A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  He answered the phone. ‘Robbi?’

  ‘You know what’s just happened?’

  Marco sensed that he didn’t want to know.

  ‘I’ve let in another seven goals.’

  ‘Oh, shit, Robbi.’

  Robert just laughed. As if losing 7–0 in the UEFA Cup to Celta Vigo hadn’t left him downcast, just simply seemed unbelievable.

  Benfica had gone into the game intent an defending tightly. The coach’s vision was for it to be a classic first-leg cup tie, putting everything, decisions and drama, off until the second leg. Then, after a quarter of an hour, Celta Vigo scored. Something broke. Benfica, despite their glorious past and Jupp Heynckes’s fresh promise and their great start to the domestic season, were all of a sudden wandering about with their own contradictory thoughts. On the one hand they had only come to defend, on the other they now had to start attacking. Benfica lost their cohesion, and Celta Vigo, who had one of the strongest squads in European club football at the time, found themselves with unexpected room for manoeuvre, especially Claude Makelele in midfield and the Russians Alexander Mostovoi and Valeri Karpin in attack. Their passing game was a whirlwind. Makelele appeared unmarked in front of Robert, then Mario Turdó calmly sent a shot flying in a parabolic curve into the sky over his head. After forty-two minutes the score was 4–0. At half-time Heynckes furiously explained all the things they needed to do to improve. Sixteen minutes of play later, with a third of the game still to go, the score was 7–0. ‘The game was basically Robert versus eleven players,’ says Moreira. ‘And each time a goal was scored he didn’t have a chance.’

  When Robert walked off the pitch, he looked at the Benficistas, the eight thousand fans who had made the trip across the border into southern Galicia. The sight of them, the overwhelming beauty of their sadness, stayed with him for ever. ‘Eight thousand people, and none of them making a sound.’

  The club president, João Vale e Azevedo, stormed into the changing-room, ranting and shouting. The three thousand fans waiting for the team at Lisbon airport found their voices too. Robert calmly told reporters, ‘Seven goals down is something I’m quite familiar with.’

  ‘A defeat is a different defeat for a goalkeeper if it isn’t his fault,’ Walter Junghans remarks.

  Two days later, before the home game against Campomaiorense, Robert was back with Moreira in his hotel room. In Vigo, Robert’s little goalkeeping brother had been absent because of an injury.

  ‘As soon as I’m not there, you let in seven goals.’

  ‘Moreira, bring mir Wasser!’

  The TV was on – German television.

  ‘Why do only a thousand fans come to some Primeira Liga games in this country, but three thousand of them get up in the middle of the night to shout at us at the airport? I don’t understand this country, Moreira.’

  ‘Robert, it’s normal, you’re in Portugal.’

  ‘And why does no one here speak English? Are there no schools in Portugal?’

  ‘English is compulsory up to year eight, and then they all forget it. It’s perfectly normal, you’re in Portugal.’

  ‘Where there are speed limits of 120 km/h on the motorways and everyone drives at 190.’

  ‘Perfectly normal. You’re in Portugal, we’re all mad here.’

  ‘And why am I so fond of this country?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Robert.’

  In their palace, four months after moving in, Teresa and Robert learned something new about Portugal: nowhere in the world is it as cold as in the warm countries of southern Europe.

  Like many flats in southern Italy, Spain or Portugal, the guest-house of the Palácio Fronteira had no heating. Teresa and Robert hadn’t noticed that when they moved in on a sunlit day in August. ‘There was a fireplace in every room, and in the seventeenth century five members of staff probably went through the rooms making sure the fires were lit,’ says Teresa.

  The cold crept damply through the walls. In the kitchen they could see their breath. The clothes in the wardrobe began to smell musty. They bought two electric radiators and started living in one room in a house with six bathrooms. Before Hubert Rosskamp, the huntsman from Gierath, came on a visit, Teresa begged him to bring electric blankets. Half an hour before they went to bed she’d switch them on. ‘The worst thing was when you’d left something in the bathroom. Then you had to get back out of bed.’

  Robert was luckier. He could shower at the stadium. Soon he started brushing his teeth there as well.

  Needless to say, the winter visitors to the palace weren’t quite as keen as the summer guests. ‘This is the world’s first walk-in fridge,’ said Teresa’s brother Florian. One morning Teresa saw him standing motionless in front of the house, arms folded and eyes closed, his head turned towards the sun.

  ‘Flo, what are you doing?’ she cried.

  ‘I’m warming myself up!’

  During his stay in Lisbon Teresa’s brother began to feel a little irritated. He liked Robert, and enjoyed his conversations with him, but why did Robert never ask him what he did? Why did Teresa’s boyfriend never ask any questions when he told them about his life as a teacher in Munich?

  It was footballer’s disease. Professional footballers get used to being constantly asked questions, and gradually they forget how to take an interest in other people.

  Unlike Florian, Hubert didn’t notice Robert’s social shortcoming. Hubert didn’t wait for people to ask him questions anyway. If he wanted to say something, then Hubert said it. In the Stadium of Light, Robert introduced him to Portugal’s legendary player Eusebio. ‘Eusebio, this is Hubert.’ Eusebio gave him the thumbs up. Teresa and Robert showed Hubert the city, the tower of Belém, the view of the Atlantic, and all the while Hubert couldn’t believe how touchingly these people were looking after him.

  Marco and Christina came shortly before Christmas. Panathinaikos, one of the twenty-five biggest clubs in Europe, had discovered Marco Villa the goal-scorer in that dip in the Alpine foothills and immediately bought him. After Christmas he would be in Greece.

  Without realising it, Robert and Marco were part of the vanguard of a new age. Professional football was leading the way in globalisation. A handful of foreigners played in the English Premier League in 1992; seven years later a third of the five hundred or so premiership professionals came from abroad. Young men like Robert and Marco, who, if they had been born ten years earlier, might have switched from Mönchengladbach to Bremen or Frankfurt, became modern-day migrant labourers. No one had prepared them for it.

  In the only warm room in the ice-palace Teresa and Christina sat on the sofa, Robert and Marco on the floor. They were playing the guessing-game of City, Country, River.

  ‘E,’ said Marco.

  ‘What river do you have?’ Robert asked the ladies.

  ‘The Ems,’ said Teresa.

  ‘Oh, we’ve got that too,’ said Robert.

  ‘N,’ said Christina.

  ‘What’s your river?’ asked Robert.

  ‘Neckar,’ said Christina.

  ‘Got that one,’ said Robert.

  Eventually Teresa and Christina realised that the men didn’t know any rivers at all, but were just stealing their answers. ‘Suspicion naturally fell on me because I was always the one fooling around,’ says Marco. But Robert was the one eager not to lose the game.

  For breakfast the next day Teresa served scrambled egg without the yolk, as an experiment.

  ‘What’s that?’ Marco asked, darting a conspiratorial glance at Robert, raising his eyebrows and grinning.

  Robert dismissed him with a gruff shake of the head. You didn’t make jokes about Teresa.

  At lunchtime Robert and Marco went off to their favourite fast-food restaurant. They were standing at the counter when Marco became aware of a buzzing noise behind them. He turned round. Dozens of children were peering through the windows of the restaurant, the first ones were already coming in, and a few minutes later they were surrounded by a hundred or so gi
ggling and laughing Portuguese kids.

  ‘Uenk! Uenk!’

  After six months in Lisbon Robert knew who they meant. Enke – O Enke. Pronounced by the Portuguese, it sounded like Uenk.

  ‘What’s going on, are they mixing you up with someone famous or something?’ asked Marco.

  Marco recalled that Robert laughed with pride at this. ‘It was paradoxical: Robbi was reticent, but he liked all that star stuff.’

  For the Portuguese, Robert Enke was more than a good goalkeeper. A country that often thinks sadly of its lost greatness as a colonial power precisely records the small gestures foreigners make. While businessmen and other sportsmen who had moved to the country still expected to be understood when they spoke English or Spanish, after just four months Robert had given his first press conference in Portuguese. ‘Of course, not after three months, as you’d planned,’ Moreira teased him.

  It was Robert’s second press conference that became national news. Fodes! read the newspaper headlines the following day. The television news bulletins repeated the scene over and over again: Robert on the podium behind the microphones, when he couldn’t remember a particular word, putting his forehead in his hands and hissing, ‘Fodes!’ – ‘Shit!’

  People laughed with delight. It was clear-cut for the Portuguese: anyone who could curse as they did was one of them.

  Benfica didn’t fully process that 7–0 defeat in Vigo; the memory of it held the club prisoner. The public reacted with increasing rage to each new mistake a player made, and naturally the footballers started making more mistakes. The club president, still feeling insulted, made those players who made too many mistakes wait weeks for their wages, and of course that didn’t make the footballers play any better either. Dynamics, sometimes the footballer’s ally, sometimes his foe, dragged Benfica down. A team that had been flying high for several months won only one out of the five Liga matches they played between December 1999 and January 2000, a wobbly 3–2 against União Leiria. Benfica dropped to third place behind Porto and Sporting Lisbon.

  Heynckes found himself under siege. On 3 January, Portuguese journalists lay in wait outside his house in Mönchengladbach and tried to peer through his windows with binoculars. They wanted to check whether he was actually in bed.

  Heynckes had been invited to spend New Year’s Eve with Bayern Munich’s manager Uli Hoeness, but he suddenly went down with a fever and spent that night in a hotel. Then, instead of returning to Lisbon he’d gone home to recuperate. On 4 January Benfica were scheduled to play an eagerly awaited derby against Sporting. The Portuguese media suspected the coach of inventing his flu so that he could spend a bit more time at home. Anyone familiar with Heynckes’s work ethic would have been amused by the idea of the coach bunking off work. But things at Benfica weren’t all that funny anymore after this episode.

  Heynckes flew feverishly back to Lisbon, but on his doctor’s advice he didn’t go to the stadium, instead watching the match on television. It ended goalless, with Robert as Benfica’s man of the match. A coach, however ill, has to be with his team, insisted the outraged sports press. ‘Portuguese journalism is even worse than Portuguese football,’ Heynckes explained, unasked, as soon as he was better. Benfica’s president flew into a rage. He publicly confronted the coach – and stopped paying him his wages.

  For months Benfica had been messing around in a similar way with Bossio, the goalkeeper who had fallen into disfavour after that pre-season match. He wasn’t needed any more, so they made him wait for his wages. Benfica only sorted out the transfer fee and the paperwork necessary for a playing permit six months after the start of the season. Given how badly he was being mucked about, Bossio remained admirably relaxed. He carried on training with Robert and Moreira without a word of complaint. The public had already forgotten Bossio; he was in the shadow of Robert Enke, who was ‘on the way to being an internationally great goalkeeper’ in Walter Junghans’s estimation. First- and third-choice goalkeeper – that sounded like a definitive, unambiguous qualitative difference. But without Bossio’s one bad day in the run-up to the season Robert’s and Bossio’s roles could have easily been swapped.

  There were things that Robert, the public’s hero, learned from the outcast Bossio. He noticed how the other keepers at Benfica – Moreira, Bossio and Nuno Santos – positioned themselves further forward, further than Köpke, Kahn and Kamps in Germany. That helped them to cut out more through-passes and crosses. ‘I’d rather have a goalkeeper who only goes out for six simple crosses and takes them all than a goalkeeper who runs out for ten crosses and the two hardest ones fly past him,’ Robert insisted to Moreira. He really believed that: the best goalkeeper wasn’t the one who coped with the most difficult situations, but the one who made the fewest mistakes. Privately, though, he took his bearings from Moreira and Bossio. When a member of the opposing team entered Benfica’s half of the pitch, Robert now stood up to eight yards in front of the goal.

  Rather than just being a few strides forward, for Robert this represented an expedition into the unknown. The most important thing for a keeper is a feeling of security, and Robert was now standing where he had never stood before. He was giving up the security that he had built up over the years, of knowing exactly how many paces it was back to the goal, and the angles between him and the posts. He kept instinctively retreating to the old conservative position, closer to the goal. Every time he did so he felt impelled to move forward again.

  ‘You didn’t need to push Robert, he was self-critical, and he always wanted to learn by himself,’ says Jupp Heynckes. ‘I’ve trained loads of players in my career, and as a coach you always get on particularly well with this team member or that one. But if somebody asks me after thirty years in the job who I think my ideal professional is, I always say Fernando Redondo and Robert Enke. Both of them weren’t just special footballers, but special people – respectful, sociable, intelligent.’

  Every time the team left the stadium after training, freshly showered and damp-haired, Heynckes went to the gym. As usual, Robert and Walter Junghans were there, though now Robert was dragging his ‘little brother’ Moreira along as well. ‘Those were the best times,’ says Heynckes. He could shed the tension of work in that gym. After the effort of making himself understood in a foreign language all the time, it was simply wonderful to be able to speak German again. They talked ‘about football, politics, everyday stuff’, says Heynckes, and then on to subjects like movies, food, dogs. ‘These conversations alone in the gym, three Germans abroad,’ Heynckes says. ‘It was like a prayer.’

  12. Robert and Teresa’s wedding photograph in 2000.

  In their ice-palace, Teresa and Robert dreamed about the summer. In the autumn they would move out of the Palácio Fronteira, they promised themselves; they couldn’t bear another winter there. But for now they were willing to put up with it, so that they could enjoy another summer by the pool.

  On 18 February 2000 Teresa unwrapped Robert’s present for her twenty-fourth birthday. She’d felt the material through the wrapping-paper.

  ‘Aha, a football shirt,’ she said, and struggled to sound pleased rather than confused.

  ‘Try it on,’ he said, touchingly on edge, as he so often was off the pitch when things didn’t go as planned.

  Teresa pulled on the black and yellow Benfica goalkeeper’s top.

  ‘OK?’ she asked.

  The jersey came down to her knees.

  ‘Yes. Stand with your back to the mirror before you complain.’

  That meant going to the bathroom – a mini polar expedition.

  In the mirror Teresa looked at her back. TERESA ENKE was printed on the shoulders. Underneath, where the goalkeeper’s number was usually displayed, Robert had taped a white question mark.

  It didn’t take Teresa more than a second to understand what the present meant.

  They were married in the summer holidays at a castle near Mönchengladbach. Teresa’s friend Christiane, shaking her head, took pictures of her turquoise b
ridal shoes.

  Teresa had found a new pal. With a heavy heart, she had left one of her two dogs in Germany with her parents. Now, whenever she could, she had the palace housekeeper’s dog over, so that it could be let off the chain.

  ‘Moreira,’ Robert said in the hotel room, ‘how come animals are so badly treated here? Everywhere I go I see dogs roaming around, or on chains.’

  ‘I’ve told you loads of times: you’re in Portugal.’

  ‘We’ve got to help those dogs.’

  But he and Teresa were the only ones who thought so.

  That autumn they moved out of Palácio Fronteira to a one-storey house with a garden and central heating in Sassoeiros, near the beach, where there were no rules to stop them keeping dogs. Teresa bought the housekeeper’s dog from her. In the park she picked up a scrawny mongrel. Word got round that the goalkeeper and his wife liked animals. A dog was thrown over their garden fence, a poodle left tied to a lamp-post outside their front door. A woman who worked in the Benfica office called Robert in after training. A Dobermann that had outgrown its collar which now cut badly into its neck had been dropped off for him.

  ‘My darling, sometimes I hate you for the fact that I can’t walk past a needy animal,’ Robert said to Teresa.

  All of a sudden they had seven dogs.

  Joker, however, didn’t get on with Alamo. They put Joker in the garden shed. Teresa went in with her mobile phone. When Robert had Alamo under control in the house, he phoned her: ‘You can come out with Joker now.’

  Eventually, for all their love of animals, it struck them as ridiculous. They put Joker in a dogs’ home in Sintra. Robert had sometimes become irritated with Teresa’s commitment to animal welfare; after all, she couldn’t save every dog in Portugal. But he went to the dogs’ home every day to take Joker for a half-hour walk.