There’s only one Abby Wambach, so don’t try to be like her

They probably played Abby Ball too long. With Abby Wambach -- the scorer whose forehead has accounted for as many goals (75) as some teams -- starting up top, players pressed to get their retiring leader a shot on goal. Every corner kick and lead pass was directed at Wambach’s hairline and the US Women’s National Team’s game plan in the friendly against China suffered because of it. Wambach, who admitted postgame that she hadn’t been training for this victory lap with her normal intensity, barked at her teammates to start searching their shot.

They didn’t. The crowd pleaded and her teammates pressed and China won a match, which was only notable for the fact that, for the first time, no one listened to Wambach. It won’t be the last time that happens. Retiring GOATs get calculated hashtags and cinematic commercials to explain remembrance to fans. In Wambach’s Gatorade spot she asks the next wave of athletes to, “make them forget me.”

Nah. For 14 years with US Soccer, and presumably long before and assuredly in her next career, Wambach has been as stubborn as red lipstick. Both conspicuous and hard as hell to wipe away.

In our American sports culture, there’s so much hand-wringing about kids. Sports are the great teachers of all life’s lessons and children lack the critical thinking to make sense of Athletes Who Dab. What do you tell the impressionable youth about the most unstoppably brutal goal scorer in soccer history? You don’t look at Wambach flinging her face past a goalkeeper’s fists and say, “make them forget her.” You click on a YouTube link, point at No. 20 and say “if I ever see you doing that you’ll have an oboe in your hand faster than you can spit.”

From her freshman season at Florida, when she put up 19 goals and 12 assists in 26 games, her teammates told NPR that their most vivid memory of Wambach was during halftime of the national title game when she yelled in the huddle, “we are not fucking losing to these bitches.” You can imagine it’s probably the same thing she said to herself, playing a woman down in stoppage time of the 2011 World Cup quarterfinal against Brazil, when she flung her face into a Megan Rapinoe cross and salvaged respectability for the USWNT. Or when, in 2010 during a World Cup qualifier against Mexico, Wambach took staples to the head on the sideline in order to get back to a game the U.S. would eventually lose.

But if that impolite mantra is going to be your career’s mission statement, then you’ll accept the fact that sometimes people are going to want to cover their ears or hide their eyes until the W is locked up. Wambach brought her 5’11” frame down on defenders like the wrath of God, and her overpowering tumbles to goal transitioned the US program past the Mia Hamm era. Hamm, slippery as a silverfish, is remembered for sparkling slashes to the goal. But within US Soccer she was known to be a nose-wrinkled tactician, who could dissect opponents with her beady eyes just as easily as with her feet. She dropped in inconspicuously at the Superdome, and reminded anyone who noticed her there of what a quiet retirement actually looks like.

Before she’d even taken the pitch on Wednesday, Wambach had already gone after USMNT coach Jurgen Klinsman in an interview with Bill Simmons. When asked postgame about the Dec. 16 retirement announcement of Japan’s Homare Sawa (the 2011 FIFA Player of the Year), Wambach admitted that she already had plans of squadding up with Sawa to FIFA-strongarm for better pay and improved playing surfaces.

Retiring only means that Wambach can continue imposing herself on the ENTIRE game. She always played without deference, convinced that she was unquestionably the most important player on the field and the smartest one off of it, a fact that most in the program have skirted in their retirement rapturizing. When Christie Rampone wrote about Wambach breaking her leg in the 2008 Olympics, she made a virtue out of Wambach’s roster manipulating.

The first call she made in the ambulance was to a player -- also a forward -- who hadn’t made the roster at training camp a few weeks before.

“I’m hurt,” she told the player. “Start training. We need you to fill my spot.”

That was Abby, too: Even at the worst times, she was always thinking about the game, thinking about the team, thinking about how to make us the best we could be. With Abby, there was never a poor me philosophy. She just didn’t do negativity.

In that telling, Wambach’s ladybossing is as much a character defining trait as her grit. Without Team Director Wambach, the USWNT will make use of its best athletes and won’t muddle the midfield simply to feed the beast up top. They’ll be faster and less dependent on air strikes. And with US Soccer banning headers for players under 11, the organization has ensured that Wambach’s highlights will serve as warnings rather than celebrations.

Remember that it wasn’t so long ago that people were asking what they should tell their kids about topless Brandi Chastain’s World Cup celebration. When Wambach celebrated her World Cup win and kissed her wife it didn’t make nearly the news that her pre-tournament lawsuit against FIFA did, or how her decision not to play for $50,000 in the NWSL enabled her to just train for World Cup glory. Maybe the true mark of the transition that Wambach has led this team through will be that from now on, concerned sports parents will ask, “What’ll I tell my kids about why their favorite female athletes get treated like crap?”

After all, parents have been cautioning their kids to mind their bones and teeth and soft tissue for millennia. “I would tell my children that if they’re that passionate about something, I hope you would give everything that she gave to the game,” says Lauren Holiday, who retired from soccer this year in part because her NBA-playing husband’s salary made her career the more expendable one. “Do I want them to get concussions? No. Do I want them to get staples in their head? No. But I think that you can’t stop that overflowing passion. Nobody asked her to do that and people probably told her not to.”

The really special little girls are the ones who won’t listen at all.