by Tim Howard
I had known Bob since I was a kid in New Jersey. Had played for him in some very high-pressure games. In all that time, I had literally never seen him lose it like this. Bob was Mr. Control. He was the guy who took ten minutes to answer a single question from a reporter, because he never, ever wanted to say anything he hadn’t carefully thought through.
Bob snapped off the television. He closed his eyes, took a long, deep breath. Then he turned to us.
We sat perfectly upright. We didn’t dare move a muscle.
His eyes flicked from me to Jay to Carlos to Steve Cherundolo, and on around the room.
“Damn it,” he finally said. “Can’t one of you crack a joke right now or something?”
And just like that, we burst out laughing.
Bob was howling, too.
I’d seen my brother in New Jersey. Over the years, he’d gotten deeply involved with martial arts training. He loved how it blended the physical and the mental.
The last time I saw him before leaving for South Africa, he’d given me a book, A Fighter’s Heart, by Sam Sheridan.
On the inside flap, Chris had written a quote from Heraclitus, along with a note of his own.
“A WARRIOR”
Out of 100 men, 10 shouldn’t even be there,
80 are just targets,
9 are the real fighters,
and we are lucky to have them,
for they make the battle.
All, but the one,
One is a warrior,
And he will bring the others back
—HERACLITUS
Good luck in WC 2010!!
You will bring them back.
I read that note again and again.
Good luck in WC 2010!!
You will bring them back.
And I wanted to. Oh, man, I wanted to so badly.
I spent a lot of time alone in South Africa. During those moments, I wanted to stay focused on my game, but other thoughts kept creeping in—thoughts I didn’t want to have. I thought about Jack Reyna a lot, fighting for his life.
I thought about how quickly everything could disappear.
And I thought about Laura. I thought about all those times I’d headed off to games, and Laura had come toward me smiling. All those times she wrapped her arms around me, when the only thing I wanted to think about was the game.
What was wrong with me in those moments? Wasn’t she supposed to be the one who would save me from my single-minded focus on winning and losing?
When my kids hugged me, I felt so much warmth, so much love.
When Laura did the same, I felt like a fake.
In the evenings I called home to speak to the kids. I made kissing noises into the phone and heard their sweet voices. They were still so little they didn’t have much patience for the telephone, even to talk to their daddy, who was at the bottom of the world. They’d quickly hand the phone back to their mom.
Laura asked me questions, and I tried to answer them, tried to be a good sport, a communicative husband.
And when she talked, I listened. I listened to her tell me about how Jacob had mastered the backstroke in the pool. How Ali fell asleep facedown on the living room floor, as if her batteries had, in a single instant, run out.
I loved those stories about the kids.
And I told Laura that I loved her, too. That I missed her and couldn’t wait to see her.
But then after hung up, I’d have to pray.
Because I knew that what I’d just said was a lie.
I didn’t miss her. Not the way I should.
You’d think that spending that much time with the same group of guys, in one location that’s nearly 10,000 miles from home, might present some challenges. You’d think, for example, we might start getting on each other’s nerves. But that was the thing about this team. We dined together and played together, and in the afternoons we’d get together to talk about nothing whatsoever, or everything. Music would waft across campus—John Mellencamp or Guns N’ Roses, or classic Springsteen or Eminem. Once in a while, some jokester might throw water on another player while he sat out on his balcony reading.
We were like a bunch of rowdy puppies—we’d tumble all over each other, roughhouse together, always playful. Then we’d retreat to our separate rooms and wake up ready to start all over again.
Maybe there’s something about soccer being a team sport, the fact that we had to work together and trust each other to accomplish anything meaningful on the field.
Maybe it’s something about the fact that we weren’t just soccer players, we were American soccer players—mostly unknown to our nation, fighting for respect both home and abroad.
Maybe it was something about this group of guys in particular. It’s hard to imagine that any other collection of pro athletes would ever be so easy to be around for so long. So relaxed, so humble. So damned much fun.
The closer we got to our first game, the more I could feel myself turning inward, trying to get mentally to that place where I felt ready. We’d be playing England, then upstart Slovenia, then Algeria.
When the England match was a few days away, I sat on the bus on the way to training jiggling my leg nervously. Stuart and Jay were two rows ahead of me. Naturally, those clowns were singing again.
Baby, baby, baby, oh . . .
Landon threw half a granola bar at them. The bar landed on the seat; Jay leaned over, picked it up, and popped it in his mouth, still singing, now with crumbs falling out of his mouth.
Like, baby, baby, baby no . . .
I watched them, but my mind kept drifting toward the game.
It wasn’t enough to be here. I wanted to advance. I wanted to go as far as we possibly could. Something big was in our grasp. I could feel it, and I wanted to reach out and grab it.
Our game against England proved that no one should write this team off. Ever.
England was the clear favorite, and they took control of the game almost immediately. With vuvuzelas in the stands buzzing like bees, England’s Emile Heskey sent a reverse pass to Steven Gerrard, who slotted it past me with ease.
Four minutes in, we were down by one.
And then it got worse.
Twenty-nine minutes into my World Cup debut, I was injured.
I made a diving save, parrying the ball at exactly the moment Heskey came sliding toward it. His foot was extended, studs up. He was stretching to slam the ball into the net, not to meet flesh and bone.
Even in that split second as he came toward me, I thought, This is bad.
Heskey crashed into my rib cage so hard it sent me flying backward. As our Steve Cherundolo cleared the ball, I lay there on the ground, my hand on my chest.
When I didn’t get up, doctors ran onto the field.
“Is something broken?” I asked. It was all I could do to speak. “I don’t know what’s going on, is something broken?”
“You want to come off, Tim?”
Oh, God. No. No, I didn’t. Not after 29 minutes. Not when I’d waited so long to get here. But the pain was blinding.
I’d been playing long enough to know that adrenaline is the world’s greatest painkiller. Adrenaline is the medicine that no doctor can give you. Only the game can give it to you. If you let adrenaline run its course, sometimes even extreme pain disappears.
I managed to stand.
“Let me see how I do.”
In the 40th minute Clint Dempsey sent an innocuous shot rolling toward England’s goal. It looked like their keeper Robert Green was scooping it up. But wait, hold on—he wasn’t! The ball went beneath him, right through his legs. We watched it crawl across the line in a kind of disbelief.
A goalkeeper’s worst nightmare . . . and on the biggest stage possible.
Now we were even.
The second half of the match was thrilling. England had plenty of chances, but we held the line. It ended in a 1–1 draw.
And my trusted friend adrenaline worked its magic. I didn’t even need the cortisone shot that t
he team doctor had prepared for me. And I managed to make enough strong saves that I earned Budweiser’s Man of the Match.
Slovenia was another come-from-behind draw—one of those hard-fought, back-and-forth dramas that highlight exactly how exciting this sport can be. And also how infuriating.
We dug a hole for ourselves in the first half. A 2–0 hole. But we knew we were a better team than we had shown in those first 45 minutes and in the second half we took the game to Slovenia. Five minutes in, Landon surged down the right flank and dribbled into their box. A Slovenian defender slid into his path, forcing him to shoot from, what looked to me, like an impossible angle. But Landon blasted the ball with such force at their keeper that had he not ducked at the last instant, his head might have gone into the goal along with the ball.
You could feel the game turn in that moment. Cries of “USA! USA!” rang out over the din of all those vuvuzelas. We were back in it.
And then in the 82nd minute, we were all square. Jozy headed Landon’s cross directly into Michael’s path as he charged in on goal. When the Slovenian keeper came out, Michael stabbed the ball over him.
2–2.
And now came the infuriating part.
In the 85th minute, Landon floated a perfect free kick into the box. Maurice Edu, who had come on as a substitute, ran onto the ball and redirected it into the net. The scoreboard was about to change to 3–2 and I was ready to go tearing up the field to give Maurice the biggest hug of his life.
But wait. Why was the referee suddenly waving his arm? Wasn’t that the signal that a goal is disallowed?
I thought maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me. There was no infraction on the play. No offsides. No foul. A bunch of our guys surrounded the referee and demanded to know why he’d made the call.
The referee didn’t answer. He didn’t answer then and later, FIFA would restrict him from ever answering questions about it: the call was the call. But since that moment, Edu’s non-goal has been replayed tens of thousands of times. It’s been slowed down frame by frame. Every split second has been analyzed and to this day no one can tell me why the goal didn’t count.
Here’s what I see when I look at freeze frames of the action: I see a Slovenian defender holding his arm out, forcefully blocking Edu’s run toward the ball. I see another Slovenian defender bear-hugging Michael from behind—pinning Michael’s arms. I see Carlos being smothered by one of the Slovenians, Jozy being gripped from the side, Jay being held.
In fact, in this whole melee of grabbing and shoving, I see a single American—Clint—holding on to any Slovenian player at all, and that guy’s not even near the ball.
There had been no foul. We’d been hosed, that’s all.
The game ended in a 2–2 draw. Which meant if we were going to advance to the round of 16, we had to beat Algeria.
I will never forget our bus ride to the Loftus Versfeld, the Pretoria stadium where we’d play our win-or-go-home match against Algeria. All along the route, American fans stood on the road, waving and cheering. By the time Loftus came into view, the bus had to roll to a stop. A sea of supporters stretched out in all directions. Some wrapped themselves in American flags, others had painted stars and stripes on their faces, and everyone rocked the national colors—red, white, and blue. They held up scarves like one might see at a Premier League match except these said LAND OF THE FREE. They held up signs proclaiming ONE NATION. ONE TEAM, and DIVERSE. HUNGRY. UNITED. AMERICA. Fans were rapping on the windows screaming “USA!” They also held up our bus—not that anyone minded. We were so far from home, and yet all these fans made us feel like were home.
“Holy crap,” said Carlos. “This is awesome.”
The game was scoreless for 90 minutes. A draw wouldn’t be good enough for us; to advance we had to win.
At a certain point, tactics went out the window. Defensive principles? Gone. The notion that a soccer game might be a chess match? Forget about it.
With the clock ticking down and the prospect of our World Cup ending, there was no time for rhyme or reason. If we had a strategy, it was this: throw everything we have at them and hope they break.
We attacked with three strikers and a midfield that marauded forward with only one thing on its mind: putting the ball in the back of their net. Algeria massed as many as nine players in front of their goal. Still we had chance after chance. We hit the post. We had a goal called back for offsides. We did everything but score.
I watched on full alert, thinking, All we need is one play, one moment of inspiration where we catch them on their heels. And then, a minute into stoppage time, it arrived.
Algeria’s Rafik Saïfi had a clear header at goal but it was weak and straight at me. The ball bounced and I caught it. I had to move fast. There was no time to survey the field and pick out a safe outlet. There wasn’t even time to even look up. I had to operate on instinct.
My instincts were formed on the fields of New Jersey with Mulch hammering certain lessons into my brain. When the ball comes in from the left, look to the right.
A split second after catching that ball, I knew—I just knew—that Landon would be tearing down the right flank. And because the game had been stretched wide open in those final frantic minutes, all those players abandoning their positions in their desperation to score, I also knew there’d be acres of green grass in front of him.
So I hurled that ball as far as I could to where Landon would be by the time it landed. It came to rest at his feet, like Mulch always insisted it would.
Landon set off toward the Algeria goal, 10 yards, 20 yards, 30 yards, chewing up the space as he searched for an open teammate. He pushed the ball ahead to Jozy, who picked out Clint across the box. I thought Clint would finish it but at the exact moment that he reached Jozy’s pass, the Algerian goalkeeper Raïs M’Bolhi threw himself bravely at Dempsey’s feet.
The ball ricocheted off their keeper and away from goal. For a moment, it looked to most of the world like we were going home.
But my eyes were on Landon. He was still running, accelerating as he moved closer to the ball. I’m not even sure the Algerian defenders knew he was there.
That’s the thing about Landon. He doesn’t broadcast his presence like some of the flashier players. He glides in, cool-as-you-like, and no matter how high the stakes, no matter how pressurized the situation is, he does what Landon always does—executes the finish with flawless precision.
There were 92 minutes on the clock. The ball had traveled from goal line to goal line in a few historic seconds before Landon buried it in the back of the net.
Landon raced toward the corner flag. He stretched out his arms and dove, bodysurfing along the grass.
Benny Feilhaber slid behind him. Then everyone got in on it. All the guys on the field. All the guys on the bench. The coaches. The staff. Everyone. They ran toward Landon and threw themselves on top of him, one after another. Jozy flew onto the pileup like he was Superman. Jay DeMerit finished it off with a rolling somersault over the whole delirious gang.
I watched the jubilation from the far end of the field. I kneeled down and touched the grass, five precise touches.
I stood. I kissed my goalkeeper’s gloves, and raised my arms toward the sky.
“Thank you,” I said, looking up. “Thank you.”
Someone brought a bunch of Budweisers into the locker room. We cracked them open.
When we learned that President Clinton was waiting outside to congratulate us, Carlos turned to me.
“I want to invite him in,” he said.
“Do it,” I said. “That’d be sweet.”
So Carlos, shirtless and sweaty, walked up to the former president of the United States, his favorite commander in chief of all time, and said, “Sir? These guys are going to drink a few beers here. We’d be honored if you’d join us.”
So that’s exactly what President Clinton did. He rolled up his sleeves and popped open a beer and stayed for half an hour.
Laura and I often vacati
oned at a lake house in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and I sat there talking to one of the most influential men in history about his home state, about books, about this incredible match we’d just played.
And again, my thoughts returned to my Poppa. Look at me now, Poppa. I’m not just talking to a former president, but I’m hanging out and drinking a beer with him. I hope you’re enjoying watching this up there.
We played Ghana in the round of 16. After winning our group in such dramatic fashion, we felt confident and strong, genuinely believed we could keep going in the tournament. But there’s only so much adversity that a team can overcome before the odds catch up to them and we had ridden our grit and resilience for three straight games.
Once again, we gave up an early goal. Once again we let an opponent dominate us in the first half. And once again, we emerged from the locker room a different team—full of creativity, precision, and attacking dynamism. We took our time equalizing with Landon converting a late penalty, but we looked like the fitter and more dangerous side as the game entered extra-time.
Only it was Ghana who scored. Asamoah Gyan scooped the ball over me at the near post. I took a lot of criticism for that one. There are very few things worse that a keeper can do than getting beat at his near post.
And it’s hard to know what to say about that. What I can say for sure is I gave my heart and soul to the game, and once in a while, a keeper gets beaten to the near post.
The game is beautiful, and it’s cruel. That was a cruel, cruel day.
In the locker room, heads were down, eyes staring at the floor—such a stark contrast to the euphoric mood after the Algeria game.
President Clinton walked in. He shook hands with everyone. And then he addressed us as a group.
“Guys,” he said, “it’s never fun getting your ass kicked.”
I glanced over at Carlos. His eyes were red.
“It’s happened to me again and again,” Clinton continued. “This won’t be the last time it happens to you. But you’re going to keep picking yourself up.”
Somehow, his words were exactly right.
He spoke the hardest truth—we had gotten our asses kicked, and we would get our asses kicked again. It would feel just as terrible next time as it did right now.