COMMENTARY

By Jim Litke

updated 10:23 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2004

Hers was the game that launched a thousand kicks, then tens of thousands, then millions, a rare blend of brains, beauty and hard-nosed grace that redefined what it meant to play like a girl.

But Mia Hamm’s influence didn’t end there.

Like every great athlete, she knew that every game mattered, that every time she raised the bar, everybody who played alongside or after her would have to pull that little bit extra out of themselves. And if making teammates better is the ultimate compliment bestowed on an athlete, what more can be said about Hamm and that small band of soccer players who lifted an entire sport to heights that once seemed unimaginable.

This: Under her leadership, they never, ever took a night off.

“We all understand there’s a bigger perspective,” Hamm said Wednesday night, moments after joining longtime teammates and fellow retirees Julie Foudy and Joy Fawcett on the sidelines after a 5-0 win over Mexico. “We want to make sure this game and these girls go forward together.”

Wednesday night’s game in Carson, Calif., was the last in a 10-match, post-Olympics tour by the U.S. national team to mark the end of an era. The game itself was little more than an exhibition, a chance for the trio to take their bows on the international stage one final time in what soccer fans call a “friendly.”

Typically, though, Hamm wouldn’t allow the friendly part of the evening until she’d taken care of business.

In the opening 20 minutes, she set up the first two U.S. goals and saw her bid for another ricochet off the crossbar. Midway through the second half, with the U.S. women already ahead 5-0, Hamm chased a teammate’s pass into the goalbox and ran into Mexican goalkeeper Pamela Tajonar instead, a collision that left her clutching her knee and writhing on the turf. It wasn’t until she’d hobbled around for another 15 minutes or so that Hamm finally walked off the pitch, stopping to shake hands with every player and coach on both benches.

Like all pioneers, she and the handful of others who blazed the trail for women’s soccer were overachievers by nature. They put their lives on hold and bottled up their emotions for almost 20 years on that long, difficult march to find a place to play. They never had to be told to act like ambassadors. They always knew exactly what was at stake.

“Think of it this way: Imagine that Magic, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Shaq, Kobe and LeBron were all on one team for 15 years. That’s what we have had with our women’s national team,” U.S. national team coach April Heinrichs said.

It wasn’t simply the winning that made this bunch remarkable, though there was plenty of that: World Cup championships in 1991 and 1999, and Olympic gold medals last summer and in 1996. It wasn’t just about proving to TV, corporate sponsors and the other half of America that women athletes can draw an audience and keep it, though they accomplished that, too. It wasn’t just about opportunities for women and girls, either, though you could make the argument they did more to create those than anything this side of Title IX.

It was about all of those things, And to achieve any of them, they had to prove first that they were skilled, fearless and ferocious enough to compel our attention.

And at the center of it all — night after night over two decades — was that familiar ponytail bobbing just above shoulders too impossibly slim to singularly shift the attitudes of an entire nation. But Hamm never shirked her task.

“It wasn’t just a game here or a game there,” Foudy said. “We could always count on her.”

Hamm had predecessors every bit as smart and tough as she was, though the most memorable made their mark in individual sports. She’s the first real team superstar that women’s sports produced, and as such, she’s undoubtedly inspired more girls to step onto a playing surface than all other female athletes combined.

It didn’t hurt that Hamm was attractive, articulate and way more modest than any man who’s ever achieved such a lofty status. Of course, those things will only make it tougher on anybody who would step into her shoes, which is exactly the way Hamm would have wanted it.

“Ask yourself if you could have your choice of role models, would you ask for a day with Mia Hamm or Julie Foudy or with a famous male athlete of today?” Heinrichs said as the celebration drew to a close. “They had an impact on America’s consciousness, on women’s sports, on women’s voices.”

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