Lilly, Matriarch Of U.S. Team, Refuses To Fade To Gray

CLEVELAND, June 15 — The other day, a visitor suggested to Kristine Lilly that she might have a pair of jeans older than some of her teammates on the United States women’s soccer team.

The United States captain Kristine Lilly is preparing to play in her fifth Women’s World Cup.

She laughed. “It’s true,” she said.

Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Brandi Chastain have all retired from soccer — and uninterrupted sleep — to begin postponed careers as mothers, commentators and America’s icons. With another World Cup approaching, in China in September, the national team is now captained by Lilly, who is a month short of 36 in chronological years but seemingly ageless in soccer years.

Once, Lilly talked to Hamm and Foudy and Chastain about changing points of attack. Now they talk about changing diapers. Occasionally, they say to her, or she says to herself, “Why are you still doing this?”

Why keep playing on the national team after two decades?

Is there anything left to accomplish after two World Cup titles and two Olympic gold medals?

How can you keep up with these youngsters? (Lilly joined the national team in 1987; Stephanie Lopez, a starting defender, was born in 1986).

To all the questions, Lilly offers this answer: “I still love it. I feel like I’m contributing. If I’m not doing what I know I can do and should do, I’ll be done. But I’m having an impact.”

[Saturday, when the United States plays an exhibition against Brazil at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Lilly is expected to make her 327th international appearance, unsurpassed by any man or woman. Only Hamm, with 158 international goals, has scored more than Lilly’s 122.]

When she began, the American women ate candy bars on the road in China and stayed in a Haitian hotel with no running water. Now Lilly forges on toward her fifth World Cup with a pioneer’s spirit and demand for excellence, even as her teammates jokingly call her Grandma, if not often to her face.

“I’ve never met anyone who had the mentality to train as consistently and to show up every day and be good,” defender Kate Markgraf, who will play in her third World Cup, said of Lilly.

For years, when the weather was too foul, she trained by running up and down the stairs at her father’s home in Wilton, Conn. Finally, she bought him a treadmill for Christmas. Recently, Lilly drew chalk lines in her brother’s driveway in Trumbull, Conn., and got in an aerobic workout, running “suicides” with two young nephews.

“I never get unfit; that’s one of the things I’ve learned,” Lilly said.

In her doddering old age, as she accedes to ice packs on her back after training, Lilly has also come to learn that rest is as important as hard work in maintaining her stamina. And is there anyone who seems to glide so effortlessly through a game, always appearing to be in the right place at the right time?

While Chastain got all the attention for twirling her jersey above her head like a lasso after the winning penalty kick in the 1999 Women’s World Cup, there would have been no dramatic, victorious ending against China without Lilly’s fundamental perfection.

In overtime, with 90,000 on hand at the Rose Bowl and 40 million Americans watching on television, Lilly lined up at the near post, followed the indolent trajectory of a corner kick and rebuffed a Chinese shot with her head. That kept the score tied at 0-0, as Foudy screamed silently and fearfully to herself, “Noooo, this is our World Cup and it’s over.”

Lilly jumped slightly at the goal line and a photograph caught her in clinched levitation — eyes closed, arms outstretched, neck braced, the cords in her throat as thick and raised as fingers, the muscular apostrophe of her quadriceps, mouth slightly open, shoulders squared, wisps of blonde hair like solar flares, the No. 13 riding up on her jersey, gravity unbound.

Excellence is making a habit of the mundane, Hamm noted at the time, saying: “So many people don’t, because they don’t think it’s important. Kristine does the mundane.”

Lilly remembers the save now as she did then, “There was no time to think.”

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