Goalie's Curse? Ms. Scurry Blocked A Big Shot, but Others Got Air Time
By JONATHAN KAUFMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
As America's soccer team defeated China on Saturday in the Women's World Cup, the Richards house in upstate New York, like millions of others, exploded in happy bedlam.
"Yeah, they did it! They did it!" shouted 11-year-old Jonah, an avid soccer player and the only black member of his team.
Half an hour later, as the celebrations and medal ceremonies unfolded on television, Jonah's sister Maya, 21, began shouting again: "Where is the black girl? Where is the black girl?"
The black player is the team goalie, Briana Scurry, and in the aftermath of the U.S. win, many blacks say she has been slighted, despite holding China scoreless and then blocking a Chinese penalty kick, setting the stage for the winning strike by Brandi Chastain. A particularly galling example: During the award ceremonies, broadcast by ABC, the camera panned to team star Mia Hamm while Ms. Scurry was being awarded her medal.
"It kind of insulted me," says a deflated Jonah Richards. "It scared me to think: If she wasn't black, would she get more attention?"
Touch almost any issue these days and it sometimes feels as if blacks and whites see the same events completely different. This is proving to be another one. Black talk radio in places like Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C., has been flooded with indignant callers, and ABC has gotten an earful from irate black viewers. Many whites simply don't see Ms. Scurry's treatment as much more than a sports issue.
That view holds that, while Ms. Scurry made an enormous play, Kristine Lilly, who cleared a potentially winning Chinese kick out of the goal in sudden death, and Ms. Chastain, who made the deciding penalty kick under intense pressure, probably made bigger ones. Moreover, if Ms. Scurry was slighted, some soccer fans say, she's simply experiencing what all goalies go through: Strikers, like Ms. Hamm, have always gotten the glory. Goalies, after all, almost never win games -- they only keep them from being lost.
"Goalies are always unsung," says Aaron Heifetz, a spokesman for the U.S. Soccer Federation. "If you win 5-0, you never talk about the goalkeeper."
Advertising: World Cup Team Attracts Fans, but Sponsors Remain Skittish Beyond that, the stunning success of the women's team, which drew unprecedented crowds to a women's sporting event, has proved a Rorschach test well-beyond race. While soccer moms and most women's sports groups have generally seen the team's popularity as a plus for women's soccer, some feminist groups see it as just another example of how women only get idolized in sports if they play up their beauty and femininity. Only Tuesday, there were complaints that the entire women's team got sexist treatment in a victory rally held in Manhattan because it didn't get the ticker-tape parade that often is given to championship men's teams such as the New York Yankees.
ABC, for its part, denies there was anything racial in its after-game coverage. But an ABC spokesman says the network regrets not paying more attention to Ms. Scurry. "We wish we had given more prominence to Briana Scurry just as we wish we had given every member of the team more coverage," says Ed Dandridge, an ABC spokesman. "Whenever you have a live event you do your best to capture the overall environment and to convey the totality of the event. No decision was made editorially or otherwise to focus on anyone other than to capture the entire event as it unfolded."
For many blacks, though, the network's treatment simply shored up their view that black heroes will never get the same adulation as their white counterparts. Even Jim Rudy, Ms. Scurry's college soccer coach, who is white, found himself confronted by a friend from Cape Verde, in Africa, the day after the game.
"I can't believe they're not giving Briana more of her due," Mr. Rudy recalls his friend saying. Mr. Rudy agreed, but ascribed it to "amateurish" camera work rather than any racial overtone. "But I'm not black," says Mr. Rudy.
To be sure, Ms. Scurry has been far from shut out of the publicity whirlwind. Time magazine's coverage of the event featured a two-page color picture of Ms. Scurry's critical block. She has appeared with fellow team members in numerous interviews since the U.S. victory and is scheduled to appear Thursday night on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno."
Even blacks disappointed with the coverage of Ms. Scurry are sometimes ambivalent about the reasons. "You give publicity to the guy who hits the game-winning home run, not the one who gets a single that keeps the rally alive," says Larry Gross, sports editor of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper that ran a full-page picture of Ms. Scurry with the headline "The Great Wall" on its back sports page Monday. Still, that same day, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a color picture of four white players celebrating on its front page -- a picture that prompted angry phone calls to a black Chicago radio show. "Sometimes we can be thin-skinned," says Mr. Gross. "Everything is not prejudice."
Some blacks say they are disappointed that a woman who was becoming a role model to young black soccer players is being overshadowed by the attention paid to her white teammates. "I don't want to say it's racism, but I think white people just don't get it," says Sidono Ferreira, who confronted his friend Mr. Rudy, and is the father of an eight-year-old soccer player. "For soccer, she is Jackie Robinson."
Complains Anna Ekpenyong, an X-ray technician attending a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Manhattan Tuesday: "If she had messed up, we would be hearing a lot about her."
Ms. Scurry's story is a remarkable one. She grew up the youngest of nine children in a virtually all-white suburb of Minneapolis. She never played soccer with a black teammate until she was picked for the U.S. National Team in 1993. In an interview, Ms. Scurry once referred to herself as "the fly in the milk." Ms. Scurry was an all-state high-school basketball player but chose to play soccer at the University of Massachusetts. There, she majored in political science, became the country's leading goalie and was chosen for the 1996 U.S. Olympic team. While Ms. Chastain gained fame recently for posing for an arty nude shot in a magazine, Ms. Scurry ran naked through the streets of Atlanta in 1996 after winning the Olympic gold medal.
Now considered one of the best women goalkeepers in the world, Ms. Scurry has racked up more than 50 shutouts, and her performance in the U.S.'s 2-0 semifinal win against Brazil was considered electrifying and crucial to America's eventual victory.
Her fans cross color lines. "She's our role model," says Taryn Sullivan, a white sophomore varsity soccer player at Watertown, Mass., High School. "She's so determined, so aggressive. You look at her and she is saying, 'Bring it on!' " Despite her high standing in the soccer world, Ms. Scurry hasn't benefited from the endorsements that have showered white players, especially Ms. Hamm, who has garnered numerous endorsements and written a book. Earlier this year, Ms. Scurry wrote an online diary about the World Cup for ESPN's Web site (www.espn.go.com). On top of her Web page, a banner advertisement blinked, featuring Ms. Hamm's Gatorade commercial with Michael Jordan. Even since her final-game heroics, interview requests for Ms. Scurry still trail requests for Ms. Hamm and another player, Julie Foudy, says U.S. Soccer spokesman James Moorhouse.
On the other hand, many who know her say Ms. Scurry is much more reserved than many of the other players on her team. Some also suggest that, in the initial TV post-game coverage, Ms. Scurry may not have been featured as prominently because she had walked off the field to the stands to greet a friend.
Still, for many blacks this all adds up to a missed opportunity. "I think America wanted a female star, someone white girls could focus on," says Charles Cobb, the black director of guidance at Teaneck, N.J., High School, who watched the game Sunday. "But in America's haste to find a white superstar, they snubbed Briana."
"We all want to look at a game and find our hometown hero," says Kibwe Be, a Washington, D.C., radio producer whose black station was flooded with angry calls on Monday. "When I watch golf, I'm only looking at Tiger Woods. Whites see something different when they watch soccer. I really wanted to say, 'Hey, that's my baby!'"
-- Dorothy J. Gaiter contributed to this article.