Time for a re-match

Fair twins find all paths lead back to soccer

By Bob Duffy, Globe Staff, 6/25/2000

The chopsticks were a mystery, an engineering enigma that defied solution.

Oh, most of the Fairs had the hang of them. May Fair, of course; she enjoyed cooking her Chinese ancestral dishes among her cosmopolitan culinary repertoire at the family's Los Altos, Calif., home, and she showed a lifetime's expertise in handling the utensils. Her husband, Ben, who was of European descent , was equally adept. And there oldest child, Greg, was a natural.

But the identical twin sisters were a puzzle. One of them, Lorrie, maneuvered the sticks with effortless dexterity. But for the other, Ronnie - short for Veronica - the journey from plate to mouth was fraught with adventure. It was as if someone had turned those infernal sticks into greased rails as the rice and noodles and other delicacies took a tailspin into her lap.

What was this all about? May wondered. Why was one of her preschool twins so adroit, the other so hapless? Was her youngest child - Lorrie had seniority by 32 minutes - that uncoordinated?

Finally, not so much from inspiration but because she'd run out of alternatives, May figured, what the heck, and placed the chopsticks on Ronnie's left. ''Try it this way,'' she said, shrugging in resignation.

Problem solved. Instead of weapons of self-inflicted misery, those sticks became a native appendage for Ronnie.

And May Fair discovered two things. She had borne one righthanded twin, one lefthanded. And they often took separate routes to reach the same destination.

Together again

There will be a reunion this week in Boston on the eve of the US women's national soccer team's Gold Cup match against Brazil Tuesday at Foxboro Stadium.

Lorrie Fair will be there as a rising midfield star on the team that became a planetary public relations supernova by winning the 1999 World Cup. With any luck, she'll be back here July 3 for the title match, pursuing the jackpot that dwarfs the stakes in this tournament that began Friday night against Trinidad & Tobago in Hershey, Pa.: a spot on the US Olympic team at Sydney in September.

May Fair, now widowed and retired, will be there to watch her daughter perform, just as she travels the world, finances permitting, to watch all her children perform.

And Ronnie Fair will be there as tour guide. She, too, is a soccer player, and Greater Boston - Framingham, to be exact - has become her headquarters. She is a mainstay in the midfield as a first-year member of the Boston Renegades. They play in the amateur W-League, classified at the top as a W-1 team, and they're an organization of national repute that lured Ronnie clear across country to pursue her career. But as good as the Renegades are - ''amazing,'' Ronnie calls them - they're a rung below the top. Lorrie's perch.

So at 21, the 5-foot-3-inch twins find their careers converging by coincidence. And, almost as if mocking the stereotypes associated with emerging from the same egg, each has taken her own way to get here.

All in the family

They describe themselves as extremely close, and that was evident from birth, which in itself became fodder for good-natured teasing. When Lorrie proudly apprises a stranger of her half-hour head start in entering the world, Ronnie will counter, ''That's because I kicked you out.'' And, she'll point out by invoking scientific data apparently known only to her, the older twin is the less mature.

Regardless, their bond was unmistakable. They shared a room as youngsters in affluent Los Altos - ''The town is; we aren't,'' says May with a laugh. And when May and Ben, both software development managers at IBM, would come in to check on the toddlers at bedtime, each sister was standing in her crib, engaged in earnest conversation intelligible only to the two of them. Twin talk.

The union carried over into sports, though that was more for the sake of logistics than allegiance. With two parents trying to watch three kids, it only made sense for the twins to double up on the same team. And with a brother three years older who loved to play ball, following suit was a matter of survival.

''He would beat us up,'' says Ronnie. ''He would make me carry him piggy-back down the hall, and he was a pretty big guy and I'd be wobbling all over the place. We played mud football with him and all his friends. We'd wrestle with him. It was all fun and games until one of us started crying.''

But most of all, there was soccer. The three Fair kids would absolutely assault the garage door with shots. ''We broke windows at least three times,'' says Greg, ''and the garage door opener once.''

More conventionally, and less destructively, the children took part in the spectrum of Los Altos youth recreation programs. Soccer. Volleyball. Baseball. Basketball. Softball. Track. May would serve as Greg's chaperone/cheerleader. Ben, who had retired from IBM after suffering a heart attack at age 50, would coach the girls. In a manner of speaking, anyway. He was a true meat-and-potatoes sportsman. He knew baseball and football inside out and scratched his head regarding the rest. So the Fair library became a storehouse for how-to manuals. ''Dad was a chapter ahead of the kids,'' May says in describing the typical practice.

While the girls excelled at all sports, they gradually gravitated toward soccer.

For Ronnie, there was never an issue. ''Soccer is a fascinating sport,'' she says. ''I wasn't born with a soccer ball stuck on my foot, but it's definitely the most interesting of the sports that I've played. It was like a perfect fit, I guess.''

Lorrie's attraction was more pragmatic. ''It seemed like the sport that came most easily,'' she says.

So much for symbiosis. Rather than two halves of the same entity, the twins emerged as individuals. Oh, they still played on the same teams, even after their father died of a second heart attack nine years ago at 57, and they still drove one another to excel as built-in training partners.

''We always had someone to play with,'' says Lorrie. ''It helped us. If one was going only 50 percent, you'd realize you couldn't keep up.''

And there was still a certain telepathy during games. ''It was kind of neat,'' says Greg. ''You could see they knew where each other was on the field.''

But there were distinctions developing, too. May Fair thought she detected them in the family scrapbooks. Each snapshot revealed Lorrie's face scrunched up in ferocious determination, as if soccer success were her reason for existence; Ronnie's was a perpetual smile, as if she were distracted by the local flora and fauna while wondering, ''Soccer game? What soccer game?''

''I didn't think Ronnie would be playing much soccer,'' says her mother.

But May eventually saw these photos were a mirage - at least some of them. Oh, those pictures of Lorrie were indeed telescopes into her soul. But Ronnie's offered a distorted view, as if at the bottom of a kaleidoscope.

''I think they both take it seriously,'' says May. ''But they show it differently. Ronnie seemed more casual. Now I see she's just as serious but has a different way of showing it.''

And took longer to realize it.

Separate ways

The parting occurred at the dawning of adolescence, and perhaps it was inevitable. May Fair long ago had noted that her delivery of identical twins had yielded disparate personalities. Their schoolwork was the tipoff. Both were brilliant students, but the methodology of one was foreign to the other.

''They never did their homework together,'' says May. ''Ronnie's thinking is that she looks at a picture and absorbs all the itty-bitty details all around, inside and outside, to find the solution. Lorrie is more sequential. She absorbs things in logical order to reach the same conclusion.''

Perhaps that's why they picked colleges a mere 3,000 miles apart. Ronnie attended Stanford, graduating with a degree in biological sciences this month - a year ahead of schedule despite taking time off to travel Europe and tour with the under-20 and under-21 national teams. Lorrie, a communications major, has about a year to go at the University of North Carolina, which she helped lead to the NCAA title on the heels of her World Cup crown last fall.

Though they'd started a Twins Club at Los Altos High - ''We had seven sets of twins there, or some ridiculous number like that,'' says Ronnie - the girls had determined they didn't want any part of being a package deal.

''We decided early that it was best,'' says Ronnie. ''There are so many factors that go into choosing a college that I think for us to say whether or not we were going to the same school or not would be too much pressure to put on a decision. Both of us said, `If we pick the same school, we pick the same school; so be it. If we don't, that's the way it is.'''

In truth, they already had started leading separate lives. Being close to one another, they'd decided, didn't mean being glued to one another. Each had developed a distinctive social circle. ''It was good,'' says Lorrie. ''We liked to be together, but we also had different friends.''

Lorrie's, it turned out, were the more athletically inclined; her best friend was the daughter of her youth soccer coach. Ronnie was the more social, according to her mother and brother; Lorrie remembers her sister associating ''more with girly-girls.''

The result, Greg noticed, was that on weekends when no soccer practice was scheduled, ''Ronnie would be talking on the phone to her friends. Lorrie was a soccer machine.''

Eventually, divergent pastimes produced a tangible split. In the eighth grade, one of the twins was chosen for the Western Regional Olympic Development Program team, the harvest ground for the national team.

Only Lorrie was picked. Only Lorrie got a trip to France with the team. Only Lorrie became an alternate, just missing a spot on the 1996 Atlanta Olympic gold medalists. Only Lorrie made the World Cup team as a substitute utility player - and the youngest of the world champions.

And only Ronnie was left to cope. ''At first, I was really upset and wanted to quit,'' she says. ''Sometimes I thought I should've made it. Other times I thought I needed to work on things. Of course I was jealous - here she was going to France.''

The envy was short-lived. Ronnie didn't want to go to France instead of her sister; she wanted to go with her. And that's what defined the relationship. Ronnie, who has played on age-group national teams and has earned three caps for international matches with the senior team, did not begrudge Lorrie an iota of success. ''One thing I have to say about my sister,'' says Ronnie, ''is that I'm very proud of her.''

Indeed, Ronnie was one of the 90,000 witnesses in the Rose Bowl last year for the Americans' epic shootout victory over China in the World Cup final. And Brandi Chastain still had all her clothes on after making the winning kick when Ronnie started dancing around announcing, ''My sister is a world champion.''

''And I'm still telling people that,'' she says.

Greg believes that upon reflection, Ronnie ''realized she had made decisions that didn't allow her to be the best soccer player she could be. But she didn't regret the decision, because she thinks she is a more well-rounded person.''

Still, the air needed some clearing.

Opening up

The hilltop Mormon church presents a panoramic view of Oakland, a perfect locale for sightseeing. Or soul-searching.

May Fair was offering her 15-year-old daughters a chance for the former when she stopped the car in front of the spectacular house of worship on their way home from the University of California at Berkeley, where Greg, who is now at Michigan studying to be an opera singer, was an undergraduate.

Sitting on a bench, the girls ignored the vista in favor of a more limited focus: their relationship.

They hadn't spoken in three days. They hadn't necessarily been angry with one another; they just had nothing to say.

It was Ronnie who initiated this conversation, though the subject also had been on Lorrie's mind. ''I'm sure if I'd mentioned it, it would have felt awkward,'' says Lorrie. ''So she said, `I want to get this off my chest.'''

There were no revelations for Lorrie. She knew things occasionally had been tough for Ronnie: ''At school, when I was off traveling, people would say to her, `I hear your sister's off in so-and-so,' or `Your sister's better than you.'''

''There's nothing you can say to that,'' Ronnie realized.

But there was something they could do about it. Or not do about it.

''We had a talk about everything,'' says Lorrie. ''Ronnie said this was no reason for us to be upset with each other or not talk to each other or grow apart.''

Instead, they've simply grown.

On the town

In anticipation of this week's visit, Ronnie has called Lorrie ''and threatened to take me out.''

The hostess has definite plans. ''I'll show her what I know of the city,'' Ronnie says. ''I know some cool places in the North End and some places in Chinatown where you can get good Chinese food.'' Presumably without struggling to eat it.

Perhaps they'll discuss their soccer over dinner. Lorrie, who scored a pair of goals Friday night against Trinidad & Tobago, is a veteran of the fast track, and Ronnie still aspires to someday make the national team, though she believes her game needs some refinement. April Heinrichs, the first-year US coach, offers encouragement: ''She's remarkably similar to her sister, very gifted technically, with a tremendous ability to control the ball.

''I think,'' Heinrichs adds as if she's read the Fair family dossier, ''sometimes society and socialization dictate where we end up. I see [Ronnie] as being a player who, if she applies herself over the next three or four years, she has all the tools.''

In the meantime, Ronnie is subsidizing her soccer by giving clinics funneled through the Renegades. ''I'm playing soccer and I'm not broke,'' she says. ''Getting paid for something you love - that's my definition of success.''

As an intermediate step toward the national team, the first women's US pro league, the WUSA, is on the horizon next year. Lorrie hopes to play in it when the time comes, and she expects Ronnie to try out, too.

''I told her she'd better,'' says Lorrie.

It's time for the twins to get back together.

This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 6/25/2000.

� Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.