It's Mia's final mission

Taking a conference call in California this week, someone asked Hamm how she had won over this generation and she smiled sweetly: "I probably scared most of them with my intensity."

She was only half-joking. The basis of Hamm's legend was not built around pure ability, even though she is uncommonly graceful and gifted, but on being a study in perpetual motion, always the most athletic, toughest and fittest out there whether as an industrious midfielder or a feared marksman.

She's only 5ft 4in and nine stone but those who watched her in her prime reckoned, somehow, she appeared to tower over colleagues and opponents, materialising all over the pitch in attack or defence. She's been a sort of Roy Keane of the women's game,

without the violent edge but with the same smouldering intensity. Mind, Keane never graced Vogue.

Hamm's hardness - and her determination always to laud team over self - was perhaps down to her military background. Born in Alabama, she spent her childhood in various bases worldwide where her father Bill, an air force colonel, was posted.

When he took the family to Italy, he fell in love with soccer - and so did his girl Mariel, who found that, in any new town, joining the local football team was the "best way to make friends".

She is still the youngest player, at 15 years 140 days, to play for her country and, as America began to swoon about her part in the 1991 World Cup and the 1996 Olympic triumph in Atlanta, so did the sponsors.

Phil Knight, the Nike chairman, once reckoned his company had given contracts to three athletes who had added a new dimension to sport. Apparently, he felt no embarrassment in mentioning Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Hamm in the same breath.

The girl who was working the phones as a customer service rep for Eurosport when she played in her first World Cup was within a decade a multi-millionaire. Her team-mates started to call her "Jordan" too and it was not because her picture started getting plastered over the papers.

Actually, a shy, retiring type off the field, she never felt comfortable with all the fuss, particularly when her private life became big news, what with her divorce from her marine husband and subsequent celebrity marriage to Boston Red Sox short stop Nomar Garciaparra.

Family life will now take over, she has decided. "Am I going to miss football? Absolutely, but I just know it's right. I get pangs in my heart when I call my sister and talk to my nephews or when I see them and they've grown another six inches. I want to be part of their lives."

It is time for her to go. In the new Millennium, injuries helped make her look only half the player of old yet she was still good enough to play one last, decisive driving role in Team US's triumph in Athens. There, her young team-mates looked at the legend and tried to assess her legacy.

Perhaps it was that, ultimately, she did even more for women than she did for her sport in the US.

"Mia has been a pioneer for being strong, competitive, athletic and still feminine," said her team-mate Kate Markgraf.

"She let us know it was okay to be competitive, to try to kill someone on the field and still be a woman off it. There'll never be anyone else like her."

SCIENCE OF SUCCESS

Born: Selma, Alabama, now aged 32
Lives: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Graduated: 1994 with degree in political science
Position: Forward
US debut: August 1987, against China, age 15
International goals: 158 - the world's leading scorer, male or female Olympic gold: 1996, 2004
World Cup: 1991, 1999 One of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People in 1997