Sports
Brandi Chastain's iconic moment aided women's movement from field to owner's box
It’s one of the most powerful images in women’s sports history.
Brandi Chastain, after converting the penalty kick that gave the U.S. its second women’s World Cup title, dropped to her knees and ripped off her jersey in celebration, exposing her black sports bra to a live crowd of 90,000 and a national television audience that peaked at 40 million.
Twenty-five years later it’s still celebrated as a moment of unbridled joy, but also one of liberation. Never before — or since — has a team of women athletes played before a crowd that large in the U.S. And rarely had a woman athlete felt so unburdened by societal constraints that she started taking her clothes off in public.
“That was an iconic moment but it transcended sport. People saw the raw emotion in that photograph and it made people feel differently about women,” said Chrissy Franklin, an executive vice president with the sports and entertainment marketing firm Octagon. “She opened the door for women to be unapologetic about their success.”
If Title IX, Billie Jean King and Florence Griffith Joyner changed the way we thought about women athletes, Chastain and her teammates began to change the way we watched, consumed and supported women’s sports. It has been a long, slow and painful evolution, one that is still far from finished even as Caitlin Clark draws record crowds to WNBA arenas and the NWSL nearly outdraws the Cubs at Wrigley Field.
But Chastain’s journey from the floor of the Rose Bowl to the owners’ suite at PayPal Park, where the NWSL franchise she founded plays, is proof that progress has been made.
“Obviously the trajectory of women’s sports has skyrocketed in the last couple years and that has been a game-changer,” said Chastain, one of a growing number of women who have moved from the playing field into the executive offices of women’s soccer and basketball teams. “I think men in business, who have been decision-makers, now look at women’s sports as not just a charitable organization. We’ve been saying for 25 or more years that women’s sports has a place in the landscape and it’s viable.”
Cheryl Cooky, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue, agrees. This moment, she said, finally feels different.
“Part of why we’re seeing what we’re seeing is because women athletes are taking the reins,” said Cooky, who has been studying the intersection of gender, sports, media and culture for more than three decades. “Women athletes today are creating their own media platforms, becoming owners and investing in women’s sports.
“I really do think it’s women athletes who are starting to really push the conversation, invest in women’s sports, speak out against injustices.”
Angel City players run on the field after a match against NJ/NY Gotham FC on May 29, 2022.
(Ashley Landis / Associated Press)
Few U.S. professional sports franchises were owned by women in 2013, when the NWSL played its first season with eight teams. Since then the league has nearly doubled, to 14 teams, eight of which have women as owners, founders or significant investors. Chastain is all three for Bay FC, an NWSL expansion franchise she started with three other national team players.
On Saturday, Bay will play host to Angel City, a third-year club whose sprawling group of more than 100 owners and investors includes 14 former USWNT stars, two Wimbledon women’s champions and Olympic gold medalists in skiing and gymnastics.
Other NWSL minority owners include former World Cup champions Carli Lloyd and Briana Scurry, basketball’s Sue Bird, tennis champion Naomi Osaka and gymnast Dominique Dawes. Partly as a result of their investments, the league is stronger than ever, with a record four-year, $240-million domestic broadcast deal, record average attendance and two more expansion teams scheduled to begin play in 2026.
Angel City alone has been valued at $180 million by the sports business website Sportico, making it the most valuable franchise in U.S. women’s sports history. And it’s run by the largest majority-women ownership group in global sports. No longer do women athletes have to rely solely on men in business to make decisions about their livelihoods, a problem that repeatedly sunk women’s sports just two decades earlier.
“We do ourselves a disservice,” Cooky said, “if we don’t recognize all the work and all the effort that women athletes have put in, both on and off the field, to make this moment happen.”
A fan holds up an Angel City scarf during a match between Angel City and Bay FC in March.
(Doug Benc / Associated Press)
There was a lot of patience involved, too. A year after Chastain’s penalty gave the U.S. a World Cup title, she joined 19 other national team players in forming the Women’s United Soccer Assn., the first in a series of short-lived women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. The WUSA folded three seasons later, but the problem wasn’t with the players, it was with the investors.
“Business executives and decision-makers were not ready for women’s sports at the time,” Chastain said. “This is not a short-term investment. Women’s sports has not been given the breathing space that men’s sports has, and so it’s hard to grow. And it hasn’t been given the nourishment to grow into what it can fully be.
“Now it’s breathing on its own, it’s healthy. The sponsorship space, the business space, we’re seeing what impact we can have.”
And it’s not just the NWSL. The WNBA has long struggled to draw fans and sponsors, but with Clark joining after a record-setting college career at Iowa, the league recently released figures showing attendance was up 156% in the first month of the season and more than half of all league games had been sellouts. Televised games on ABC and ESPN averaged 1.32 million viewers in May across ESPN, ESPN 2, ABC and CBS, three times as many as they did last year.
So can you draw line from Chastain kneeling on the floor of the Rose Bowl to Clark draining shots from the midcourt logo today? No, says Joy Fawcett, a teammate of Chastain’s on three World Cup teams. Agreeing with Cooky, she says seeing Chastain’s success reflected in Clark’s doesn’t do justice to the difficulty of the journey, nor the contributions so many others made along the way.
“It wasn’t a straight line,” said Fawcett, now an Angel City investor. “It was a lot of ups and downs to get to this point.
“This is something that takes a village. You have none of this without the fans and their support. You have nothing without the investors. It’s all layered over time and none of us could do it alone.”
But Fawcett, the first coach of UCLA’s women’s team and now an assistant with the national deaf soccer team, said she and her teammates never doubted this day would come.
“We always believed that it’s like ‘you just need to see it,’” she said. “You just need to watch the women’s game. It’s a beautiful game. You will love it. You just need to come.
“And that’s what happened. They did, and it took off.”
Twenty-five years later Chastain keeps a framed copy of that iconic photo in her San Jose home, though humility prevents her from displaying it in a prominent place.
“It’s in the bathroom,” she said.
Brandi Chastain speaks during Zeta Live 2023 in New York. Chastain tries to stay humble about her iconic moment in the 1999 Women’s World Cup.
(Charles Sykes / Invision / Associated Press)
But then Chastain doesn’t need a picture to be inspired, which is how the photo came to be in the first place. Her mother Lark raised her daughter to be the kind of woman who wasn’t afraid to take her shirt off in public if the moment called for it or to start a professional soccer team from scratch. However she did that not with words, but deeds.
Lark Chastain dreamed of becoming a flight attendant but was told she couldn’t keep the job if she married or had children — rules that didn’t apply to male flight attendants. So she quit, married and raised a family before returning to the work force, eventually becoming the vice president of a Silicon Valley employment agency.
While Brandi Chastain was winning World Cups, her mother was filling the board rooms at Hewlett Packard and IBM, arguably influencing the direction of the tech revolution.
“There was no reason for her to think she could do that. She was told she could be a nurse, a secretary or a teacher,” Brandi said of her mother, who died in 2002. “I saw that example every day in front of me. Her fearlessness gave me the power to stand up and say: ‘I love sports. I belong in this space.’ I will take pride in knowing that I was gifted something really powerful from my mom.”
So maybe there is a straight line from Chastain to Clark after all, only it’s Lark Chastain who blazed that trail by questioning whether the way things have always been done is necessarily the way they should continue to be done.
“What Caitlin Clark has been gifted,” Brandi said, “is women who have been showcasing powerful strength and confidence. So she too believes she belongs in that space.”
Sports
Law firm fighting for women’s sports in SCOTUS battle comments on ruling possibly impacting SJSU trans lawsuit
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A law firm leading the charge in the ongoing Supreme Court case over trans athletes in women’s sports has responded after a federal judge suggested the case’s ruling could impact a separate case involving a similar issue.
Colorado District Judge Kato Crews deferred ruling in motions to dismiss former San Jose State volleyball co-captain Brooke Slusser’s lawsuit against the California State University (CSU) system until after a ruling in the B.P.J. v. West Virginia Supreme Court case, which is expected to come in June.
Slusser filed the lawsuit against representatives of her school and the Mountain West Conference in fall 2024 after she allegedly was made to share bedrooms and changing spaces with trans teammate Blaire Fleming for a whole season without being informed that Fleming is a biological male.
Meanwhile, the B.P.J. case went to the Supreme Court after a trans teen sued West Virginia to block the state’s law that prevents males from competing in girls’ high school sports.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is the primary law firm defending West Virginia in that case at the Supreme Court, and has now responded to news that Slusser’s lawsuit could be affected by the SCOTUS ruling.
“We hope the ruling from the Supreme Court will affirm that Title IX was designed to guarantee equal opportunity for women, not to let male athletes displace women and girl in competition. It is crucial that sports be separated by sex for not only the equal opportunity of women but for safety and privacy. Title IX should protect women’s right to compete in their own sports. Allowing men to compete in the female category reverses 50 years of advancement for women,” ADF Vice President of Litigation Strategies Jonathan Scruggs said.
Slusser’s attorney, Bill Bock of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, expects a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the legal defense representing West Virginia, thus helping his case.
(Left) Brooke Slusser (10) of the San Jose State Spartans serves the ball during the first set against the Air Force Falcons at Falcon Court at East Gym in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Oct. 19, 2024. (Right) Blaire Fleming #3 of the San Jose State Spartans looks on during the third set against the Air Force Falcons at Falcon Court at East Gym on October 19, 2024 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. ( Andrew Wevers/Getty Images; Andrew Wevers/Getty Images)
“We’re looking forward to the case going forward,” Bock told Fox News Digital.
“I believe that the court is going to find that Title IX operates on the basis of biological sex, without regard to an assumed or professed gender, and so just like the congress and the members of congress that passed Title IX in 1972, allowed this specifically provided for in the regulations that there had to be separate men’s and women’s teams based on biological sex, I think the court is going to see that is the original meaning of the statute and apply it in that way, and I think it’s going to be a big win in women’s sports.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared prepared to rule in favor of West Virginia after oral arguments on Jan. 13.
Slusser spoke on the steps of the Supreme Court on Jan. 13 while oral arguments took place inside, sharing her experience with a divided crowd of opposing protesters.
With Fleming on its roster, SJSU reached the 2024 conference final by virtue of a forfeit by Boise State in the semifinal round. SJSU lost in the final to Colorado State.
Slusser went on to develop an eating disorder due to the anxiety and trauma from the scandal and dropped out of her classes the following semester. The eating disorder became so severe, that Slusser said she lost her menstrual cycle for nine months. Her decision to drop her classes resulted in the loss of her scholarship, and her parents said they had to foot the bill out of pocket for an unfinished final semester of college.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Education determined in January that SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of the situation involving Fleming, and has given the university an ultimatum to agree to a series of resolutions or face a referral to the Department of Justice.
Among the department’s findings, it determined that a female athlete discovered that the trans student allegedly conspired to have a member of an opposing team spike her in the face during a match. ED claims that “SJSU did not investigate the conspiracy, but later subjected the female athlete to a Title IX complaint for ‘misgendering’ the male athlete in online videos and interviews.”
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SJSU trans player Blaire Fleming and teammate Brooke Slusser went to a magic show and had Thanksgiving together in Las Vegas despite an ongoing lawsuit over Fleming being transgender. (Thien-An Truong/San Jose State Athletics)
SJSU Athletic Director Jeff Konya told Fox News Digital in a July interview that he was satisfied with how the university handled the situation involving Fleming.
“I think everybody acted in the best possible way they could, given the circumstances,” Konya said.
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Sports
Myles Garrett cited for speeding a ninth time, an elite pass rusher seemingly always in a rush
Myles Garrett is in a hurry to become the greatest pass rusher in NFL history. The Cleveland Browns All-Pro defensive end set the single-season sack record in 2025 and has cracked the top 20 career leaders after only nine seasons.
“I’m going to take that down, and I prefer I take it down in the next five years,” Garrett told Casino Guru News last month.
Off the field, however, his urgency to get from point A to B is a problem. He’s accumulating speeding tickets at an alarming rate.
On Feb. 21, Garrett was handed his ninth speeding ticket since his NFL career began in 2017. He was cited for driving 94 mph in a 70-mph zone on Interstate 71 between Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio.
The citation from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office says Garrett was driving his green 2024 Porsche at 1:35 a.m., returning home after attending a Miami of Ohio basketball game in Oxford.
Body cam footage shows the officer telling Garrett that she kept the charge under 100 mph so that a court appearance wouldn’t be mandatory. Garrett reportedly still holds a Texas driver’s license — he attended Texas A&M — and told the officer that he did not have an Ohio license.
Cleveland Browns’ Myles Garrett wears a jacket displaying his girlfriend Chloe Kim before the women’s snowboarding halfpipe finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy.
(Lindsey Wasson / AP)
The officer wrote that the famously affable Garrett was “kind and cooperative,” and that drugs and alcohol were not a factor.
Garrett’s need for speed flies in the face of his persona. He has written poetry since high school, peppers social media with inspirational sayings and donates time and money to several charities.
His girlfriend is two-time gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim, for whom he wrote a poem he shared on social media: “You enrapture fools to kings, and exist without a peer, put on this Earth for many things, but our love is why you’re here.”
Verse hasn’t slowed his roll. On Aug. 9 he was cited for ticket No. 8, clocked at 100 mph in a 60-mph zone in a Cleveland suburb a day after the Browns returned home from a preseason game at Carolina.
Garrett’s seventh ticket followed a frightening crash in 2022. He flipped his gray 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S off State Road in Sharon Township and he and a female passenger were injured. He was cited for failing to control his vehicle due to unsafe speeds on what had been a slick roadway.
A witness told a responding police officer that Garrett’s vehicle went airborne, took out a fire hydrant and rolled three times. Garrett sustained shoulder and biceps sprains and was sidelined for the Browns’ game that week against the Atlanta Falcons. His companion was not seriously injured.
Cleveland television station WKYC reported that in September 2021 Garrett was stopped twice in a 24-hour period — for driving 120 and 105 mph. The infractions occurred on Interstate 71 in Medina County, where the speed limit is 70 mph, and he paid fines of $267 and $287.
A year earlier, Garrett was cited for driving 100 mph in a 65-mph zone of Interstate 77 — again while driving a Porsche — and paid a $308 fine. He accumulated his first batch of speeding tickets in 2017 and 2018, and the police reports recite similar circumstances: Garrett driving well over the speed limit, cited without incident, paid a nominal fine.
The piddly fines certainly aren’t a deterrent. Garrett, 30, and the Browns agreed to a four-year contract extension in March 2025 that made him the highest-paid non-quarterback in NFL history at the time. The deal pays the seven-time All-Pro more than $40 million a season and includes more than $123 million in guaranteed money.
He set the NFL single-season sack record with 23.0 last season, surpassing the 22.5 accumulated by T.J. Watt and Michael Strahan. Garrett has 125.5 career sacks, averaging 14 a season, a pace that would enable him to break Bruce Smith’s career record of 200 in five years.
“That is definitely on my mind to go out there and get,” Garrett said. “That’s a goal I’ve had for years now since college.”
Garrett has declined to discuss his driving habits.
“I’d honestly prefer to talk about football and this team than anything I’m doing off the field other than the back-to-school event that I did the other day,” he told reporters after ticket No. 8 in August, referring to a charity appearance.
“I try to keep my personal life personal. And I’d rather focus on this team when I can.”
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Former ESPN broadcaster Keith Olbermann once again incited backlash on social media Wednesday after he called late legendary college football coach Lou Holtz a “legendary scumbag” in an X post on the day Holtz was announced dead.
“Legendary scumbag, yes,” Olbermann wrote in response to a clip of Holtz criticizing former President Joe Biden in 2020 for supporting abortion rights.
Olbermann received scathing criticism in response to his post on X.
“You’re a scumbag that needs mental help,” one X user wrote to Olbermann.
One user echoed that sentiment, writing to Olbermann, “You’re the real scumbag here. Lou Holtz had more class, integrity, and genuine decency in his pinky finger than you’ll ever show in your lifetime.”
Another user wrote, “You’re a grumpy, lonely, Godless man. All the things Lou Holtz was not.”
Keith Olbermann speaks onstage during the Olbermann panel at the ESPN portion of the 2013 Summer Television Critics Association tour at the Beverly Hilton Hotel July 24, 2013, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Olbermann has made it a pattern of sharing politically charged far-left statements that are often combative and ridiculed on social media, typically resulting in immense backlash.
After the U.S. men’s hockey team’s gold medal win, Olbermann heavily criticized the team for accepting an invitation from President Trump to the State of the Union address. Olbermann wrote on X that any members of the men’s team who attended the event were “declaring their indelible stupidity and misogyny,” while praising the women’s team for declining the invitation.
In January, Olbermann attacked former University of Kentucky women’s swimmer Kaitlynn Wheeler for celebrating a women’s rights rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court during oral arguments for two cases focused on the legality of biological male trans athletes in women’s sports.
Former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz listens before being presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in Washington, D.C., Dec, 3, 2020. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“It’s still about you trying to find an excuse for a lifetime wasted trying to succeed in sports without talent,” Olbermann wrote in response to Wheeler’s post.
In 2025, Olbermann faced significant backlash after posting (and later deleting) a message on X aimed at CNN contributor Scott Jennings, that said, “You’re next motherf—–,” shortly after the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.
Holtz was a stern supporter of President Donald Trump, even saying in February 2024 that Trump needed to “coach America back to greatness!”
Near the end of Trump’s first term, shortly after former President Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 election, Trump awarded Holtz with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States.
After Holtz’s death was announced Wednesday, several top GOP figures paid tribute to the coach on social media.
Those GOP lawmakers included senators Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.; Todd Young, R-Ind.; Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; representatives Greg Murphy, R-N.C.; David Rouzer, R-N.C.; Erin Houchin, R-Ind.; and Steve Womack, R-Ark.; and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; Indiana Gov. Mike Braun; U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon; and Rudy Giuliani.
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Lou Holtz, former Notre Dame football coach, addresses the America First Policy Institute’s America First Agenda Summit at the Marriott Marquis July 26, 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc)
At the time of publication, prominent Democrat leaders have appeared silent on Holtz’s passing, including prominent Democrats with a football background.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who worked as an assistant high school football coach; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who was a recruiting target for Holtz in 1986 as a college prospect; Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, who played in the NFL; and Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Ill., who played football for the University of Illinois, have not posted acknowledging Holtz’s death.
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