Jaylen Tatum
Veteran
Permanent Ink
Sydney Leroux has followed a map to the stars — from Canada to the U.S., and now, on the eve of the Women’s World Cup, back again. Will the tatted and tenacious striker leave her mark on the big tournament?
by Louisa Thomas on May 28, 2015
It began with a bet. Sydney Leroux was barely a teenager, small-shouldered and skinny, with a narrow chin and dimpled cheeks. She lived in Surrey, Canada, and played soccer for the Coquitlam City Wild. She wanted a tattoo. Her mother, Sandi, agreed to a wager: If Sydney could score 10 goals in four games at the under-14 Canadian national championships, then Sandi would take her daughter to a tattoo parlor. Leroux scored 12. Her back was inked with a flaming soccer ball.
There was always something at stake on the field: tattoos, goals, greatness, getting out. As a child, Sydney played baseball and soccer; she tried gymnastics and tae kwon do. Her mother, Sandi, was desperate to try anything that would burn off Sydney’s rambunctious energy. But in soccer, Leroux showed the kind of potential that turned heads and opened doors, the kind of talent that made a young girl and her single mother think it might change her life. As a forward, she was aggressive, physical, unafraid, and hungry. She wanted to play with the best. It became a consuming ambition. It was sometimes the only thing that she knew about herself.
Twelve years later, on a Saturday morning in mid-May, Leroux sat in the lobby of the Belamar hotel, in California’s Manhattan Beach. Tattoos of koans and tangled, flowering designs ran across her lithe but muscular forearms. While teammates passed by, many in U.S. national team gear, she wore black pants, sandals, a flowing tank top with an abstract black-and-white print. She was dressed for the camera. The Women’s World Cup was three weeks away, and Leroux is one of the U.S. team’s most sought-after players; she was already giving her second interview of the day. Her explosive, physical style on the pitch and her charismatic, expressive personality off it had brought her to attention during the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, where she’d been the youngest member of the USWNT. Now, on the eve of her first World Cup, it seemed possible that she could be the team’s next transcendent star. The public — and marketers — have embraced her as she appears to embrace herself: bold, fun-loving, beautiful, free.
But with Leroux, nothing ever happens easily.
Sydney Leroux was once the player that Canada planned to build its program around. She’s now returning to Canada determined to hold the trophy while wrapped in an American flag. Leroux played north of the border in the junior levels, even joining the U19 team at the World Championship when she was only 14 — the youngest player in the tournament. But her dream was to play for the United States.
As it happened, she was not only Canadian; she was American, too. It was part of the complicated legacy that her father, Ray Chadwick, a baseball player who’d briefly pitched in the big leagues, had left her before he disappeared. Through no effort of his own, he gave her fast-twitch muscles; the dimples that punctuated her smile; creamy, pale-brown skin; and American citizenship. Even as a child, she knew the possibility of a U.S. passport was a gift. It was the connection between her and her heroes, Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy and the other 1999 Women’s World Cup champions. “I will thank him forever for that,” she says.
Sandi quietly did some research and learned that Sydney would still be eligible to play for the United States as long as she didn’t represent Canada at a senior-level FIFA-sanctioned game. But to play for the United States, Sydney would have to play in the United States. She would have to leave home.
It was a gamble. But life was like that. Sandi, who had been a softball player on the Canadian national team, worked at a grocery store, taking graveyard shifts so that she could go to Sydney’s games. Money was hard to come by. They bet even their happiness. Leroux went to Seattle first, playing for a club team, living with a host family, and being homeschooled. She was 13, “still very much a little girl,” and she was alone. Worse, she wasn’t scoring. So Leroux came home.
But back in Canada, she struggled, got into trouble at school, started partying, wondered if she should give the sport up. She wanted, she told me, “to go somewhere where I could really learn something.” Her mother was as committed as she was. So she and Sandi decided to try one more time. They would double down. This time, Sydney would be more than a bus ride away. She would go to Scottsdale, Arizona, where Les Armstrong, a well-respected coach, and his club team, Sereno Soccer Club, were waiting. She got on a plane, flew away, and left her mother behind.
“[My mother] knew,” Leroux said. “The U.S. was the only place to go.”
Leroux hated it. Hated school, the whiteness of Scottsdale, the feeling of being alone. “I didn’t like who I was,” she told me. “I didn’t like my hair. I didn’t like the color of my skin. I didn’t like that I was different.” She moved from host family to host family, house to house. She packed her bags more than once. “I don’t know if anyone could understand what it was like to be 14, 15 and have no one,” she says. “I wanted to quit, I wanted to give up so many times. I just wanted to come home.”
Instead, she found a tattoo parlor. This time, she went by herself. She felt herself rebelling. “I really didn’t know who I was,” she told me.
http://grantland.com/features/sydney-leroux-womens-world-cup-2015/
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