he chronic fatigue, the knee surgeries (12 and counting), the concussions, the fractured cheekbone, and the knocked-out teeth are an old, old story. It's all in the Bible, Michelle Akers will tell you.
''There was Job and lots of other dudes in there that God squashed,'' she says.
He has his reasons, then and now, and after the illness and injuries just kept on coming, Akers finally concluded that it was some sort of biblical test.
''I spent a lot of time asking God, `What's up here?''' she says. ''`What do you want me to do?'''
And the answer, she says, is always the same. Stop asking and keep playing.
Akers, at 33, is the alpha female on the US women's soccer team. She has played 143 matches and scored 103 goals across 14 years. She scored the first goal in the history of the program. She was wearing a star-spangled jersey when Mia Hamm was a high-school freshman. She has competed in three World Cups and one Olympics, and she has played the last eight years while fighting off a variety of physical torments.
And yet, Akers is still the mainspring of the world's best team, the woman her teammates look to for direction on the field and inspiration off it.
''Her presence is such a contagious thing,'' says US coach Tony DiCicco. ''When she steps on the soccer field, they look for Michelle Akers.''
It was Akers who won the 1991 Cup virtually by herself, scoring 10 goals in six matches, including the winner in the final with Norway. When she went down with head and knee injuries in the 1995 opener, the US essentially went down with her, losing in the semifinals.
''It wasn't the same without her,'' says Hamm. ''There's that feeling we have when she's out there. Every time Michelle gets knocked down, everyone's silent. We just hope she gets back up.''
Hamm may be the world's best player, but the Americans can't reclaim the Cup without Akers, and they know it. So they're happy to work around the chronic fatigue syndrome that still sucks her dry and limits her availability not just from game to game but from minute to minute.
''I never really know,'' Akers shrugs. ''It's a bit unpredictable. Sometimes it's 90 minutes, sometimes it's 20.''
And sometimes it's none at all. Akers never knows until she steps on the field for her warmup.
''Then I'll tell Tony that I can go or that I'm at half-mast or that I need to step off,'' she says. Sometimes, she won't know until she's played the better part of a half.
''I have to go to the edge and see what's there,'' Akers says. ''Sometimes, I'll get a second wind.''
Akers is the constant variable on a team whose starting 11 is so stable, so chock-a-block with 100-cap veterans, that it might as well be engraved on a marble tablet. DiCicco always keeps a With Michelle and Without Michelle lineup in his head.
With is always better, he says, but we're always ready for Without, and her teammates understand.
''We just want her to come out and give what she's got,'' says Tiffeny Milbrett, who has played alongside Akers since 1991.
So far in this Cup, Akers has been able to give more than they had dared to hope. She played all 90 minutes at defensive midfield in the opener against Denmark and played the first half (and scored a goal) in Thursday's 7-1 giggler against Nigeria before DiCicco pulled her out and sent her in to the locker room rest and rehydrate.
And unless they need her to settle or spark the team tonight against the North Koreans in Foxboro Stadium, odds are Akers will sit out to refill her tank for the quarterfinals and semifinals (with a West Coast trip in between) at the end of the week.
She plays it game by game now. That's ironic, Akers says, because that's how she trashed her body in the first place.
''As a kid, I played for the day and the moment,'' she says. ''That was my strength and my weakness. I played so much for the moment that I got injured. I took a lot of physical risks because I couldn't see beyond the moment.''
She ruined both knees. She cracked skulls with defenders so often going up for headers that concussions were common as bruises. But Akers came to dominate her sport and put the women's game on the global map. She was on top of the world in 1991 - and then her body turned on her.
Nobody knows how Akers developed chronic fatigue syndrome.
''They're still trying to figure out what it is,'' she says. ''Environment or genetics or a virus ... they don't know.''
All Akers knew was that suddenly, she couldn't play, couldn't run, couldn't even take a five-minute walk. She had no energy. She had harrowing migraines. She was sweating through three T-shirts a night. Combine the flu with jet lag and multiply it, Akers says. That's what chronic fatigue was, and still is, like for her.
There were days when she felt so sick she wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.
''I can't go on,'' Akers told herself before the 1996 Olympics, but she gutted it through, won her gold medal, and spent the night hooked up to an IV fluid bag while her teammates were out partying.
Akers didn't play for more than a year after that, while she tried to figure out whether it was worth the torment to continue. She had tried alternative medicine. She had tried a zillion diets. She wolfed down Power Bars by the fistful. Finally, Akers concluded that it wasn't about anything she was or wasn't doing - and it wasn't merely a bum break.
''I wasn't thinking, `Why me, why me, poor Michelle,' '' she says. ''It was more, `What does this mean? How do you want me to change?' That's the question I would shout at God.''
Maybe all He wants you to do, Akers finally told herself, is persevere and, perhaps, inspire.
''I remember once when we lost during the 1995 World Cup when I was hurt,'' she says. ''And Carla Overbeck said: When we feel like we want to quit, let's look at Michelle and how hard she's fighting. I just started crying. That made it worthwhile, that my struggles weren't going unnoticed.''
The struggles go on. In February, Akers smacked heads with Norway's Linda Medalen in the FIFA all-star game and broke three bones below her left eye and took 25 stitches above.
''God's doing some big-time stuff in my life,'' she says. ''He's squashing me, but at the same time he's building me up.''
It's all in the Bible, she says. God uses people for his own purposes, and maybe that's why he's picked Michelle Akers for this challenge. Because Job was never much on headers.
