Gwendolyn Oxenham - Under the Lights and In the Dark

I N J ULY OF 2004 , I stood with my teammate on the side of a dirt road in Itanham, Brazil, holding out my thumb, attempting to hitchhike to professional futebol practice. We played for Santos FC, the most storied club in Brazil, and this was our daily routine: Karen batted at my thumb and mumbled at me in Portuguese, never satisfied with my technique. A two-toned car with missing hubcaps slowed down and honked (you learn quickly that the nice cars pass you by, but the sketchier ones are always willing to stop). We took off after the car, running and laughing, yelling, Obrigada!, having saved ourselves the 45-minute walk to the field. Karen sat in the front seat with her elbows propped on her knees and kept up continuous chatter with the driver, stopping only to wave victoriously as we passed teammates still on foot. I had learned that if I kept my mouth shut I could pass for Brazilian. When the driver looked questioningly into the rear-view mirror at the mute girl in the back, Karen slung her thumb at me and said, matter-of-factly, Americana. As Karen went back to chatting, I sat on the animal-fur-covered backseat and considered my summer.

One year earlier, I had graduated from college, the same year the US professional league folded. I went to grad school and found a new life. But on a snowy morning in South Bend, Indiana, I received an email with the subject line: PROFESSIONAL BRAZILIAN TEAM LOOKING FOR AMERICAN GOALSCORER. I opened it and stared at the text live in a bungalow on the beach, play for Santos Futebol Clube and then I typed, Im a forward, even though I was a retired outside mid who almost never scored goals. One month later I was on a plane to So Paulo. I wouldnt get paid few did. I didnt care. All my life Id grown up on Brazilian futebol folklore. There was no way I could pass up the chance to play for Santos, home of Pel himself.

I spoke no Portuguese; my teammates spoke no English. My summer was an incredible, wordless haze: we trained twice a day, six to seven hours. Sometimes a horse grazed on the grass at midfield. My teammates could juggle the ball on their shins. We often trained barefoot on the beach, running plyometrics over cardboard hurdles. When the Brazilian winters dumped too much rain on the field and there were high tides at the beach, we ran sprints on the main highway, occupying one lane, passing cars dousing us with water. After training we walked home slowly. When it was warm enough, we jumped in the ocean even Cris, our six-foot-tall keeper who did not know how to swim and who once had to be rescued but who kept going in anyway. Back in our dorms, we ate rice and beans for dinner. In the alley behind our rooms, we washed our jerseys by hand in the concrete basins as my teammates tried to teach me to samba. At night, on our bunk beds, we passed back and forth my PortugueseEnglish dictionary. I learned about their lives. They came from all over Brazil, from the highlands of the Northeast to a tiny island without cars. They had all learned to play on the street with the boys, and most had a familiar dream: to one day make the national team.

T HIS GLIMPSE INTO the life of a Brazilian futebol player lasted for only one season, but it made me wonder what the womens game looked like in the rest of the world. When I watched the Womens World Cup on television, I knew nothing about the majority of the teams taking part. What were their lives like? You hear a lot about inequality in womens soccer what are the stories that grow out of that broad term?

I wanted to find out what it means to be a top womens player, not just in the United States, where I live, but everywhere, from Nigeria to Russia. I often tried to web my way around the world via teammates of my former teammates, which means that many of the stories I found have an American tie (a tie that often runs through Portland, the heartbeat of womens soccer in the United States). Dozens of players across the world shared their stories and their time. Whether from Liverpool or Lagos, Tokyo or Kabul, Kingston or Paris, heres one thing that was always true: at an early age, they found the game and held on, driven neither by money nor fame only the desire to be great. Here are their stories.