The Backstory: Catarina Macario
There's Always a Backstory to Every Magazine Piece. Here's Mine on My Latest.
We’re starting a new feature from now on that I’m calling The Backstory. Whenever I publish a new magazine-style story, as I did this week on the USWNT’s Catarina Macario, I’ll follow up with a column on what happened behind the scenes and how everything got done.
By the time I arrived in Lyon on the night of November 4, I was exhausted. It was the end of a 12-day European reporting trip in which I had spent two days in Madrid for a story on the TV show El Chiringuito and seven days in Moldova for a piece on the wild tale of FC Sheriff. I had been flying the entire day from Chișinău to Bucharest (Air Moldova!) to Paris to Lyon, all while trying to write my 6,000-word Moldova story as quickly as possible so that it could come out six days later, ahead of my USMNT-Mexico World Cup qualifying coverage in Cincinnati.
(It later turned out that a few miles from where I was waiting in Paris for my connection that night, Paris Saint-Germain’s Kheira Hamraoui was being attacked by pipe-wielding assailants in an assault that would reverberate around the world.)
I also had picked up a nasty cold—at least it wasn’t Covid, based on what four days of negative tests had told me—which is why I insisted on wearing a mask (despite both of us being fully vaccinated) when I interviewed Catarina Macario the next day at the training headquarters of Olympique Lyonnais in the Lyon suburb of Décines-Charpieu.
I had already observed part of Macario’s training session and came away impressed—with Lyon’s cutting-edge facilities, with the absolute quality of Macario and her world-class teammates, and with the way the 22-year-old American had clearly been accepted inside the group. Maybe it’s because Macario isn’t a short-term player for Lyon, but already she has exceeded performance-wise what U.S. players Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan have done in their Lyon stints. Lyon’s Ada Hegerberg, the former Ballon d’Or winner, even had some fun by announcing to her teammates during warmups that a visitor had arrived from New York just to see Macario.
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It was the first time I had done a sit-down interview with Macario, who very well could be the next USWNT superstar, and you never know how a first interview is going to go. But within a minute or two I could tell she was fantastic: Honest, expressive, funny, engaging. (She does have a Stanford communications degree, after all.) You didn’t have to pry anything out of her. Those attributes combined with her highlight-reel play mean she’ll have a real future when it comes to endorsement deals. She also understood the effort I had made to travel to see her, and I think that helped the interview. When a PR head told us our 30 minutes were up, Macario said she had no problem continuing, and we went for another half-hour.
I had anticipated this would be maybe a 2,500-word story at most about a player U.S. fans are excited about. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that you never know what you’ll pick up during your reporting. When I asked Macario early in the interview about what it was like to finally live in her own place in Lyon, she responded with some angst that her dad was still living with her, and said she had been telling him she wanted more independence.
There was a story there. When I returned to the U.S., I ended up interviewing Macario’s father, José, as well her mother, Ana Maria, a doctor, and her brother, Estevão. The sacrifices that everyone in the family had made for Catarina to move to the U.S. at age 12 with her father and brother, leaving her mom in Brazil to earn the money to support the family, were incredible. And the family’s journey, to say nothing of her dad’s extreme influence, reminded me of the Williams sisters and their family in the recent film King Richard.
One great thing about writing for this platform is that I can write stories to any length I want to—not just a certain page length, as had always been the case when I was at Sports Illustrated—and so the piece I had anticipated being 2,500 words long ended up having 4,500 words. It made sense, and it fit the material that I had.
It may be the first big USWNT story that I have written on this site, but it certainly won’t be the last. If your decision to subscribe is connected to wanting to read ambitious coverage of the women’s game, I promise you there will be more.
What stood out to you about the Macario story?
For me, it was the family angle. That she would let her guard down about how living with her father was not ideal says so much about her connection with you during the interview. I cannot wait to see her blossom for the USWNT. Nice one, Mr, Wahl.
She's a superstar and you treated her like one. So many people have their doubts or say they haven't seen enough of her brilliance. It's really on them to watch her play and accept her talent as generational.