Mia Hamm

After graduating from the University of North Carolina, Hamm married Christian Corey, a career Marine, and played exclusively for the women's national team. In the 1995 Women's World Cup, she played forward and midfielder. One game, she even filled in at goal-keeper when the U.S. keeper was red-carded and had to leave the game. She led the team to a third-place bronze medal finish

The 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, was the first in which women's soccer was a gold-medal sport. After many years of American girls playing the sport, it was time for soccer to take center stage, and Hamm was in the spotlight. Before the largest crowd in the history of women's soccer, 76,481, at the University of Georgia's Seaford Stadium, plus a huge television audience, the U.S. team took on China for the gold medal. Sportswriter Dan Weber wrote: "…in Pele-like fashion, Hamm was both the difference – and the focus of everything that happened. … Hamm had a hand – or a hamstring – in every U.S. strike." Hamm, who was playing on a badly sprained ankle, was all over the field. In the 19th minute, she took a cross from Christine Lilly and shot it past the goalie. It hit the upright, and teammate Shannon MacMillan scored on the rebound. After China tied the score, Hamm took the ball into the right corner in the 68th minute, stopped and crossed the ball to Joy Fawcett, who fed Tiffeny Milbrett for the game-winning goal.

Olympic gold medals bring attention, and almost overnight Hamm, the biggest star on the U.S. team, became a celebrity. Advertisers hoped to connect her notoriety to the market of eight million female soccer players under the age of 18 in the United States. Hamm started doing commercials for Nike, a sponsor of the U.S. women's soccer team. Nike designed a women's sports shoe in her honor that featured her number 9. Hamm also did endorsements for Sportmart, Power Bar, Pert Plus shampoo and Pepsi. People named her one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World."

According to a 1998 Sports Business Daily survey, Hamm was America's most marketable female endorser. She even promoted a new Soccer Barbie doll. Hamm's most famous commercial epitomized the impact that she had on the male-dominated world of American athletics. In a widely played Gatorade spot, Hamm challenged fellow University of North Carolina superstar Michael Jordan to a series of sports contests, including tennis, basketball, soccer, track, and fencing, and as the song "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" played, the commercial ended with Hamm flipping Jordan over her hip in a judo maneuver. "You have the greatest icon of American sports put alongside this woman who's saying, 'I can beat you,'" said Rick Burton, a professor at the University of Oregon's Warsaw Marketing Center, in a Newsweek interview. "That's incredibly important to the women's sports movement."

In a later commercial for Gatorade Ice, Hamm was shown executing a header and a bicycle kick as "ice" flows through her veins in a computerized rendering of her endoskeleton. All her endorsement deals gave her an estimated $1 million in annual earnings in a sport where most women players could not yet earn a full-time living by playing professionally.

Hamm had come to symbolize not only the ascendancy of soccer as an American sport, but the rise of women's athletics. She became a top role model and a much-in-demand speaker. Hamm participated widely in clinics for girls and exhibition games to promote soccer. She told audiences of young girls how soccer had transformed her from shy and uncertain to confident and strong. Hamm wrote an inspirational book, Go for the Goal: A Champion's Guide to Winning in Soccer and Life, which was part autobiography but primarily a soccer instructional manual filled with inspirational advice. In the book, she emphasized teamwork and practice as well as heart and attitude, insisting there was no place on a soccer team for an egotistical player with the aphorism "There is no me in Mia."

As Hamm grew increasingly comfortable as a role model for girls, she gradually shed the shyness and inhibition that were part of her personality. But she was reluctant to hog the spotlight and quick to credit others for her success. As for being labeled the world's greatest player, Hamm said it was mostly a matter of more attention being paid to goal scoring. In 1999 she told Mazzola: "I'm just another player trying to fill my role on this talented team. Since I score goals, I get more attention." Even when she described her own abilities, she downplayed them. Hamm explained to Starr: "A great finisher can analyze in a split second what the goalie is doing, what surface of the foot to use, and then put the ball in exactly the right spot. It's an ability to slow down time. You don't actually shoot any faster than other players do, but you process a lot more information in the same time … I'm still working on that." During the 1999 World Cup, she admitted to Newsweek that she wouldn't take penalty kicks because "I lack confidence."

Hamm always promoted the sport above herself. She appeared at clinics and freely gave autographs at every opportunity, but often refused photo shoots for high-profile publications. "This isn't all about me," said Hamm to Newsweek during the build-up to the 1999 Women's World Cup. "I won't bear the entire responsibility for my gender and my sport. I can't carry that much weight. I'm not that strong a person." Her national team coach, Tony DiCicco, told Jere Longman of the New York Times: "She's not only a soccer icon. She's an icon for women's athletics. That's a huge responsibility."

Hamm became a leader in other aspects of life as well. Her brother Garrett contracted a rare blood disease, aplastic anemia. Hamm joined the board of the Marrow Foundation and raised $50,000 for his bone marrow transplant with a charity soccer match. After his death, she established the Mia Hamm Foundation to raise money for bone-marrow research and to set up clinics and camps for young girls in soccer and other sports. The foundation held an annual golf tournament, the Mia Hamm Foundation Golf Classic, to raise money to help families of bone marrow transplant patients.