A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  After the matches father and son would talk.

  Good save.

  Thanks.

  The way you caught that ball from the corner.

  I nearly didn’t get it. It hit the tips of my fingers, he shot so hard.

  And Torsten the Goat (a play on Torsten’s surname) back on form – fantastic!

  You know what he’s like.

  At the end I was thinking, Goat, are you crazy? An opponent tries to get past him and Goat simply knocks him down, runs straight into the opponent. And he does that three times! Normally he’d see three red cards.

  Dad, I’ve got to get back to the changing-rooms.

  So many fathers and sons make a laborious effort to use sport as a way of getting close to each other; to use a conversation about football to whitewash the speechlessness between them. ‘Dirk and Robert really talked together far too rarely,’ says Robert’s mother. ‘I could never bring myself to argue in the family, to say anything negative. And I don’t think Robert could either. There was so much polite reticence in our family.’

  Even though words sometimes failed him, Robert’s father kept an eye. While his mother benignly believed her older son Gunnar for several days when he said he’d left his guitar at a friend’s house, his father noticed the boy’s awkwardness. He discovered that Gunnar had sold the guitar. And he recognised Robert’s harassed expression when he first had to play in the Under-18 youth team. He was still sixteen. His coaches sent him to the higher age-group so that he would be properly stretched; he was too good to play with those his own age. Even in the Under-18 team he played faultlessly. But that wasn’t how he saw it.

  To a sixteen-year-old, eighteen-year-olds are the big boys. Most sixteen-year-old goalkeepers who have to play with the older boys get scared. Because in the final analysis a keeper is always measured by his mistakes, and how can he avoid making mistakes when the opposing team’s strikers are so big and strong? And how the big, strong players on his own side will despise him if he fails!

  Robert cried when he was alone with his father after the game, and told him he didn’t want to play on the Under-18 team any more. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t be cross with me if I gave up football?’

  His friends don’t recognise this Robert. ‘There were always a few nutcases who tore into the weakest players on the youth teams, so Enkus must have put up with the slings and arrows as well,’ Torsten says, ‘but you couldn’t bring him down, quite the contrary. In those days we had the impression that nothing could faze Enkus. Even then he was more confident in goal than other people after ten years as professional players.’

  During that time with the Under-18 team, Robert’s mother saw a very different Robert from the one his father saw. ‘I still remember him getting up after dinner and saying to me, “Mother, there’s something I’ve got to sort out.”’ He took the tram to the Ernst Abbe sports field and told Ronald Prause, the Under-18 team coach, that he wanted to play in the Under-16 team again. A sixteen-year-old boy, confident and charming enough to tell an authoritarian coach what he wanted.

  But Dirk Enke is a psychotherapist. He sees it differently. Over lunch at the Marktplatz, he sets his knife and fork down, rubs his palms over his thighs, then says, ‘I thought, what’s going on here? Is he having problems with his team-mates? No, it quickly became clear that something was happening to him: his fear of making mistakes was getting to him, that way of thinking “If I’m not the best, I’m the worst”. That torment must have started when he was sixteen playing with the eighteen-year-old boys.’

  But was it not a one-off, a brief moment of anxiety of the kind that hundreds of youth goalkeepers experience?

  ‘The mind always remembers that sort of liminal experience.’

  As a seventeen-year-old schoolboy with a special permit from the German Football Association, Robert signed a professional contract with Carl Zeiss Jena. His mother and father went with him to the Association’s office. Ernst Schmidt, the managing director and Hans Meyer, the coach, were waiting for them. His tendency to dominate a conversation with witty opinions later made Meyer a popular figure with the Bundesliga sportswriters. In the office that day he had something to tell the teenage goalkeeper about Jena’s mythical goalie from the fifties. ‘Harald Fritzsche wasn’t to blame for a single goal for over ten years,’ Meyer said. ‘At least if you asked him for his opinion.’

  Dirk Enke pricked up his ears. Did Meyer know about Robert’s painful self-reproach after his mistakes? Was the coach trying to send him a message – don’t drive yourself nuts?

  Before long Robert Enke’s life was divided in two. At school he got one-to-one tuition so that he could train as a substitute goalkeeper with the Second Bundesliga team – he was now a professional sportsman with all the seriousness, all the desire to stay on top that that entailed – and at the same time he was starting a happy-go-lucky relationship with Teresa.

  They camped at his mother’s on a mattress in the living-room and told her they had to study for their leaving exam. Sometimes they went out in the evening; he might have a shandy ‘and I danced on the tables’, says Teresa. Presumably that’s not to be taken literally, but Robert felt she showed her joie de vivre in better ways. She expressed everything so easily, her warmth, her curiosity, her decisiveness. He thought she was much stronger than he was. ‘I’ve never learned to party the way you do,’ he said, as if he had to defend her. She immediately liked his reticent, gentle charm. His face was that of the eternally sweet boy.

  She had grown up with two elder brothers in rural Bavaria; her father had passed on to them his passion for modern pentathlon: swimming, fencing, riding, shooting and running. At home in the nursery Teresa and her brother secretly fired an airgun at Playmobil figures – ‘If you hit them in the chest they explode in a thousand pieces,’ her brother said, proud at his discovery. Officially Teresa had come to the high school in Jena for its renowned sports education; unofficially she had been determined to escape the Bavarian school system with its dreaded Latin. ‘Don’t wear brand-names, or you’ll come across as a Wessi snob,’ her friends from the West warned her. ‘And then on my first day at the new school I saw that they were all wearing brand-name clothes.’

  East and West, the opposition that so many people wanted to emphasise at that time, didn’t matter to her; it was just a source of amusement for them from time to time. When Robert spent Christmas Eve with Teresa’s family he showed gaps in his knowledge of the Christmas story because of his atheist upbringing in the GDR. ‘So, who was Joseph?’ he asked.

  Teresa wasn’t very interested in football. For her, football meant disappointing Saturday evenings ‘when I’d rather have been watching Beverly Hills 90210 and couldn’t because my brothers had commandeered the television to watch the sports programmes’. Not only for that reason Robert didn’t tell her about his first professional games, until eventually, much later, she asked about it. He thought you didn’t talk about things like that – it was boasting.

  Carl Zeiss Jena did remarkably well in the opening matches of the 1995–96 season in the Second Bundesliga. In midfield a twenty-one-year-old called Bernd Schneider began to attract attention for his elegance; a few years later he would be regarded as Germany’s best technical player. The team had levelled out in mid-table when they suffered two heavy defeats in a row in the autumn, 4–1 in Duisburg and 4–0 against VfL Bochum. Carl Zeiss’s goalkeeper, Mario Neumann, had had happier times. On 11 November Carl Zeiss played Hannover 96 away. Good keepers, they say, need experience more than anything else, and Robert Enke was eighteen. Coach Eberhard Vogel put him in goal for the first time.

  The most striking thing for Robert was how empty the stadium was. The six thousand spectators were lost among the fifty-six thousand seats. And the floodlight masts were even more curious, looming into the sky like gigantic toothbrushes. This was club football in the days before the sport became an event, a national celebration.

  The game began, and Robert waited. The battle
was being waged in midfield, but he kept his concentration because the opposition could pop up at any time in his penalty area. Then, suddenly, after half an hour, a header from Hannover’s Reinhold Daschner. Even an almost empty stadium could suddenly sound incredibly noisy. Robert was already on the spot to which the ball was flying, and he caught it easily.

  Less than two minutes after this first noteworthy feat he conceded his first goal in professional football. The Ostthüringer Zeitung chose some unusual words to leap to his defence: ‘Jena’s defender Dejan Raickovic was instrumental in Hannover going 1–0 up, but Robert Enke certainly wasn’t.’

  He carried on doing the nuts-and-bolts work of a goalkeeper, stopping the odd corner, sending out well-aimed drop-kicks. Once he drew a roar from the stadium, trapping a shot from Kreso Kovacec underneath his belly. The final score was 1–1. It was a game the fans had already started forgetting as they made their way down the stadium steps, but not the young and happy goalkeeper who got the fear again as he walked back to the changing-room. There was a thunderous noise on the Plexiglas roof of the tunnel above him. His father had reached out over the terrace railing and was proudly banging his fist against the roof of the player’s entrance to say, well done, son!

  The following Saturday his mother drove with a friend into the mountains around Jena, where they turned on the radio. ‘I felt ill,’ says Gisela.

  ‘Free kick for Lübeck on the left wing,’ cried the commentator. ‘Behnert crosses, Enke rushes out to collect it, he has the ball – and he lets it slip through his hands! Goal for Lübeck! A terrible goalkeeping error!’

  It was at moments like this that Andy Meyer had his view confirmed, that Enkus was a child of fortune. Because when he missed the ball – and it didn’t happen that often – his team promptly won and no one talked about his error.

  Jena defeated VfB Lübeck 3–1.

  The error had been a minor one. But later, many years later, Robert admitted how as a young goalkeeper ‘I couldn’t forgive myself a mistake.’ His team-mates might be saying ‘Who cares?’, the coach might be saying ‘That happens to everybody at some point, things will be better next Saturday, of course you’ll stay in goal’, but ‘for the whole of the next week I had the error in front of my eyes. I couldn’t get it out of my head.’

  After the Lübeck game Robert didn’t go to school all week. He said he was ill.

  4. Robert in goal for CZ Jena at the German Under-16 youth championship.

  It’s the goalkeeper’s torture – the constant demand on him not to make a single mistake. None of them can forget their mistakes. But a goalkeeper must be able to repress things. Otherwise the next game comes along and crashes down on top of him.

  Carl Zeiss had to go to Leipzig for the derby. On the terraces his father met a woman he knew from his old athletics days. They sat together. She was supporting VfB Leipzig, but in the third minute of play even she cried out in sympathy, ‘Oh, no!’ Robert had let a wide shot from twenty yards out, a rather ineffectual and not particularly powerful effort, slip under his body and into the goal.

  At such moments a goalkeeper has to act as if nothing has happened.

  In the thirty-fourth minute Leipzig’s striker Ronny Kujat ran straight at him all on his own. At such moments as these the game suddenly seems to go into slow-motion. The goalkeeper registers each movement of the striker’s feet, the fans sit open-mouthed, the keeper waits, frozen. He can’t move now. The first one to commit himself – the keeper with his hand or the striker with his foot – usually loses because the other one will see through the manoeuvre. Robert flung himself at the right moment and tipped the ball away. It was the best display of his short professional career so far. But he didn’t enjoy it any more for that.

  At half-time he said despairingly to his coach, ‘Please substitute me.’

  Eberhard Vogel told Robert not to talk nonsense, and made him go on playing till the final whistle. After that he never put him back in goal.

  His mother noticed that he hardly talked at all at home, that he went to his room after dinner and closed the door behind him. ‘But I remembered Dirk being like that after a bad hurdles race.’

  A week later Robert hesitantly rediscovered his smile and drove to the Western Station. At the time he didn’t even think about it, he saw no connection, but for the remaining six months of the season, when he was the young substitute goalkeeper of whom no one expected anything, he was cheerful again, and even-tempered. If anything, he thought it must have something to do with Teresa.

  Jena’s coach had talked publicly about what had happened in Leipzig. ‘The boy lacks confidence. He wanted me to take him off at half-time. But it’s not as easy as that,’ Vogel had told sports reporters immediately after the game. Ten years later that could have been the end for a goalkeeper: he made a beginner’s mistake and then begged to be able to clear off at half-time. The news would have appeared on the internet, and it would have been broadcast on television and countless other media which now turn Second Bundesliga games into an event. A reputation would have been cemented on the gossipy professional football scene: he’s unstable. But in those days the news was hidden away in a sixteen-line story somewhere in the middle of the Ostthüringer Zeitung.

  The Bundesliga clubs that had spotted him during his remarkable youth career retained an unbroken interest in him. Some of them had called on his parents, including a gentleman from Bayer Leverkusen who said, ‘Hello, Reiner Calmund here,’ and went on to deliver ten sentences in half a minute without so much as a comma or a full stop. The best impression was left by the envoys from Borussia Mönchengladbach. Because unlike Leverkusen and VfB Stuttgart, Borussia unusually sent not only their manager but also their goalkeeping coach.

  Robert wasn’t going to leave before his A-levels, his parents said, but the summer of 1996, the end of his school days, was edging ever closer.

  Teresa wondered out loud where they could go to university together. She was thinking of training as a teacher or a vet. ‘What about Würzburg?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t forget I still play football.’

  ‘Is that so important? Anyway, I’m sure there’s a club in Würzburg too.’

  ‘No, I mean professional football. I’ve had a few offers.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re not offering bad money. In Mönchengladbach I could be earning twelve thousand marks a month.’

  Oh, Teresa thought, maybe she had sounded a little bit naive.

  A few days after Robert and his father first met the big hitters from Borussia Mönchengladbach, Dirk Enke’s phone rang. Norbert Pflipsen was on the line. He was a football agent, he said, Günter Netzer, Lothar Matthäus, Stefan Effenberg and Mehmet Scholl had been among his clients. ‘I could help your son,’ he said.

  Usually a football agent puts a player under contract and then starts looking for a club. But in those days things were often a bit easier for the handful of agents who ruled the market. Through their informants in the Bundesliga they learned if a club wanted to sign a player who didn’t yet have an adviser, and by return of post the agent would offer himself to the player. That was how it was with Pflipsen and Borussia Mönchengladbach in the eighties and nineties.

  Pflipsen – Flippi – had one strength: he was one of the first in the business. So for decades he maintained a reputation for being one of the best.

  Flippi visited the Enkes in Jena. A man with fleshy lower arms and shirt-sleeve manners, he wasn’t short on anecdotes about how he had taken Günter to Real Madrid and Lothar to Inter Milan. It was a time when hardly any youth players had agents, yet here was this man from the highest echelons of football offering himself to Robert. The Enkes felt rather honoured. And in his witty way, Flippi was a likeable guy. They ignored the fact that he could sometimes be a bit crude. ‘When we start doing business,’ Pflipsen roared at Robert’s father, ‘I’ll give you a combined phone and fax. And,’ turning to Robert, ‘you’d get a car from me.’

  Just before his geogr
aphy oral (subject: rocks) in May 1996 Robert Enke signed a three-year contract negotiated by Norbert Pflipsen with the Bundesliga club Borussia Mönchengladbach.

  Just before that, on the A2 eastbound from Dortmund, the engine of a small Peugeot had thrown up some sparks. Then smoke had started rising from under the bonnet. Driving in a car like that had been perilous, the breakdown services said; there was no oil and no water, and the outlets were blocked.

  There was nothing, Flippi remonstrated, he could do about the fact that the second-hand car he had given Robert was in such a state.

  TWO

  The Snap

  ROBERT WAS LYING on the ground, his head in the grass, now already brown in places. He looked up, and ten feet away, also level with the grass-stalks, two greyish-blue eyes were waiting for him. Come on, the eyes were saying, rigid with concentration, I’ll show you.

  They lay facing each other in the penalty box on the training pitch, throwing the ball to each other with two hands. Their bodies were like bendy seesaws, swinging rhythmically back and forth, the only sound a brief, muffled clapping noise when the ball sank into the soft foam of their gloves.

  That’s enough, Robert thought after a few minutes. We’re just warming up – why won’t he stop?

  It took Robert a week to work out that Uwe Kamps would never stop. He wanted to see him, the new substitute goalkeeper, his potential rival, give up; to defeat him, even in the most minor warm-up exercise, every day.

  Kamps had already played over three hundred Bundesliga games for Borussia Mönchengladbach. He was thirty-two, the darling of the fans, and in fact, after training, quite genial. Robert was nineteen, a boy, the number three keeper in the squad. In the first few years he would learn from Kamps and sooner or later he would be ready to take over as number one, he had been told by Dirk Heyne, the goalkeeping coach. Heyne was one reason he had chosen Borussia over other Bundesliga teams. He’d struck Robert as likeable and competent.