Brandi Chastain is an American legend.
The famous soccer player helped Team USA win the Women’s World Cup both in 1991 and 1999, scoring the winning penalty kick against China in California during the latter version. She celebrated by ripping off her jersey, and the image of her falling to her knees, her fists clenched in the air in her sports bra, is now synonymous with some of the greatest moments in women’s sports.
While men often rip off their jerseys in international soccer, this “momentary insanity” is something that made Brandi a figure of American sports folklore, forever stamped in the minds of sports fans.
Apart from this, Chastain also won two gold medals in the Summer Olympics with Team USA, undoubtedly making her one of the best women soccer players to have braced the game. So it is no wonder that the San Francisco Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame decided to induct her. An induction into Hall of Fame is an honorable moment for any athlete, but when Brandi Chastain saw her likeness on the plaque — pleased as she was — she could not call it “flattering.”
Just look at the plaque yourself and decide if it looks anything remotely like Brandi.
Like TMZ pointed out, the people who made the plaque made it look less like Brandi Chastain, and more like Babe Ruth .
Of course, Brandi is not the only soccer player to have such a bad likeness of herself installed. Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably the best soccer player in the worl,d alongside Lionel Messi, also found himself at the receiving end of bad craftsmanship when his bust was installed at the Madeira International Airport, to celebrate the airport’s new name: Aeroporto Cristiano Ronaldo. While renaming an airport after you is a tremendous honor, Ronaldo found out the hard way that installing the bust was anything but.
Call that bust what you will, but Twitter lost its sleep over it, with many Portuguese fans calling it the most “luoco” (crazy) likeness they had seen of Ronaldo anywhere. Thankfully for him, his statues since that airport renaming ceremony haven’t been all bad.
In other instances, the likenesses are so bad that they force the makers to retire from their professions altogether. Lucille Ball’s statue, first erected in 2009 in New York, was so bad that it earned the infamous moniker “Scary Lucy” by residents, forcing Dave Poulin to quit sculpting for good .
Hopefully, the creator of Brandi Chastain’s plaque won’t have to suffer such a terrible fate.
Lucille Ball’s ‘Scary Lucy’ likeness haunts her hometown http://t.co/ZA2Z3LAoFH via @washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/viFmF80d0d
— Lindsey Bever (@lindseybever) April 7, 2015
