Flat-Out Fantastic

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The first taste of glory would come at Giants Stadium near New York City, where Mia Hamm helped hammer Denmark in a 3-0 win, opening the scoring with a terrific strike in the 17th minute. That was expected. What nobody expected, at least initially, was a crowd of 79,000 cheering fans. There were painted faces and flags and banners, and an entire section of fans wearing Kristine Lilly shirts. It looked as if someone had gone to suburban malls and parks and hijacked shoppers and picnickers to the stadium. The players were stunned, and after the game Hamm noted that the usually voluble Foudy was speechless. "That doesn't happen too often," Hamm said.

Reporters who wouldn't know an offside trap from a lobster pot were now descending on the team's lone media rep demanding exclusives. David Letterman pronounced himself "team owner" and began plugging away. Even Tom Brokaw went West for an on-the-scene report.

There were plenty of good stories waiting to be discovered too--"eight- or nine-year overnight sensations," said Nike president Thomas Clarke. After all, this is a veteran group whose members have known one another and played together for a decade in some cases. They won the Olympic gold medal in 1996, and some, including Akers, were around in 1991, when the team won the inaugural World Cup, held in China, where the event apparently was kept a state secret. Indeed, the team barely played the next year because U.S. Soccer couldn't afford to pay anyone.

Since then, the team and the federation have been steadily raising their profile. "We came up with a marketing plan that really tapped into the grass roots," says Alan Rothenberg, chairman of the Women's World Cup board and past president of U.S. Soccer. "We might have 2,000 to 3,000 people at those early barnstorming games," he says, in Hershey, Pa., and in New York's Long Island. Wherever the team went in those days, the hero that girls sought out was Hamm, now 27, whose speed and finesse still give defenders the shakes. As the team's best known player--a distaff version of Michael Jordan--she had the burden of not only scoring goals but also being Miss Publicity. A self-described emotional child from a military family who lost an older brother to a rare blood disease (and still wears his initials on her soccer shoes), Hamm found the soccer field a perfect outlet for her inner fire. She's been on the national team since she was 15.

For Akers, who preceded Hamm to stardom, this Cup was a test of willpower. Dogged by chronic fatigue syndrome and damaged knees, she has pursued this Cup as relentlessly as she has tracked down opposing midfielders. With the Olympics coming up next summer, Akers has said she will listen to what her body is telling her about whether to play. That would be a first for someone whose body has been screaming at her for years.

Originally, Messing figured Women's World Cup could sell a total of about 312,000 tickets for the 17 doubleheaders (the semis were staged in conjunction with an MLS game). Instead the figure will be more like 650,000. While professional women soccer players are no match for the men in skill levels, their game is great entertainment because unlike the final, most games are freewheeling shoot-outs. It was all scintillating soccer, blissfully devoid of drunks and hooligans--just hundreds of thousands of soccer-loving Americans out for good, clean fun.