Briana Scurry has a story to tell.
Or two. Or three.
The World Cup and two-time Olympic champion is Black and played in an era in which nearly everyone else in women’s soccer was white. She was openly gay before openly gay players were commonplace. And she ended her career with a devastating concussion that left her unable to support herself.
So to see her smiling on the cover of her new autobiography, My Greatest Save: The Brave, Barrier-Breaking Journey of a World-Champion Goalkeeper, with the two Olympic gold medals she reclaimed after pawning them at her lowest point, is a good sign that the book will be compelling. And it is.
“If you compare (my life) to a house, and all the events that happened in my life are the rooms in the house,” Scurry told the Guardian in an effervescent phone interview in which her happiness over the book’s launch was palpable. “There are certain rooms in the house that are padlocked, and they’re dark and they’re barricaded. Those are things that are painful or disappointing or emotional where you don’t visit. I needed to be OK with going in that room.”
Some of the brightest rooms were always open to the public. She was the starter for the US team that won the first Olympic medal in 1996, then leapt into fame with a save in the penalty shootout that settled the 1999 World Cup amidst a summer of whirlwind publicity. After being out of shape and relegated to backup duty for the 2000 Olympics, she came back for a World Cup bronze medal in 2003 and another Olympic gold in 2004.
Another “room” was always open but not visited by the public. Her book describes her experience as a gay woman, and while she always considered herself “out”, it wasn’t widely publicized.
“My girlfriend actually lived with me in residency in 1999 in Florida,” she says. “If a reporter wanted to ask about it, I would’ve been more than happy to discuss it, but (reporters) didn’t go there back then.”
The public had more of a view into the darker spaces, most notably the 2007 World Cup. In a semi-final against Brazil, Scurry was surprisingly put into the starting lineup in the semi-finals in place of Hope Solo, who had played well but had, by Scurry’s account and others, missed a mandatory team dinner and missed curfew. The US lost 4-0, thoroughly outplayed and unlucky to be reduced to 10 players on a call that certainly would not have stood up under modern VAR technology.
After the game, Solo gave her infamous “I would have made those saves” interview. She wouldn’t have – no one would’ve stopped all four goals – and the team didn’t take kindly to her comments.
In her book, Scurry laments that the hurt from that experience stuck with her too long, and she says she feels no ill will toward Solo now. But her recap is unflinching – Solo and her supporters divided the team, and Scurry adds previously undiscussed details about how the team’s usual unity was temporarily destroyed.
“I think the semi-final game would’ve gone very differently had discord not been sown among the ranks,” Scurry says. “When you cut out that individual that’s sowing the discord, and you look at how we performed and how I performed in the third-place game against Norway – we crushed them.”
But the other darker rooms in the house had remained closed until now. Her concussion, suffered in a collision in an April 2010 game with the Washington Freedom in WPS, didn’t just end her playing career. It ruined her life for a considerable amount of time.
“The problem with concussions is a lot of us suffer in silence,” Scurry said. “I wanted to change that.”
For a few months, Scurry served uncomfortably as the general manager for magicJack, the team on which colorful owner Dan Borislow lavished attention among his star players but paid little to no attention on handling the administrative parts of playing games and marketing the team.
“I was torn in two at that point with being the GM,” Scurry says. “I wanted so badly for that team to be amazing for those players, and it had the potential. It started off great. And yet it just exploded.”
She also did commentary for ESPN at the 2011 World Cup, struggling to remember facts and names and, along the way, being fired from magicJack.
By the end of the year, she was collecting unemployment checks and fighting with insurers over a worker’s compensation claim. The next year, she pawned the Rolex watch she earned when she made her 100th appearance for the national team. The next year, she walked up to a plaza overlooking a waterfall and debated whether to jump. Not wanting her mother to deal with the pain of losing a child and not wanting tabloids to write headlines about the former Olympic champion taking her own life, she backed away from the railing.
Instead, she paid a visit to her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother and retrieved her Olympic gold medals, which she then handed over to a company that looked like “a high-class pawn shop” in its infomercials. The pain of handing over the medals drove her to the railing for a second time, but she again stopped short of jumping into the water.
She finally managed to get surgery that alleviated her constant headache pain. She modeled shirts and started making appearances with the help of a PR specialist whom she would later marry. She reclaimed her medals. A couple of years later, she was ready to tell her story.
The book includes a few lighthearted details, such as her surprising pre-game routines of listening to Nine Inch Nails and polishing her boots. But she also hopes to shed some light on concussions in soccer, which she hopes will be ameliorated by borrowing top-flight rugby’s system of having independent doctors do in-game assessments. And maybe players should consider headgear, which is legal in the game but lacks a “cool” factor.
“Can you imagine Ronaldo wearing a headband?” she says with a laugh. “But if Ronaldo wore a headband, everybody would wear one!”
And she has unfinished business. She hasn’t finished her degree at the University of Massachusetts, but after giving a speech at the university’s business school, she was invited to take some online classes, which she plans to do next year. She also took some swimming lessons, joking that she’s not very good at floating.
“I have a pool and I use the (floatation) noodles,” she says.
“But I’m not afraid of the water any more.”
