Megan Rapinoe was the talk of the 2019 Women's World Cup in France and not just for her dominant
play on the field.
She's made headlines for her outspoken nature and colorful personality, and people can't
get enough of her.
For those fans, here's the untold truth of Megan Rapinoe.
Believe it or not, the liberal and outspoken Megan Rapinoe was raised in an extremely conservative
part of northern California.
She comes from a large Christian family and just so happened to grow up across the street
from a church in Palo Cedro, California, as reported by Yahoo!
Sports.
She's the youngest of six, but only by about 11 minutes.
According to ESPN, their brother Brian introduced the twins to the sport of soccer when they
were 4 years old and would regularly play with them on the field across from the church.
Because Megan and Rachael were hooked on the sport by a young age, their mother, Denise,
signed them up for soccer when they were five years old.
"I mean I think I always loved playing it.
I started playing when I was five, or probably before that.
Just in the backyard."
Denise also got them involved in community service as well, as noted by Sports Illustrated.
They volunteered at their church, at homeless shelters, and at food banks.
Long before she was a World Cup champion, Megan Rapinoe was losing youth soccer games.
Lots of them.
Rapinoe wrote in a Q&A for The Players Tribune:
"My teams lost all the time when I was growing up.
[...] My teams didn't start winning until I was midway through high school."
Did that keep her from succeeding in the sport?
Obviously not, which is why she wants people to not take youth soccer so seriously.
"Alright, let's break someone's clavicle on three.
One, two, three.
Break someone's clavicle.
Hit the field.
Let's go."
Rapinoe recommends that parents not try to map out their kid's path to the pros.
She explained:
"That element of 'just play' is really missing, I think.
Our mom and dad were never pushy.
It was always up to [my sister] Rach and I whether we wanted to play or not."
It's hard to argue with that approach.
The results speak for themselves.
Megan Rapinoe never really hid her sexuality.
She had been out to friends and family for years, but she'd never revealed she was gay
publicly until an interview with Out in 2012.
Her reasoning for coming out publicly?
She explained:
"I feel everyone is really craving [for] people to come out.
People want they need to see that there are people like me playing soccer for the good
ol' U.S. of A."
It was former teammate Lori Lindsey who encouraged her to come out publicly on the flight back
from the 2011 World Cup.
Rapinoe told the New York Times:
"I had become more vocal for gay marriage and gay rights on social media, and at some
point it just felt a little inauthentic.
Lori said it and it was like one of those moments where I was like, 'You know, you're
right.'"
Rapinoe's parents were concerned about the backlash, but she said the announcement had
the opposite effect.
Rapinoe told Yahoo!
Sports that people have told her she, quote, "gave them the push or the confidence that
they needed to be themselves, or tell their families [they're gay], or come out."
"This whole process of coming out, it's just been one affirmation after another."
Megan Rapinoe and her twin sister, Rachael, are close so close that they opted to attend
the University of Portland together.
They both played for the school's soccer team, winning the 2005 national championship together,
and both played professionally, though Rachael's pro career was short-lived.
It was during their sophomore year at Portland that they would discover they had something
else in common.
The two sisters had a heart-to-heart conversation and came out to each other.
Rachael told The New York Times:
"It was just a matter of one of us saying it first.
That was really it.
I had been dating someone and one of us said it first.
It was a ripple effect.
We both kind of came to the realization that we're in this together."
The sisters later co-founded their Rapinoe brand, which describes itself as both a soccer
and performance training business and a lifestyle apparel business.
The brand advocates for LGBTQ organization GLSEN, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and the
Human Rights Campaign, among others.
Megan Rapinoe got close with fellow soccer player Sarah Walsh in 2009 while playing in
the now-defunct Women's Professional Soccer league, as noted by The New York Times.
A long-distance relationship ensued, which became an even longer long-distance relationship
when Walsh moved back to her native Australia two years later.
Rapinoe said long-distance romances are sort of common in professional sports, so they
didn't feel like their relationship was all that out of the norm.
She told Us Weekly in 2012:
"Most people who are in a relationship on our team, it's basically long distance because
we're gone so much."
Walsh spoke just as highly of Rapinoe in an interview with The New York Times in 2013.
She said,
"We make fun of each other a lot and one of the things I love about her is that she can
make fun of herself.
People are drawn to her."
The pair, however, would end up calling it quits that same year, according to the New
York Post.
Following in the footsteps of former NFL star Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe took a knee
during the national anthem in 2016 to protest injustice and inequality.
She told Yahoo!
Sports that Kaepernick inspired her, quote, "to actually think about these things" and
made her feel like she had no choice but to take a knee.
The backlash was immediate.
Registration for her training clinic dipped, as did apparel sales on her website.
Rapinoe took a ton of heat on social media, and it got so bad that, for the following
game, she had two police officers assigned to her as a precaution.
She said:
"It wasn't easy for me.
But it shouldn't be.
[…] This is what it's going to take for things to change, norms to change, conventions
to change."
Megan Rapinoe no longer kneels during the national anthem, but that doesn't mean she
fully participates in the pre-game tradition.
She now stands alongside her teammates as the song plays, refusing to sing along or,
as is tradition, cover her heart with her hand.
Rapinoe told Yahoo!
Sports that the anthem has become a somber moment for her and described her new approach
to it as a, quote, "peaceful protest."
And it doesn't sound like she will go back to singing along or putting her hand over
her heart until significant changes are made.
She said:
"It would take a lot.
It would take criminal justice reform.
It would take the huge inequality gap that we have to be much better.
It would take a lot of progress in LGBTQ rights.
We just have such a disparity in this country in so many different ways, inequality in so
many different ways."
Megan Rapinoe wasn't the only one feeling the backlash due to her kneeling during the
national anthem.
Her mother told Yahoo!
Sports she felt the heat as well in her conservative county, which strongly disapproved of her
famous daughter's gesture.
People reportedly called her home constantly.
Some even confronted her at the restaurant where she worked for three decades, which
had pictures of her daughter hanging on the walls until the restaurant took them down.
Her mother says they come from a, quote, "very patriotic family."
Rapinoe's mother and father were upset about the way their daughter protested, but not
her reason for protesting.
There was probably a lot on Megan Rapinoe's mind after winning the 2019 World Cup, but
she still remembered to wish her brother Brian a happy birthday during a post-game interview.
As much as Brian probably would have liked to have been at the match, he couldn't because
he was in a Male Community Reentry Program.
Brian has been in and out of incarceration ever since age 15, according to ESPN.
Over the years, he's been charged with car theft, a hit-and-run, and three assaults while
in jail, among other crimes.
While in prison, he joined a gang and was inked with racist tattoos.
But Rapinoe never gave up on him.
She said:
"My brother is special.
He has so much to offer.
It would be such a shame if he left this world with nothing but prison sentences behind him."
Brian has since had the disturbing tattoos removed or covered and, as of 2019, has claimed
he's been clean for 18 months.
The summer of 2015 was an eventful one for Megan Rapinoe.
She followed up her team's 2015 World Cup victory by proposing to her girlfriend Sera
Cahoone the following month.
Rapinoe announced the engagement to the former Band of Horses member in a since-deleted Instagram
post.
Fast forward to 2016.
Curve asked Rapinoe about wedding plans, to which she responded:
"Well, we put them on pause because we started planning and everything and — that s---
is stressful.
[...] We decided to take a break for a little bit, but we're enjoying being engaged, and
we're taking full advantage of that."
The following year it was revealed those plans were no longer on pause, but were instead
apparently canceled.
WNBA star Sue Bird came out in an article with espn W in 2017, but that wasn't the only
nugget she dropped about her personal life in the story.
She also revealed that she had been dating Megan Rapinoe since the fall of 2016.
Both Bird and Rapinoe were playing in Seattle at the time and had hit it off at a 2016 Rio
Olympics event.
Rapinoe told the Seattle Times:
"It was kinda like, 'OK, we both live in Seattle, we should be friends.
Why aren't we friends?'"
A relationship developed after that, in part due to their similar backgrounds.
Rapinoe told espn W:
"We have a lot in common and just sort of clicked.
I joke she is my No. 1 go-to-for-advice person.
She's just so level-headed."
The United States was up comfortably against Japan at halftime of the 2015 World Cup final,
but you wouldn't know the score was 4 to 1 from the mood in the U.S. locker room, according
to Sue Bird's op-ed in The Players Tribune.
She said Megan Rapinoe told her the team was going over miscues from the first half and
talking strategy for the second half.
Bird said Rapinoe was doing her best to put on her game face just like her teammates,
but she couldn't, quote, "deal with the ceremony of it all."
Her excitement eventually got the best of her and led her to scream in front of the
team what everybody else was thinking:
"WE'RE GONNA WIN THE WORLD CUP.
WE'RE GONNA WIN THE WORLD CUP!"
And just like Rapinoe colorfully predicted, the U.S. did exactly that, winning the match
5 to 2.
This wasn't the last time the U.S. women's team made headlines for celebrating, but in
soccer, that's just what you do.
The first thing you probably notice when looking at Megan Rapinoe is her hair.
It's short and usually bleached blond.
But Rapinoe can't take all the credit for the look.
She admitted in an interview with Out that she somewhat stole the hairstyle from another
short-haired celebrity:
"I'm totally obsessed with Tilda Swinton.
She has this strange, beautiful sexiness about her.
I love everything she does.
And I love her hair.
It was a little bit of an inspiration for mine."
Rapinoe altered her look for the 2019 World Cup, opting for pinkish purple hair, much
to the dismay of girlfriend Sue Bird.
At least one person seems to have really liked the pinkish purple hairdo.
During the World Cup quarterfinals, actor Zac Efron tweeted,
"I'm dying my hair purple."
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