer. The USMNT generated $660 million dollars in ticket and sponsorship revenue in the 2014 World Cup. The women brought in $32 million.
That’s less than five percent. Balloon, meet pin.
It’s the same story for TV ratings. The men drew a 13.7 share for the first three games of the 2014 World Cup. The women drew only 6.7 for the last three games they played – the knockout stage as opposed to the men’s group stage tilts.
Game, set, match: Bobby Riggs.
There’s the inconvenient truth: they aren’t worth equal pay to the men. It’s simple economics. Equality is not either team getting the same money regardless of ratings and revenue.
Never forget: the world taught the U.S. to play soccer, but the U.S. taught the world to play Women’s soccer. As a result, for years they beat up cupcakes, playing teams that had had just started playing women’s sports internationally. But here’s an indisputable litmus test as to the quality of their game: in 2015, the same year the U.S. women won the World Cup, they were defeated by the U.S. Under 17 team by a jaw-dropping 8-2 score.
Eight goals in a soccer game? To a bunch of kids who haven’t reached puberty yet? Who can’t shave? Can’t vote? Can’t drink legally? Are just noticing girls for the first time? Can play against you, but are too scared to ask you out? That’s mortifying. That shows you how thin the competition is at the Women’s World Cup.
“There’s only three or four teams that ever have a chance of winning the women’s World Cup, but they’d have trouble – big trouble – beating a good high school team from a large program,” said one former semi-pro soccer star, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “I don’t think they could beat Pompey,” he stated, referring to the perennial Syracuse, NY area soccer power.
That might be a reach, but certainly St. Benedict’s or St. Ignatius, or Scotch Plains – schools filled with brothers of international players, invitees to training camps like Manchester United and the Columbus Crew, and various All-Americans and All-Internationals – they’d would have little trouble taking the game to the women, rather than the other way around. The men play the game at split-second speed. The women are a half step slower, and it shows in the velocity of the ball and the speed of the game.
They’re just bigger, stronger, faster.
Of course it’s not the women’s fault. They’re worth $10,000,000 a year according to a lawsuit and politically correct dogma. They may well win at the EEOC. Laws don’t seem to really matter that much to our government any more. Identity politics, though, that generates votes.
In response to the complaint U.S. Soccer argued that not only was the players’ pay collectively bargained, but that the players – on more than one occasion – had insisted on a salary-based system as a means of economic security over the bonus-centric plan the men work under. Russell Sauer, an attorney for U.S. Soccer during labor talks, also said the women’s labor contract included provisions not available to the men’s team like severance and injury pay, health benefits and maternity leave.
“The truth,” Sauer stated, “is the players are claiming discrimination based on a more conservative structure…which they themselves requested, negotiated and approved of not once, but twice.”
Sadly, as our country is, at present, governed by fiends, the EEOC will hear it, which means Dictator Obama will decree they win. Substituting wishful thinking for reality is a specialty of modern day feminists.
Oh well. An early exit has its upside too for a modern day Olympic athlete: more time to drink, more time for parties, more time for casual sex, more profiles to check on Tinder. But if you run across Hope Solo or anyone else who tries to tell you the USWNT is worth the same as the men, just swipe left. That’s what they’re really worth.
