It’s a grace note, a tiny mannerism, imperceptible when she is in mid-flight. Only someone raised in the same house would notice.
Her family picks it out in all the still photos. When Mia Hamm extends herself in the run of play, leaping to hurdle an opponent or launch a shot, the middle finger of her right hand curls naturally toward her thumb, forming a circle as if something delicate is nestling there.
That small and private space is emblematic of what Hamm tries to reserve for herself, even as she has become one of the most scrutinized athletes in the world.
It also reveals something about her bloodlines.
“It’s a ballerina move,” her oldest sister, Tiffany, explained.
Hamm is the daughter of a pilot and a dancer, and both professions inform her work. She may be regarded as the prima ballerina of her troupe, the U.S. women’s soccer team, which opens the 1999 Women’s World Cup in Giants Stadium on Saturday. But Hamm also has a horror of being viewed as a prima donna. Like a flinty and laconic flyer used to landing in thunderstorms, she routinely brushes off accolades.
Of her record 108th international goal, scored against Brazil last month, Hamm said, “It was actually very reflective of our team, with lots of one-touch plays, and I was fortunate to be on the end of it.” She sees herself not as a soloist but the beneficiary of great choreography.
The dancer in Hamm comes out in the stepover moves and side volleys and back-heel passes that are an evolutionary step removed from arabesques and plies. As a little girl, she quit ballet lessons after a couple of weeks. It wasn’t the first thing she had dabbled in and dropped, and Tiffany Hamm remembers thinking that her younger sister was a bit of a gadfly. “We all thought Mia had no stick-to-itiveness,” her sister said. “Then she found sports.”
The Hamms were an Air Force family, and this was Mia’s drill every couple of years when her father, Bill, was transferred: Say goodbye. Pack. Move. Walk into a new classroom and try to focus on the unfamiliar faces swimming into vision like a heat mirage. Be watchful. Try to blend in.
“I’ve never been one who tries to attract attention to herself,” Mia Hamm said. “I’ve always been one who likes to observe rather than walk into a room and say, `Hey, look at me.’ In class, I wasn’t one who raised her hand all the time. I wasn’t the most popular. I wasn’t Miss Congeniality.
“Sports was a really good way for me to meet people, an easy way for me to express myself.”
And it was a way for an emotional child to channel her fierce temper and shore up her confidence.
Hamm’s favorite “Saturday Night Live” cast member is Molly Shannon. Shannon’s signature character is a misfit Catholic schoolgirl whose insecurities are displayed for all the world to see. Hamm gets it. This is one of the secrets held in that gently cupped right hand: Her public polish and panache have been hard-won.
“I spent a lot of days growing up apologizing to everyone in my family for things I said,” Hamm said. She was a screamer, a brooder, quick to anger, argumentative. All her five siblings had to do to press her buttons, Tiffany Hamm recalled, “was disagree with her.” As debate escalated, Mia would become mute with frustration.
In soccer, Hamm found motivation to submerge her pride and her moods, to work toward that perfect last touch.
“My emotions can be my greatest asset or one of my biggest weaknesses,” she said. “It’s so unpredictable. A lot of times, on the field, I fight to control them.”
Her mother, the former ballerina, understands.
“I was quiet, too, so why was I always picked for the dramatic roles?” said Stephanie Hamm, who named Mia after a beloved dance instructor. “She directs all her emotion into her play. I did the same thing on stage. When I was up there, it just came out of my pores.
“That’s her fuel, her acceleration.”
But Mia Hamm’s innocent outlet had consequences that were unintended, and unscripted, like her playful one-take judo flip of fellow Tar Heel Michael Jordan in their joint Gatorade spot. Her talent made her, in the words of the Chinese proverb, the nail that sticks up and can’t be pounded down.
At 14, she was spotted by then-U.S. coach Anson Dorrance in an Olympic Development tournament. A year later, she became the youngest player to play for the national team when she appeared in a match in China in August 1987. She helped win four NCAA titles for Dorrance’s North Carolina teams and started for the 1991 World Cup and 1996 Olympic champions. Her biggest disappointment came when the U.S. team finished third in the 1995 World Cup in Sweden.
U.S. midfielder Julie Foudy, who also made her national team debut on the ’87 trip at age 16, has a vivid recollection of Hamm when the two met at a camp just preceding the China tour.
“Mia looked like a deer,” Foudy said. “She had those big brown eyes, and a really short haircut, so her eyes were just huge. She reminded me of a deer caught in the headlights.
“You kicked the ball to Mia and she ran after it.”
Then and now, Hamm is a striker who darts instinctively into open space, but when the game is over, would just as soon find a shady spot and avoid the high beams. Over the years, she has trained herself to use the interplay of light and shadow to her advantage. She has worked overtime to sell her sport; she has invested much time in trying to convert the pain of her brother’s premature death into something constructive.
In the meantime, Hamm has gotten her wish. The spotlight is more diffuse. Other star players have emerged, here and around the world. The U.S. team is recognized as an ensemble company. But resist it as she may, there is something about Hamm that draws the eye, a faintly exotic quality. The camera loves her.
Role model
The little-girl players love her too, and she genuinely loves them. At family gatherings, Hamm says, she would rather sit “at the kids’ table.”
She is not a saint. None of the U.S. players are, and the endless parade of promotional appearances and the high-decibel postgame autograph sessions get tiring sometimes. The team made a bet on the outcome of a scrimmage in Milwaukee last month: Loser does the clinic.
But ask Hamm if she’d prefer to be at a black-tie banquet or, as she was recently, at a sporting goods store in the Woodfield Mall, looking out at a bevy of local youth players whose faces were flushed with excitement and pleasure.
The girls asked questions. Hamm and four of her U.S. teammates answered. Afterward, they posed for individual photos with each of the children. A hundred and twenty times, the flashbulbs went off. Hamm’s eyes were dry and bloodshot, as they frequently get with exertion, but she smiled. One hundred and twenty times.
Her teammates know her as a wry wit, a gifted mimic who performs skits at their parties and pulls accents out of her hip pockets to make them laugh. But she is not always comfortable with public speaking. At a North Carolina athletic boosters’ dinner years ago, Hamm was on the dais with former basketball standout Phil Ford. He did his thing, suitably practiced and glib. She got up, began to talk about her family, choked up and had to stop.
“I’ve never been good at meeting people,” Hamm said. “I’ve gotten better, but I get really nervous. Kids are easy for me. It’s the adults that are hard, going out and talking to them.”
Although she managed to construct her career without many women to emulate, Hamm is sold on the importance of female role models–especially those willing to go out and press the flesh. She delights in telling the story of a girl she met in Atlanta who was astounded to discover that she was taller than Hamm.
There now is a 500,000-square-foot building at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., named for Hamm. The company dutifully reported that if the offices in the building were stacked up and stood on end, they would be 63 stories high. Yet Hamm’s consuming desire is to stay life-size.
“I’m no different from these kids,” Hamm said. “That, to me, is an important message for them. We have a lot of the same worries as they do. `Do my friends like me? Am I doing my responsibilities at home? Am I a good sister?’ The things that are so much more important than whether we won that game or not.”
However, Hamm is liberal in exercising her constitutional right to say no. This spring, she said no to a Newsweek magazine cover shoot. Before the U.S.-Canada match earlier this month, the U.S. team psychologist presented the players with laminated cards saying permission–permission to fend off outside demands in the days leading up to the World Cup. Hamm flashed hers right away, in response to an ABC-TV sideline reporter’s request for a halftime interview. People who know Hamm were amused: Like she needed the help.
“She has a posse of one: me,” her agent, David Bober, said. He had been after Hamm for a couple of years to collaborate on a book. When she finally agreed, she was very specific. It was to be aimed at young soccer players, heavy on the instructional, light on the autobiographical. Her teammates were asked to contribute essays on their positions.
Hamm insisted on proofreading every word of the book, “Go for the Goal.” She and editor David Hirshey hammered out a title for the first chapter: There’s No Me In Mia. When he tried to insert a quip into the text, she vetoed it, telling him, “Sarcasm doesn’t work with 14-year-old girls.”
“Her object was not to shine the light on herself,” Hirshey said.
Hamm was firm about something else: mentioning, prominently and with great affection and respect, Dorrance, her ex-North Carolina and national team coach. Dorrance is the defendant in a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought by former North Carolina forward Debbie Keller of Naperville. Hamm issued a public statement and signed a letter of support when the suit was filed last summer; she has declined to comment on the matter since.
Her loyalty to Dorrance runs deeper than any bond save that to her family. Yet Hamm also has found a way to balance her feelings with the fact that some of her teammates, some of her best friends, do not see things the same way.
She is precise about what should remain unsaid. People who push make her wary. That is why being around kids perks her up: After the initial shock of meeting her, they usually just want to talk soccer.
Family values
Hamm, so outwardly disciplined, doesn’t trace the trait back to her early exposure to the military. “The military never came home with my Dad,” she said. “It was not a `Yes, sir, no, sir,’ type of house.”
It was a relaxed house, but a house where it was understood you were expected to give more than you took. Her parents, for example, went to adopt one boy 20 years ago and came back with two.
“If they won $2 million in the lottery, they’d keep $200,000 and give the rest away,” she said.
That kind of home instills its own sense of duty.
During Hamm’s college career, her parents were stationed overseas and unable to make many of her games. Now the pattern is being repeated.
Hamm met her husband, Christiaan Corry, in a political science class at North Carolina when he stopped to tell her he liked the lyrical sound of her real name, Mariel Margaret. He was in the Navy ROTC then; he is a Marine pilot now. They were married five years ago in an Episcopalian ceremony in Chapel Hill.
Since then, the couple’s respective assignments often have separated them. Corry shipped out to Japan last week. He will be away throughout the tournament. She cannot afford to let it affect her.
A perfectionist, Hamm constantly questions whether she is doing enough for the people around her. She still is searching for ways to honor the memory of her adoptive brother Garrett, who swept her along with him into competitive sports when they were both in grade school. He was 28 when he died two years ago after a long struggle with a rare blood disease.
“His illness and death gave me the courage to stand up and ask for help, and to understand I can do some things for people with the opportunities I’ve been given,” Hamm said.
She recently established a foundation whose resources will be partially devoted to educating people about the National Bone Marrow Registry, which matches donors with needy recipients.
Hamm saw to it that her brother’s initials were embedded in one model of her new Nike shoes. Nike also gave her naming rights on a couple of rooms in the new building. She chose to christen the cafeteria “Woody’s.” It seems that Garrett came home one day with a very ragged Mohawk haircut. He looked a little like the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker, and the nickname stuck.
Hamm can smile when she thinks about it. It’s a small, private gesture. And now she will turn her attention to the public realm, to the one title she has seen slip away four years ago to archrival Norway.
She is on her toes, poised for takeoff.
———-
On the Internet
E-mail your women’s World Cup soccer questions for Tribune staff writer Bonnie DeSimone at: chicagotribune.com/go/worldcup99
