A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  The previous season Borussia had only just escaped relegation on the last day, then Big Stefan Effenberg had moved to Bayern Munich for a transfer fee of 8.5 million marks. A bit of steadiness was thus the best thing most people in Mönchengladbach hoped for from the new season – a place in the Bundesliga midfield, just far enough away from the commotion of a relegation battle.

  The 34,000-seater stadium was sold out. The sun was shining. The stands directly behind the goals rose more steeply than anywhere else in the Bundesliga. When Borussia’s goalkeeper ran towards his goal immediately before kick-off the entire stand behind the goal grew higher with each step he took. By the time he had reached the six-yard box he felt as if he was at the foot of a gorge.

  Robert played entirely in black, the colour of great goalkeepers from former days – Lev Yashin, Gyula Grosics, Ricardo Zamora.

  The game began. A striker immediately forced his way down the right wing, got past a second opponent and fired a fast, low cross into the goalie’s area. The defender stayed clear because he thought his goalkeeper would deal with the cross. But the keeper hesitated. Within a period of time in which no human being can even finish a thought a goalkeeper has to decide whether he’s going to run out of the goal or not. It was already too late.

  From the other end of the pitch, Robert watched as Borussia’s new centre-forward Toni Polster exploited the hesitation of Schalke’s goalkeeper Frode Grodås to give his side a 1–0 lead. The second minute of play was just beginning. After ten minutes Mönchengladbach had raised its advantage to 2–0.

  The game had already lost its tension when Robert was seriously put to the test for the first time. With the score at 2–0 everything and everyone looked a bit brighter. The economy of his movements, the absence of any haste, gave him the air of an utterly unbeatable goalkeeper.

  Borussia had resorted to putting up a concentrated defence and hitting their opponents quickly on the break. Twice Schalke hit the bar, and Robert commandingly saw off a handful of more or less dangerous shots and headers. Ten minutes before the end the scoreline changed again, to 3–0.

  ‘I actually thought I’d be more nervous,’ Robert said to the sports reporters in the tunnel after the game. With quiet enthusiasm he talked about the crosses that had flown in at him, far faster than anything he had ever experienced in training or even in reserve games. As so often when he was in a good mood, he responded to praise with self-deprecation: ‘The ball came so fast that I sometimes wasn’t sure when I should go out to meet a cross; but somehow the ball always ended up in my hands.’

  After the game most people talked about not the goalkeeper but the new striker, Toni Polster. The Rheinische Post featured a double-page report under the headline ‘Borussia tops the league again for the first time in ten years’, which after one game wasn’t exactly much of a feat.

  At home, Robert cleaned his gloves with shampoo under the shower, laid them out to dry and stroked smooth the soft foam of their surfaces.

  THREE

  Defeats Are His Victory

  IN A SMALL, rain-drenched American town, the murderer already had five people on his conscience when he saw the body of a dog lying in the road. ‘I didn’t do that,’ the serial killer said drily.

  At this point in the film Se7en Robert always burst out laughing. He actually abhorred violence; he was absolutely sure about what he would do if he encountered a threat: run away. Nonetheless, he watched that film, which isn’t short of violent scenes, five or six times. Se7en, starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, provided him with something that was getting increasingly difficult to find since he had started playing for Borussia Mönchengladbach. The film was so exciting that for 127 minutes Robert forgot everything else, especially football. Switching off had become his most difficult task.

  His internal film ran incessantly. Everything was new, exciting, inspiring, and at the same time professional sport had taken over his life with its constant rhythm. A game every week, without a break. There was no final whistle for him. Scenes from each match swam around repeatedly in his head: the free kick by Kaiserslautern’s Martin Wagner, which he didn’t see until it was just a blink away; the striking long-range shot by Frankfurt’s Chen Yang, right under the bar. For a debutant goalkeeper it doesn’t matter much whether a goal is unstoppable or not. After every one Robert brooded on how he could have stopped it.

  After only a few weeks he was well known in the video store.

  Two months had passed since the start of the season against Schalke 04. Borussia Mönchengladbach hadn’t won a single one of the next eight games. Robert wasn’t much more than a footnote in that wretched tale; and the young goalkeeper prevented even worse things happening, it was said regularly in the match reports. After a 2–1 defeat in Bochum, Borussia fell to the bottom of the table.

  Marco Villa gave Toni Polster a pair of Mickey Mouse-print silk underpants as a trophy for the worst-dressed man in the team. Polster happily put the pants on. But it wasn’t really all that funny any more.

  Fewer than three years earlier, when Robert had chosen to go to Borussia, the club was fourth in the Bundesliga, and looked as if they had a chance of getting to the top. Now the two best players on the team, Stefan Effenberg and striker Martin Dahlin, had been sold, at the urging of the banks. Even so, the team Borussia had retained should have been easily strong enough to stay out of the Bundesliga’s relegation battle. But football is pure dynamism, and in that sense sport really is like life: dynamics decide things in our life more often than any kind of careful planning; dynamics win more games than tactics. Seconds after Robert had saved a penalty Borussia went 1–0 down against 1860 Munich; they squandered a victory in Duisburg in the last second with an own goal. Before the players had even noticed, the forces that stimulate change were unleashed. Each mishap produced two new ones, and soon the team was looking like one big error. Where Dahlin had pressed the previous season, now Borussia’s opponents could calmly get on with building their game from the back because the new striker Toni Polster felt no particular desire to run and press. Where the previous season Jörgen Pettersson had used Dahlin’s pressing game to run off his opponent’s badly placed passes, now Pettersson was exploding with fury at Polster, that coffee-house footballer. In his irritation Pettersson then forgot to run back, which meant that the midfield was shorthanded. When a club slips away like that, it usually looks inevitable.

  Borussia’s coach hardly gave an impression of being able to free them from this downward spiral. Friedel Rausch had once won the UEFA Cup with Eintracht Frankfurt. That was eighteen years ago. On one of his first days at the training-ground in Mönchengladbach Rausch had turned to the midfielder Valantis Anagnostou and said, ‘Herr Ballandi, yooou’ – he pointed at Anagnostou – ‘under-stand’ – he pointed at his chest – ‘me?’

  ‘Yes, Coach,’ replied Anagnostou, ‘I was born and bred in Düsseldorf. And my name is Anagnostou, not Ballandi.’

  ‘I see,’ said Friedel Rausch. ‘And who are you?’ he asked Marco Villa.

  ‘I’m Marco Villa.’

  ‘Oh yes, Markus.’

  For years, Rausch had been an established Bundesliga coach, a passable tactician and a fiery motivator. The players might have grinned about his scatterbrain ways, but they liked him for it. Rausch hadn’t changed. But a team that loses too often sees only its coach’s shortcomings. Training methods that had seemed innovative for years suddenly looked ridiculous. Rausch liked to train ‘all over the pitch’, as he put it. On the training-ground in Rönneter there were several pitches in a row, and the practice game covered two of them – over 240 metres. Robert smiled about this even years later, with a mixture of amusement and irritation.

  When Borussia slipped to the bottom of the league, Rausch convinced the directors to fire two players, Karlheinz Pflipsen and Marcel Witeczek, without notice. In professional football, that’s called setting an example. It’s an effort to change the dynamics, somehow. The directors passed the news on to the players i
n question. When the coach realised that the majority of the team was furious about the measure, he switched sides. The directors had suggested to Pflipsen and Witeczek that they find a new team, Rausch told his team, but he couldn’t do without both! He nominated Pflipsen as deputy team captain for the next game against Bayer Leverkusen, on 30 October 1998.

  It was the day Robert Enke became nationally famous.

  Marco Villa injured his knee in the tenth minute; the ligament was torn. He was lying on the edge of the pitch being examined by the doctor when the first goal was scored. After being substituted, Marco hobbled to the club-room to watch the game on television with an ice pack on his knee. When he turned the set on, he learned that Borussia’s central defender Patrik Andersson had had to leave the pitch as well because of injury, and the score stood at 2–0 to Leverkusen. Robert was sitting on the ground – his hands hanging limply over his knees, which were drawn up to his chest – with an expression of profound incomprehension on his face. That was how he became famous, because the footage was repeated as often as if it were a snippet of Chaplin slapstick: Robert Enke sitting uncomprehendingly on the ground after a goal, and then after another.

  Mönchengladbach lost 8–2 to Bayer Leverkusen that day. ‘Carnival in Gladbach,’ the fans sang. The biggest debacle in thirty years, the radio commentators cried. And the young goalkeeper had prevented even worse things happening!

  Robert wished next Saturday, the next game, would come quickly, so that he could leave the horror behind him.

  A week later, they played in Wolfsburg. Teresa met some of the wives of Borussia’s footballers in a bar in Mönchengladbach to watch the match on television. After fifty-three minutes of play Uwe Kamps’s girlfriend said to her, ‘Oh God, four goals was the most Uwe ever let in, and after that he was always finished.’ Brian O’Neil had just made it 5–1 to VfL Wolfsburg. Their fans sang, ‘Only three more, only three more!’ Goals to top Leverkusen’s feat from last week, they meant. The game ended 7–1.

  Robert Enke was famous. No goalkeeper in the Bundesliga had ever let in fifteen goals in a week. The reporters outside the changing-room asked how he felt, and put on sympathetic faces. ‘Oh,’ Robert replied, ‘I’d practised getting the ball out of the net the week before.’

  The day after the Wolfsburg game he went for a walk in the fields with Teresa and the dogs. Victory or defeat, that was their Sunday routine.

  ‘So, Enke the Aunt Sally,’ said Teresa.

  And even though every goal had tormented him, for all his despondency he was suddenly able to explode with laughter.

  7. 30 October 1998: Robert Enke at the game against Bayer Leverkusen that ended in an 8–2 defeat.

  ‘We were very easygoing,’ Teresa says. ‘The important thing was that there was nothing he could have done about the goals. Then we were able to joke about it.’

  After unforgettable defeats like these Robert had to resort to little tricks to maintain his composure. ‘I convinced myself that the team had let me down. That helped me to calm down.’ He had often reproached himself as a goalkeeper – for goals that weren’t really his fault, or for disappointing his team-mates even though no one was disappointed in him. He never received as much sympathy and forgiveness as he did after those fifteen goals. ‘And God protect this young goalkeeper – he can’t help it!’ Teresa heard the television commentator saying in the bar, as the camera caught Robert on the ground with his uncomprehending expression for the last time. As he received evidence from all quarters of how impressively calmly he had gone on playing in an intimidated team, he forgot that his own nerves had once been a-flutter, with Carl Zeiss in Leipzig and during that first winter in Mönchengladbach. ‘I’m not so psychologically unstable that I’m crapping myself before each game,’ he told the sportswriters. ‘You don’t need to worry about me suffering lasting damage.’

  The more people praised him for his calmness and confidence, the more serenely he played, although without noticing the connection. A decade later, when he was with Hannover 96, he took the Reiss profile test that is supposed to establish a player’s personality and motivation. He had never thought that recognition was so fundamentally important to him, he remarked with amazement to Teresa as he held the results in his hands. But even in Mönchengladbach she had been struck by the fact that ‘if he felt that other people doubted him, he developed self-doubts, and when he was put under pressure by others, he became insecure. But when he received support, he was incredibly strong as a goalkeeper.’

  In Hamburg, once again, Borussia were 2–0 down after half an hour. Hamburg’s striker Anthony Yeboah was in the zone – that place where movement happens at an incredible pace, with a higher level of coordination – and he was half a step faster than his Mönchengladbach marker Thomas Eichin. Robert was left stranded and Yeboah’s shot flew in, between his legs. Such shots are unstoppable – when a goalkeeper has to stand with his legs spread, waiting to dive towards either side, he can’t snap his legs shut like that. But a nutmeg always makes a goalkeeper look ridiculous; after an impossible task he lands clumsily on his backside. The only thing he can rely on is the mockery of the fans. When he got back to his feet, rage was pounding through Robert. He felt abandoned, humiliated; it had been Eichin’s mistake, and now people were laughing at him. He wanted to start yelling. But he thought a goalkeeper who lost his composure was lost himself. He wrestled with his fury, and he was helped by the knowledge that so many people had praised his serenity. He was the cool guy, so he would stay cool. Seconds after Yeboah’s goal the agitation had left his face.

  Over the weeks that followed he learned how to turn off the internal film that constantly tried to tell him all about the most recent goals and crosses. In the evenings he and Teresa often went to see Grandma Frida in Rheydt – the fourth grandma in his life. The old farmer’s wife had had her farm converted into rented apartments, and Jörg Neblung lived there with his girlfriend Dörthe. The four of them sat together talking easily about God and the world. It was only when a football match was shown on television that he got up to watch it.

  Jörg would sit on the sofa next to him. Whenever Jörg perkily commented on some aspect of the game, Robert would reply concisely and analytically. After that he’d fall silent again. When he watched football on television he became withdrawn, studying his colleagues with great concentration, a goalkeeping engineer in search of the mechanisms of the game – on the one hand. On the other, football on television was a most effective anaesthetic. Watching football helped him to forget about playing football.

  Sometimes the others wanted to do something else.

  ‘We could always go out,’ Teresa said.

  ‘But we could always stay at home,’ he countered.

  How often had they had that exchange?

  But when they visited Dörthe and Jörg, Robert had three people against him, and he went along with it. When they played Bon Jovi at the disco, he even danced. But he didn’t want to go out all the time so he soon developed tactics.

  ‘Come on, let’s go to the Gebläsehalle,’ said Jörg one evening.

  ‘Can’t,’ said Robert, trying to keep the triumph off his face.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Stupidly, I’m wearing tracksuit trousers. The doorman won’t let me in.’

  Jörg was supposed to be looking after him. ‘Can’t you do something about that boy? He has no social circle,’ Norbert Pflipsen had said to Jörg during Robert’s second year with Mönchengladbach, when Jörg was still the team’s athletics coach. ‘Worrying’ can also be a job, Jörg learned when Borussia declined to extend his contract in the summer of 1998. Flippi took him on as a ‘worrier’, or Kümmerer – the slang name given to the staff of an agency that’s supposed to look after professional sportspeople in everyday life. ‘Fridge-filler is another term,’ says Jörg.

  He’d really wanted to be an industrial designer. During the entrance exam for technical college in Hanover he had looked out of the window in search of inspiration.
He saw the bile-green trams driving past the gardens of the town-houses, drew his next sketches in that colour, and was rejected. After that he wanted to do something completely different. He studied sports science. One of his professors, Karl-Heinz Drygalsky, became chairman of Borussia Mönchengladbach. When Drygalsky took him on as fitness coach in 1994, Bayern Munich was the only team in the Bundesliga with such a post.

  Jörg thought professional football would be pretty much the same as athletics. He assumed a Bundesliga team’s medical staff would work hand in hand, and the head coach would take an interest in individual training plans. Then he saw his first head coach, Bernd Krauss, forcing the players to run excessively hard endurance races, contrary to all training theory, supposedly as a way of schooling their will. He experienced Borussia’s physiotherapist denigrating him to the coaching staff to make sure that injured players came to him first. ‘All backroom staff in a Bundesliga side are constantly courting the favour of the coach and the players,’ Jörg says. ‘And in order to please them, if necessary they sometimes worked against their better judgement.’

  A bell rings in the corridor outside his airy office on the third floor of an old factory building. It’s a woman with a basket full of sandwiches. She does her rounds every day because the multimedia designers and communication advisers in offices like this on Lichtstrasse in Cologne have no time for lunch. Jörg Neblung, northern German and blond, still looking like a decathlete at the age of forty-three, now runs his own football agency. During our interview he sometimes turns round as if talking to his shelf, where he has set up some goalkeeping gloves and photographs of Robert, and a candle.

  There are hundreds of kinds of friendship, and of the one formed in 1998 between Robert Enke and Jörg Neblung the fact will always remain that Jörg was supposed to worry about him. But the will to strive together for goals is more of a bond than most emotions.