Mia Hamm: A pioneer for female sporting empowerment who inspired a generation

Football Trailblazers: With soccer taking off, the US women’s national team needed a poster girl and a leader. In Hamm it found both

Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight was once asked to pick three athletes that he believed had played sport to such a high level that they added a new dimension to their craft. His trio: Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Mia Hamm.

Even excusing Knight’s loyalty bias (all three were Nike-sponsored athletes), it’s difficult to argue strongly with his sentiment. These are the stars whose first names are enough to bring immediate familiarity to their many millions of disciples. You may be able to add a few of your own – Roger, Lionel, Ronnie, Muhammad, Sachin – but the principle remains the same.

If Knight’s third name might seem a little leftfield to a UK audience, others agreed. In 2004, Washington Post columnist Michael Wibon labelled Hamm ‘perhaps the most important athlete of the last 15 years’, while ESPN named her as the greatest female athlete of the last 40 years. Again we must allow for pro-American bias. Again the cap still fits. No player in football’s history has measurably done more to inspire a generation of their nation’s young people to take up the sport, and no player in women’s football comes anywhere close.

Without the blanket ban that applied in the UK, and assisted by the Title IX mandate passed in 1972 that required equal funding for men’s and women’s US college athletic programmes, women’s football had already established a foothold within American sporting culture. Girls who had been put off by the physicality and the male isolationism of other US sports found solace in soccer. In 1972, 700 girls played soccer at high-school level. By 1991, that number had increased to 121,722. The USA’s talent pool became so deep that it would allow the national team to remain dominant 30 years on.

But, as so often is the case with great cultural awakenings, the US women’s national team needed a poster girl and a leader. In Hamm it found both. At 15 she became the youngest ever senior international to represent the USWNT. Hamm scored 158 international goals, was selected for the FIFA100 in 2000 and won a litany of individual and team honours despite playing almost all of her career at amateur level due to the lack of professional club system.

Much more than that, Hamm was a pioneer for female sporting empowerment. For a while, she was women’s football, at least in the eyes of some sections of the international mainstream media. Her book Go For the Goal: A Champion’s Guide to Winning in Soccer and Life, aimed to inspire young girls, became a national bestseller in the US. Girls grew up wanting to be professional sportswomen – and had a chance to make that dream reality – because of her.

Former US soccer coach April Heinrichs remembers the exact date when Hamm-mania hit home. On 19 May, 1995, the USWNT were playing Canada in Dallas. She recalls a bumper crowd present pre-match as the two XIs were announced over the tannoy. When Hamm’s name was uttered, a communal shriek uttered by thousands of excited young girls stopped the players and coaches in their warm-ups: “They’re here for us.”

Even so, women’s football was not placed front and centre of America’s busy sporting landscape until 1999. Held in the US, the 1999 World Cup became a cornerstone of the country’s modern sporting culture with the perfect Hollywood ending, Brandi Chastain’s winning penalty and subsequent celebration a lasting iconic image for the celebration of women’s sport.

Average attendances at the matches were the highest of any Women’s World Cup and the final drew in 90,000 live spectators. The “99ers” – the nickname afforded to the winning squad – appeared on Letterman and other major talk shows. Boys across the country were photographed wearing “Hamm 9” replica shirts. Without the suffocating, strangling hype of an uber-dominant men’s game, the women stood tallest. Two days before the final, the formation of an organised women’s league was announced.

Hamm was neither comfortable being cast as the poster girl of any movement nor as a sporting celebrity. She continuously insisted that she had no greater right to fame and adoration than any of her team-mates, and stressed that, to her, the beauty of football lay in team ethic being prioritised above individual glory. In the build-up to the final against China, Hamm was approached to do a magazine cover shoot. She accepted the invitation, but only on the proviso that several team-mates could join her and be part of the story. Julie Foudy, one of Hamm’s team-mates, remembered the gesture years later as an example of her typical humility: “She embarked on an insatiable quest solely for the greater good of the game.”

But if Hamm was distinctly uneasy with the trappings of fame, she proved herself expertly capable of detaching her reticence from her unique position of authority. If she was going to be deemed an icon, the least she could do was create a pathway for those icons who might follow her. If fame is worth anything at all, it is a vehicle to popularise the bricks that have constructed it: hard work, perseverance, respect, prowess.

Hamm helped girls believe that getting sweaty and dirty was acceptable, but more than that she made it cool. She taught a generation of US girls (and US boys) that playing hard to win wasn’t an inherently masculine trait, but an integral and pure part of human nature. That she did so not by manufactured design but out of love made her example so powerful. “I hope all you young girls see yourself up there too,” so her famous quote goes. “Once we were just like you”.

Article Credit: inews