Hope Solo is a Bad Person

She’s a bad person. Hope Solo was not born a bad person. I think what happened in her childhood shaped her into being bad, but in the end I just couldn’t bring myself to root for her or the team that ignored her transgressions because she’s good at being a soccer goalie.

I don’t want to cover why she’s a bad person. There are plenty of articles out there that discuss it at length. I hope she gets counseling and can avoid situations like this in the future.

Not Rooting for Team USA

As the USA women’s World Cup team continued to advance and I watched friend after friend post how excited they were on Facebook, my own enthusiasm refused to emerge. I just couldn’t find it in me to root for the team that so eagerly overlooked what she had done simply because she gave them a better chance to win.

The reality is that if Solo had been a bench warmer, a marginal player, then she would never have been allowed to play. Her transgressions were such that she would have been left off the team. Of this I have no doubt. And that’s why I just couldn’t be all that happy when Team USA won the World Cup in resounding fashion.

There are a lot of great stories from the triumph. Hat tricks, veterans going out with victories, national pride. But I wasn’t rooting for them. I’m not happy they won.

Winning is not Everything

The entire episode reminds me of what is wrong with this world where winning is everything. I’ll never believe that winning is everything. That the ends of winning justify the means used to achieve it. We become cheaters to win, we employ bad people to win, we enrich bad people to win, we sublimate our own ethics to win. When we do that to win … we lose.

It’s my opinion this World Cup win is really just a terrible loss for ethics, for morality, for human decency.

I sure wish they would have left Solo off the team. That would have been a real victory, win or lose.

I know my opinion here isn’t going to be popular but I can’t force myself to feel differently.

Tom Liberman