Good article:
Marta's Silva Lining On World's Soccer Stage
BY MARILYN ALVA
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 12/11/2007
By the time Marta Vieira da Silva led Brazil's fledgling women's soccer team in the 2007 World Cup, she was known as Marta.
Yes, Brazilian athletes mostly go by one name. But Marta especially stood out.
Now the striker was going up against the mighty U.S. women. They hadn't lost a game in almost three years and held two World Cup and two Olympic gold medals.
Marta's team almost beat the Americans in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, but lost in overtime.
Three years later, at China's Hangzhou Dragon Stadium in September, Brazil had another chance to beat the Americans. It came in the semifinals, and Marta produced. She led her team to a 4-0 triumph, scoring two goals, including the exclamation point with 13 minutes left. Back-heeling the ball to herself while averting two defenders, she smashed the finale into the corner.
Though Brazil settled for the silver, losing 2-0 in the final to Germany, Marta was the Cup's top scorer and thus winner of the Golden Boot. She also collected the Golden Ball as top player.
Brazilian coach Jorge Barcellos praised his players after their upset of the Americans, saying, "They were aggressive and determined, and that made the difference."
No one was more determined than Marta, who as a child vowed to become the best soccer player in the world. In 2006, she got her wish. The International Soccer Federation named her Women's World Player of the Year.
She reached that peak by breaking soccer barriers most of her life.
Soccer is Brazil's national obsession, but it is a sport long dominated by men. Until 1979, women were even banned from playing it by law. Though Marta was born seven years after the ban was lifted, women didn't find many opportunities to participate, unless they entered a soccer beauty pageant.
As a 7-year-old, Marta fought to play soccer with the boys in her impoverished Dois Riachos hometown in northeast Brazil.
The children made fun of her for playing with the boys.
"They would insult me, say that I had no shame. Sometimes, I'd try to fight them," she told sportswriter Alex Bellos of the Observer in England, speaking in Portuguese.
Marta's father, a barber, left her mother Tereza and her siblings when she was still a child. The family was too poor to buy a soccer ball. That was par for her village. The kids would make due by rolling up plastic bags and kicking them.
When she joined the action, her older brother tried to stop her from participating. But she persisted, and the boys eventually relented.
Playing with the boys, Marta learned how to control the ball in a flamboyant style. She excelled as a center forward. "She has great technical skills," Shannon Boxx, midfielder for the U.S. women's team, told IBD. "It's almost like the ball is attached to her foot."
It helps that Marta plays with passion. "You can see she loves soccer," Boxx said. "She has this complete confidence in her ability."
After a few years playing in the streets, Marta joined an indoor all-boys team and excelled in local games. But when one club refused to play against a team with a girl on it, she was asked to leave.
She did, but not far. She found a local girls team. When it disbanded, Marta got an opportunity she couldn't turn down. A soccer organizer who had once lived in her hometown encouraged the 14-year-old to try out for a women's team in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's second largest city. After a three-day bus trip, she landed a spot on the squad.
By that time — 2000 — women's soccer was blossoming. The club, Vasco da Gama, was a feeder for the national women's team. Three years later, at 17, Marta moved up to the big show, making her debut at the 2003 World Cup in the U.S. Her team got only as far as the quarterfinals, but Marta stood out.
One person startled by Marta's talent was Roland Arnqvist, manager of Umea IK, a Swedish women's pro team and one of the best in Europe. "It was the first time I ever saw Marta play," Arnqvist told IBD. "She was a very young player, but she was great with the ball and she was a very fast player."
When Arnqvist returned to Sweden, he tried to sign her. But it wasn't easy. It took him two months to track down Marta by phone. When he did, using a translator, he convinced her to join his Swedish team and play professionally, something no club in Brazil could offer.
Marta arrived in Umea in February 2004, just before her 18th birthday. It was the first time she saw snow. The Swedish town was just 170 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
"The cold was a challenge," she told Bellos, noting the subzero temperatures. "But my life has always been about breaking barriers. I saw everything as a challenge."
Arnqvist's soccer colleagues were skeptical.
"People said to me, 'This will never work. It does not matter how good Marta is. She will never adapt to the way Swedish teams play. The culture, the way of playing, is too different between Sweden and Brazil,' " he recalled.
Marta had to train in a whole different way. In Brazil, she practiced a few times a week with her team — when the team drilled at all. The Swedish team practiced 10 times a week, and worked out in a gym. Marta had never set foot in a gym.
So she adjusted. If she was told to do 10 push-ups, she'd do 20.
"Her will is very strong," Arnqvist said. "She hates to lose."
Arnqvist says she learned quickly how to become a team player because. "You have so many players who play only for themselves. She puts the team before herself."
Sweden's Pia Sundhage, who was recently named coach of the U.S. women's team, says Marta learned from the organized Swedes how to improve. And once on the field, she says, Marta "makes a difference."
"It's not very often you come across a player that has both speed and is comfortable with the ball," Sundhage told IBD. "She pretty much has everything."
Marta helped Umea IK win the Swedish title in 2005 and 2006.
Last summer, her national team was able to train only a few weeks for the Pan American Games in Rio. Even so, the Brazilians won the gold, with Marta scoring 12 goals.
Afterward, Brazilian officials invited Marta to become the first woman to press her feet into wet concrete at the Soccer Walk of Fame at Rio's Maracana Stadium. They're near the imprints of another one-word soccer legend — Pele.
After the Pan Am triumph, Marta called for financial backing for women's soccer in Brazil. She did the same during the World Cup.
"She fights for her teammates and her country for getting what they deserve — backing from Brazil," Boxx said. "I admire her on the (field) and I admire her for what she's trying to do off the field."
With Marta pushing for recognition, the Brazil Soccer Federation recently announced it would launch a women's pro league.
Why should I buy them any presents? They don't buy me any 
