A Writer's Life (6 page)

While five of the twenty-two Chinese women players on the 1999 national squad were married, none could have children if they wished to
remain affiliated with the team. With their average incomes being about five thousand dollars a year, and with financing in China unavailable to help cover the high cost of such items as, for example, an automobile, only four members of the squad owned and operated cars (three of the women had working husbands who shared expenses; the other was the unmarried daughter of a successful family from Shanghai). The majority of their teammates did not even have a driver's license and saw no point in taking lessons to obtain one. None of the women on the national team had a college education. The only one with classroom experience on a campus was the team captain, Sun Wen, who dropped out early in her first year. Drinking, smoking, and dancing in discos late at night—a not-unfamiliar routine with some male soccer players following practice sessions and games—would have caused a woman player's dismissal had such behavior come to the attention of the national team's ascetic male coach, Ma Yuanan, who considered himself permissive when he allowed one of his wedded sequestered soccer-playing sprites to accept a husbandly visit in her dormitory bedroom late on a Saturday night.

The women of the United States team, on the other hand, were free to partake in nighttime interludes with husbands and/or admirers of either sex. Two of the five married players on the American squad had children (one had two), and when these women were on the road with the team, the organizational budget covered the travel costs and living expenses of the accompanying nannies. All the American players had college degrees or were in the process of getting them. All drove cars, and, with their team salaries and bonuses and their forthcoming game fees as participants in the newly formed National Soccer League, the women would soon join the lucrative six-figure ranks of professional athletes. With the exception of the goalkeeper, who was black, all the American starters were white women, who as a group were fair-haired and photogenic enough to be courted by the makers of commercials in the mainstream market and to be poster-perfect for schoolgirls in the suburbs. The American players also tended to be larger, taller, and yet just as fast as the Chinese—I could see this myself from watching the Rose Bowl game on television—and it also appeared to me that the Americans' bodies were more curvesome and fully feminine than the Chinese. The latter were inclined to be quite narrow-hipped and boyish in figure, and, with one or two exceptions, to have smaller breasts than the Americans. Actually, I had not noticed large-breasted women on either team. Perhaps there were some seated among the substitutes, but, since the television cameras were not catering to the sensual concentrations that might enliven my afternoon, any women so endowed existed beyond my purview.

Still, from what I had read about the American team, they were not especially prudish. One of the starting players was apparently proud enough of her body to pose in a bikini for
Sports Illustrated
's swimsuit issue. Another starter was photographed in a squatting position in
Gear
magazine, wearing no clothes at all while holding a soccer ball in front of her breasts. I could not imagine the Chinese coach allowing his players these liberties even if they were so disposed, but this was conjecture on my part, the musings of an elderly man who, for lack of anything better to do at this particular time, was watching fleet-footed and sweating female athletes chasing one another around the playing field while momentarily imagining them gamboling in G-strings in a rain forest on the Playboy Channel.

This game was now nearly over and the score was still 0-0. The regulation time of a soccer match is ninety minutes—two forty-five-minute halves—and so far every shot aimed at the net had either been misguided or blocked by the opposing goalkeeper. The Americans got off more kicks than the Chinese, and they seemed to boot the ball harder and farther and to cover more ground as they roved widely around the field before settling into their offensive or defensive formations. But the Chinese impressed me as having the edge in teamwork and in anticipating where the ball was going to be before it got there. They were prescient about what footwork and ball movement would lead to, and, like the onetime rebounding basketball star Dennis Rodman—a veritable geometric genius in the way he foresaw and acted upon the projections of errant shots caroming off backboards and rims—the Chinese women arrived just ahead of time at the spot where a pass from a teammate was due or where they might intercept an intended exchange between their opponents. The Chinese minimized their own turnovers by advancing with short passes, and they also maintained possession of the ball through feigning—keeping the ball between their feet while
pretending
they were about to kick it. Instead of kicking it, they sidestepped it, danced around it, did the jig, the rumba, then wiggled their hips and their heads just enough to keep the opposition off balance and allow sufficient space through which they could get off a quick kick downfield toward a teammate dashing in the direction of the rival goalkeeper.

At one point in the closing minutes, the Chinese had an opportunity to break the deadlock. After the Americans had allowed the ball to roll out of bounds on the sidelines deep in their own territory, the Chinese corner kicker booted the ball back into play at an angle that spun inward through the air and then tailed down within reach of two Chinese players who stood ready to kick or head it in for a score. But before they could get
to it, the American goalie leaped forward with a clenched fist to punch it away, clobbering not only the ball but also the head of a teammate with such force that the American girl was knocked sprawling to the ground. Unconscious for a few moments, and unable to maintain her balance after being helped to her feet, the groggy American was carried away and was never able to reenter the contest. Her substitute filled in well enough, however, and the game continued without further scoring opportunities from either side until the clock expired.

After a brief respite, during which the two eleven-player teams huddled separately along the sidelines, drinking water and talking to their coaches, the referees waved them back onto the field for fifteen minutes of overtime—which from then on would both extend and heighten the spectators' expectations and their noise level as they sat forward in their seats, observing the ongoing foot-to-foot combat that went back and forth on this grassy turf that measured 116 by 72 yards and was rimmed by big-business billboards—Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Fuji film, Bud Light—and that earlier in the day had been buzzed from above by four streaking U.S. F-18 fighter planes that were perhaps trying to communicate to any of the Chinese spies in the crowd, or their bosses back in Beijing, that such jets were part of Uncle Sam's answer to China's potential military aggression along the coastal areas of Taiwan.

The people of Taiwan were now, in fact, completing a half century of isolation from mainland China, having first become a self-governing entity under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek following the latter's military defeat by Mao's forces and his escape to the island in 1949. Arriving with what was left of his downtrodden Kuomintang army and nearly a million mainland refugees and all of China's gold reserves, the Generalissimo subsequently established Taiwan as a small but stalwart abutment against communism while he continued to see himself as the legitimate leader of the mainland, from which he had been so rudely removed. When he died in 1975, he left behind a people made more secure through United States support and with a standard of living higher than that of their counterparts on the mainland, but neither he nor his political successors could restore his notions of grandeur, and the Taiwanese women who played on the island's soccer team in 1999 were a level below the Chinese now playing in the Rose Bowl. Not only the Taiwanese but
all
the teams of Asia—the Japanese, the North and South Koreans, the Thais, and the rest—were inferior to the soccer women of China, and had been so for nearly a decade.

However, the Chinese were now being tested on the other side of the world by this more physical force from the United States while being surrounded
by a partisan crowd consisting of spectators cloaked in the Stars and Stripes, and by confetti-tossing teenagers with their faces painted red, white, and blue, and by an energy-sapping sun and the 105-degree heat under a stadium sky jet-streamed with jingoism. Still, the Chinese women kept pace with the United States through the overtime period, and they nearly won the game in the tenth minute when one of their players headed a ball over the American goalkeeper, and were it not for a spectacular save near the back line by a leaping American defender, the ball would have penetrated the net.

With neither team staging another serious attack during the remaining five minutes, nor during the
second
fifteen-minute overtime period that followed—fatigue was slowing down many of the women, especially those who had performed without substitutes during this grueling and sweltering ordeal that had so far lasted two hours—the referees ordered that the outcome be resolved by penalty kicks, a situation in which five women from each side would be selected by their coaches to take turns trying to kick a ball spotted twelve yards in front of the net into the goal that was guarded by the rival team's goalkeeper.

The odds were always with the kickers, since it is very difficult for a defender standing alone to react quickly enough to block a hard-hit shot booted at such close range toward a net that is eight feet high and eight yards wide, practically the size of a two-car garage. Still, scoring was not automatic—errant shots sometimes
did
occur due to a combination of factors that might include the nervousness or carelessness of the kicker, or the defensive acrobatics and/or good guesswork of the goalkeeper.

The World Cup winner would now be decided while the majority of the players stood watching along the sidelines as their five appointed teammates, alternating with five opponents, would singularly appear on the western end of the field and place the ball on a white spot in the grass in front of the net, and then, after stepping back several paces, and after the referee had blown the whistle, each player in turn would run toward the ball and kick it in a way she hoped would elude the outstretched hands and moving body of the goalkeeper and land somewhere within the net. If each of the teams' five kickers were successful, resulting in a 5-5 tie, the coaches would then summon a sixth member to go one-on-one against a rival; and if these two also scored, they would be succeeded by another pair of competitors, and then another and another if necessary, until one of the two had faltered as a result of missing the net or having the ball blocked. This title match could not end in a draw. The kicks would continue indefinitely until there was a winner and a loser. It would be demoralizing and heartbreaking for the individual who would ultimately
fail to get her penalty kick into the net, knowing that she alone would be responsible for the defeat of her entire team, but this would inevitably be the fate of one of these women on this day in the Rose Bowl.

Since the Chinese won the coin toss, they were the first to send a kicker onto the field. She was a round-faced, ponytailed brunette who wore the number 5 and seemed to be a bit taller and sturdier than her characteristically petite teammates. She was not, however, as imposing in appearance as the burly 150-pound black American goalkeeper who stood in front of her, staring at her, although the Chinese girl paid little attention as she slowly lowered the ball with both hands and positioned it on the white grass spot that marked the twelve-yard target site. She was said to be China's most reliable penalty kicker, which was why the coach had assigned her ahead of the others, expecting her to get his team off to a good start. She was also functioning with full energy, since she had not played long in today's heat, having entered the game as a substitute late in the second overtime. After hearing the referee's whistle, she charged the ball and kicked it so swiftly and surely that the American goalie could only watch it sail high over her own right shoulder into the left corner of the net. As the kicker's teammates and the coaches clapped along the sidelines, China took a 1-0 lead.

The first American kicker was the team captain, wearing number 4, a lanky chestnut-haired woman with delicately refined facial features and the reputation for being an indelicate and indefatigable defender. But she would also prove to be a surefooted kicker on this occasion, unhesitatingly attacking the ball and driving it low and hard past China's goalie into the opposite side of the net that the first Chinese kicker had hit. Jubilantly, after watching her ball slam into the cords, the American pumped her fist in the air and then jogged back to the sidelines while most of the stadium's crowd stood cheering and her teammates came forward to embrace her. The score was now 1-1.

The second Chinese kicker was a slender brunette who wore number 15. She had seen action earlier in the game as a substitute and was not a key player on the team except in times like this. She was an excellent penalty kicker. Some of her teammates considered her the equal of their premier penalty converter, the surefire number 5. I had read that there were some fine players among the Chinese—and among the Americans and other teams, as well—who had stage fright when confronting penalty-kick situations. They were more comfortable running and kicking while surrounded by crowds of scrambling opponents than they were when standing alone behind an unmoving ball spotted on the grass and
having to boot it twelve yards toward a spacious net that was guarded by a solitary defender in a one-on-one matchup being scrutinized by every fan in the stadium and perhaps millions of watchers on television. There were players who practically begged their coaches not to select them for the penalty spotlight, which could subject them to such vast humiliation should their booted ball be blocked or, worse, should they fail to hit the net.