by Tim Howard
We were, for all intents and purposes, out of the tournament.
Since it was likely our last game of the tournament before going home, Bob Bradley decided to give some playing time to a bunch of the players who hadn’t gotten any so far, among them Brad Guzan, another U.S. goalkeeper. Brad played well and we beat Egypt 3–0.
Through some miracle of the scoreboard—a combination of results that I still don’t fully understand—that win advanced us to the semifinal.
Our next opponent was Spain, the world’s top-ranked team. Not only had Spain conquered all of Europe in the UEFA Cup, but they were unbeaten in their last 35 games. Spain hadn’t conceded a goal yet in this tournament. I doubt they lost much sleep over the prospect of playing us in the semis.
I got word that Bob Bradley was thinking about starting Brad Guzan against Spain.
The very idea of warming the bench during a semifinal of a major tournament against Spain made me absolutely crazy.
There was this voice in my head: What if we can beat Spain? The closer we got to the game, the louder that voice became. What if we can make history, and you’re sitting on the sidelines?
After training one day, I found Bob.
“Look,” I said. “I know you’re thinking about starting Brad. But I need you to hear this from me: I want to play.”
Bob looked at me evenly. “Tim, you’re coming off of a long season, a great season. But we obviously didn’t play well in those first two games.” He paused, then added, “The truth is, I think you might be tired.”
“Bob,” I said, “you know me. You know I compete if I can, and you know I compete hard. And frankly, although we got peppered in those first two games, I can’t think of one mistake I made that should keep me out of the semifinals.”
I didn’t actually believe that I’d sway Bob, because he doesn’t cave to pressure. The man never lets himself get backed into a corner.
“I’ll think about it,” he replied. That’s all he said.
The following day, he announced the starting lineup. I was in goal.
Bob prepared us tirelessly for Spain.
“You need to clog their midfield,” he said. “Force them wide, make sure their attacks come from the flanks.”
He clenched his jaw. “They can move backwards or sideways,” he added, “but you can’t let them move forward,” Bob repeated.
We listened. We practiced. We ran drills. We were ready.
We took the lead in the 27th minute; Dempsey sent the ball to Jozy Altidore, who lashed a powerful shot from 25 yards. Their keeper, Iker Casillas, got a hand on it, but not enough of one. 1–0.
That was the first goal Spain had conceded in 451 minutes of play, and it was a 19-year-old American kid who’d done it.
After that, Spain’s danger men—Fernando Torres, David Villa, and Cesc Fàbregas—attacked nonstop. I was barraged in a way I wouldn’t be again until I was standing on a field in Salvador, Brazil.
But our defense was in lockdown mode. Bob’s strategy had been absolutely perfect: every time they tried to move the ball forward, one of our guys was right there to intercept it. Our back line of Carlos, Jay DeMerit, Oguchi Onyewu, and Jonathan Spector was brave and inexhaustible.
We held on to our lead. Then late in the game we got another breakaway. The ball deflected off one of their defenders. Clint took a single touch, and put that thing away.
At 2–0, we knew the game was over.
We had won.
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Few people believed that we were capable of beating these soccer titans, let alone shutting them out. A few days ago, we’d been on the verge of elimination. As recently as 90 minutes ago, the whole world had been waiting for Spain to annihilate us.
Yet somehow, inexplicably, here we were, with a win so big it was jaw-dropping. Thank God, I thought. Thank God I went to Bob Bradley and asked him to put me in the game. Thank God he did so I could be a part of this historic occasion.
And I did thank God. I literally dropped to my knees at the end of that game. I looked up to the heavens and I spoke out loud.
“I don’t know why,” I said. “And I don’t know why me.” I took a deep breath, drank in everything about the moment—the vuvuzelas buzzing in the stands, my giddy teammates at the other end of the field, the floodlights and the understanding that we’d actually done this huge, amazing thing. I kissed my gloves and gazed up again at that night sky.
“But thank you.”
We played Brazil in the final. Though we took an early 2–0 lead, Brazil came back with a vengeance. We lost 3–2.
But here was something curious: we’d later learn that the match was the most-watched non–World Cup game in the team’s history. Worldwide, nearly 60 million viewers tuned in. Four million of those were in the U.S.
When I’d started playing this sport professionally, nobody gave a damn about it. The MLS was barely considered a pro league. Soccer was a game kids played; it wasn’t a sport that adults paid attention to.
You had to leave the country to play in any serious way.
But look: we’d beaten the number one team in the world. We’d taken second place in one of the major tournaments. We were playing well, and for the first time in my professional life, people cared.
Could it be that soccer was finally gaining a foothold in the last outpost on earth that had resisted it all these years?
Around that time Kasey Keller called me.
“Tim,” he said. His voice was funny somehow—he didn’t sound like the Kasey I remembered, the always easy, unflappable guy who’d seen everything before.
“What’s up?”
“Jack Reyna’s not well.” Jack Reyna, son of Claudio and Danielle, Laura and my first friends in Manchester. Laura had slept in Jack’s room during so many of my away games.
Claudio had left England for the U.S. a few years ago; he was playing for my old team, the MetroStars, now renamed the Red Bulls. I hadn’t seen Jack for a while. God, the kid must be ten years old by now.
Not well, Kasey had said. As I tried to process those words—not well—Kasey spoke again. “He has a brain tumor.”
Oh, God.
My heart sank. I could still picture little Jack pushing his toy cars along the floor in his pajamas as the adults sat around laughing. I could remember Claudio scooping him up and carrying him up to his room when his eyelids grew heavy.
Jack Reyna. Sweet Jack with his dark, cherubic eyes. Ten years old now. With a brain tumor.
“You want to give Claudio a call?” Kasey asked.
“Just pass on my love, okay?” Claudio didn’t need to hear from me. Not right now. He and Danielle had enough going on without having to answer phone calls.
“Yeah,” said Kasey. “I will.”
“And keep me posted.”
That night, I stood in my children’s rooms for a long time. I watched them sleep, and I prayed.
“LOOK AT ME NOW, POPPA”
Well, this is surreal.
I was standing in the West Wing of the White House. Everything around me was exactly like I’d seen it a hundred times before—in movies, on television, in textbooks, and in news reports. There were the battle flags, the heavily framed portraits of past presidents, the round eagle carpet in the middle of the Oval Office.
But the angles had gone all funny; somehow I was in the middle of the picture, as if I’d unzipped a television screen and walked right onto the set.
It was 2010. Tomorrow we’d be heading to South Africa. Our destination was the World Cup.
We’d spent the last month training at Princeton University, Bob Bradley’s old stomping grounds. We’d worked our butts off, running up and down the field as Bob stood there with his arms folded, giving us simple one-word commands. Sharp. Punch. Good. Now. Play.
Then we’d driven down together to Washington, D.C. And here I was, Timmy Howard, the kid who hadn’t been able sit still in his classroom once upon a time, now an invited guest at the White House.
Our team wasn’t getting any old tour, either. Vice President Joe Biden had given us a full 30 minutes. Former president Bill Clinton had come in and shaken our hands. Clinton would be attending the World Cup as part of the U.S. delegation that was making a bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
Now we were shaking hands with President Obama himself.
“This is incredible,” Carlos whispered to me. On the bus ride down here, Carlos had probably told us 40 times how excited he was to meet Clinton—my favorite president ever, he’d say. I love that guy.
A crisply dressed woman clapped her hands at us. “We’re going to take a photograph now,” she said. “Please follow us outside to the steps.”
We opened the doors and stepped out into the D.C. summer. It was sweltering out there—93 degrees and humid. We were all dressed alike, in khakis and precisely matched brown leather shoes, dress shirts, and heavy warm-up jackets emblazoned with the U.S. Soccer logo. Clinton and Obama and Biden mingled with the team—those are some sharp shoes, said Clinton, when he realized we all were wearing the exact same ones. We wiped sweat off our brows, trying not to look like we were melting in the heat.
Standing there, I kept thinking about my Poppa.
Poppa had passed away last September. Because I was in England, I hadn’t been able to go to the funeral. I wished he were still around so I could share this moment with him.
What would he have thought if someone could have told him, on the night he was fleeing Hungary for his life, that I’d be here someday. You will escape, they might have said. And you will succeed in your new country. And one day, your grandson, the child of the little girl whom you’re trying so desperately to hush, will stand at the White House flanked by the most important leaders in the world.
President Obama spoke.
“I just wanted to say how incredibly proud we are of the team,” he said. “Everybody’s going to be rooting for you. Although sometimes we don’t remember it here in the United States, this is going to be the biggest world stage there is. You’re going to be representing all of us.”
I’d been 11 years old back in 1990, when the U.S. qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years. I’d watched us play in that tournament on a grainy television in my mother’s living room, no earthly idea what might lie ahead. Since then, I’d marched steadily toward this moment. I’d been in the stands in ’94, with Mulch pointing down to the field saying, “That should be you.” By ’98, I’d been playing side-by-side on the MetroStars with Tony Meola, the U.S. World Cup goalkeeper. By 2002, I was friends with a bunch of guys on the team, and I’d earned a spot as the number four keeper—not enough to attend the tournament, but getting closer. Then in 2006, I’d sat on the bench watching Kasey.
Now it was my turn.
President Obama finished speaking: “We are incredibly proud of what you’ve done already, and we are going to be proud of what you do when you get to South Africa.”
The camera shutters clicked as sweat trickled down my neck. Bill Clinton was so close to me that I could have reached over and patted him on the back.
In the photograph that was published later that day, I’m beaming like a little kid.
Back when we were training in Princeton, I’d managed to get away a couple of times. I’d seen my brother, some of my friends. One night, my old basketball teammate Steve Senior organized a steak dinner, complete with players and coaches alike. We’d talked about the good old days, all those trips to away games on school buses, the hundreds of pounds of pizza we’d devoured afterward.
We hadn’t been all together like this since high school; it simultaneously felt like no time had passed, and like three whole lifetimes had gone by. New Jersey will always be inside of me, I thought.
Laura called after dinner that night. I knew the kids must be asleep in their beds, that it would be just Laura on the other end. For some reason I hadn’t picked it up. Instead I texted her back.
Heading to bed. Tired.
I don’t know. Maybe I was already thinking about the next morning’s training. Maybe I was nervous about what was coming up—the most important competition I’d ever been in. Maybe it was that I’d spent several hours with the guys who had known me long before I was anybody’s husband, and I wasn’t quite ready to be a husband again.
But somehow, in that moment, there wasn’t room for Laura.
Landon had come on loan to Everton earlier that year. He’d stayed in a hotel near my house, and every day I picked him up, and we drove to training together. I loved having him there, loved introducing him to everyone—and I mean everyone: players, the youth academy players, the office workers, the physios. I wanted all of them to know Landon.
“Listen,” I said to him on his first game day. “If there’s one thing you need to know to be successful here, it’s this: leave the bathroom door open when you go.”
“What? That’s crazy!”
“Trust me, Landon.”
He did, even though he didn’t understand why. Until one day, someone new entered the stall and shut the door. The guys got a giant bucket of water and doused him while he was going.
Landon fit right in. He was lighthearted enough to leave the bathroom stall door open, and he could dump buckets of ice over guys who were getting rehab in the hot and cold tubs like the rest of us. But he was also a straight-up professional, who played great for us. The fans sensed a real Evertonian. They took to him instantly.
In the evenings he came to the house, and hung out with Laura and the kids. Sometimes we watched American football together. Nothing with Landon was ever forced. We had been friends and teammates for a long time. Things went unspoken between us now, the way they once had with my mom. I could sense how relaxed he was with the Everton guys, how much he liked Laura and the kids. It was just easy.
Now we were headed to South Africa together—it would be Landon’s third World Cup, and my first as a starter. I was so psyched we were going to get to share this together.
We flew through night and day, 17 hours in all, then climbed aboard a bus and rode for hours more. By the time the bus rolled to a stop at the lodge where we’d be spending the next month, I had no idea how long we’d been traveling, or even what time zone we were in. As the bus doors opened, we heard the sounds of a traditional South African choir rising up into the night sky. They sang in a language I didn’t understand, but their tone said Welcome. Welcome to our home at the far southern tip of this continent. Welcome to everything that is about to happen.
When I woke up in the morning, I stepped out onto the balcony. Wow, this place was lush, built around a grand lake. Across the water I could see Clint Dempsey sitting perfectly still, fishing rod in his hand. The guy might have traveled the world as a member of the national team, but he was the perennial Texas country boy at heart.
We were isolated there—far from the rest of the world, lots of time on our hands. Everything was taken care of for us—our meals, our lodging, our schedule. Our sole responsibilities were to show up to practice, train until we had nothing left, then rest so we could do it again.
Something happens when you’re in that kind of setting—you fall into a kind of suspended reality.
We retreated back into a kind of grade school mentality. On the bus rides to and from the gym, guys threw gum wrappers at each other, mocked each other about their haircuts. We laughed often, ribbed each other endlessly. Jay DeMerit and Stuart Holden belted out Justin Bieber songs at the top of their lungs. Brad Guzan was an easy target. The guy was a lovable teddy bear. He had a missing front tooth and size 14 shoes and always looked like a kid dressed up in his dad’s clothes. But Brad gave as good as he got.
“Well,” he’d say when I teased him, eyeballing my backward baseball cap, “at least I’m not a grown man dressed as a sixteen-year-old.”
We didn’t see much of Bob Bradley during our downtime. Every so often, though, we’d glimpse him walking around with a portable DVD player—the kind that parents migh
t hand to kids for a long car trip. It didn’t matter where we were—on the bus, in our hotel rooms, eating dinner—we’d see Bob hauling that thing around, and we’d know he had something new to show us.
“Uh-oh,” Carlos might say when he saw Bob coming. “Better hide in the bushes. Bob’s got his DVD player out again.”
“Shh. Don’t make eye contact,” I’d respond.
But Bob would walk up, grab one of us, and press play.
“You see where you are here,” he might say, pointing at a clip from a recent game. “Next time, I want you to get five yards over so their winger can’t make that pass.” Whomever he was talking to would agree . . . because of course Bob was right.
Once, Bob tried to bring the action to the big screen. He called us all into a conference room to show us highlights from a recent game against Turkey.
“See, here, the way their striker veers to the left . . .”
He picked up the remote control and pressed a button. It didn’t work. He tried a few more times.
“But you’re closing him down a little too quickly,” Bob continued. He adjusted his angle, holding his thumb down. The television blanked out completely. “Shit,” he muttered. Then he stood there, pressing it again and again, until finally the screen popped back to life.
“Anyhow, if you watch that play again, you’ll see . . .”
He held the rewind button and it didn’t work. He moved closer to the television, then attempted to hit the rewind button a few more times. The television kicked in at too high a gear, rewinding too quickly, to a different moment in the game altogether.
“Come on,” he muttered to the television. He hit fast-forward, but again, nothing happened.
It went on for a while, this battle with the remote. He changed position, then pressed. Nothing. He moved closer to the television. We sat there quietly waiting, when suddenly Bob slammed the remote on the conference table.
“Fuck you!” he screamed at the remote. “Fuck you, you fucking piece-of-shit garbage!” Then he banged the remote down with every word: “Why-Won’t-You-Fucking-Work?”