A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  She thought: he’s so relaxed, that’s just lovely; but how sad that we can’t share these moments with each other.

  In spite of her pregnancy, she mowed the lawn. She had laid off the gardener during Robert’s depression, less because they were pinched for money than out of a vague feeling that they weren’t going to earn any more. In the evening she sat exhausted in front of the television.

  Suddenly something hit the window. She held her breath. When they’d first started living in Sant Cugat there had been a shooting in her street, she remembered. Again a pebble hit the glass.

  She went cautiously to the window. Down by the front door stood her husband, beaming and waving. He had come unannounced from Tenerife, a three-and-a-half-hour flight. He had set off at midday after training and had to get back first thing the next morning. She was knocked out after mowing the lawn. It wasn’t even nine in the evening but her eyelids were heavy. She was sorry, but she had to sleep. It doesn’t matter, he said, and really meant it. He watched her sleeping.

  Back in Tenerife he began to do things that he hadn’t done since devoting himself to professional sport as a teenager. He went to the cinema on his own. He read a book for hours. He went to a carnival with the team. He put on a hooped T-shirt, stuck a sheet of A4 paper to his chest, drew a number on it and said he was an escaped safe-breaker. When he saw his team-mates, he wanted to sink into the ground. Álvaro Iglesias was a nurse with a real uniform, including red lipstick, Adolfo Baines was Rambo. Everyone but him had taken a lot of trouble with their fancy dress. He was twenty-six and still learning how other people partied.

  After midnight, when the hard core moved on from the restaurant to a nightclub, he went home tired but happy. He knew more clearly than ever what he wanted to be like. All through his life he had been calm, businesslike, polite to other people, ‘not extrovert, but open’, says Iglesias. And now, for the first time in ages, he felt inwardly how he seemed outwardly; now he was also considerate and sympathetic to himself. The narrow-minded eagerness of youth had made way for a healthy ambition; the hunger that young sportsmen have, their total focus on being the best, had made way for a certain serenity. He had often wondered what it would be like to go through life with blinkers on, absolutely convinced about himself and his work. Perhaps then he would have been a better goalkeeper. But maybe, he said to himself now, it wasn’t that important after all to be the very best goalkeeper.

  The ball bounced in the penalty area; the goalkeeper had to come out before any damage was done. And Álvaro Iglesias was already there. He reached resolutely for the ball. Rayo Vallecano’s striker jumped into him, even though it was unlikely he would win back the ball. When they do things like that, strikers are usually already thinking about the next goal-scoring opportunity; they want to frighten the goalkeeper, intimidate him so that he will hesitate a moment too long in the next critical situation. Álvaro’s forehead was bleeding. It was just a cut, said the doctor, who gave him three stitches on the pitch, and on the game went. Álvaro played the remaining forty-eight minutes, and Tenerife scored in injury time to salvage a draw.

  The X-ray the next morning showed that Álvaro’s cheekbone had suffered a double fracture near his right eye. The bone was fixed with four pins at one fracture, six at the other. ‘Feel that,’ Álvaro said to Robert when he looked in on the changing-room for the first time after the operation. ‘You can feel the individual pins under the skin with your finger.’ Robert shivered as he felt them.

  The goalkeeper’s spot was free.

  He thought about Álvaro, about what it was like to lose your place like that. In four months Álvaro would turn thirty-two, and he was playing his first proper season in professional football; until then he had spent a decade in the Segunda B and Tercera divisions expending the effort of a professional but drawing the salary of a part-time job. Whenever he saw Álvaro at the stadium he went up to him and asked about his recovery. In the world of football that was unusually cordial. ‘Robert was very close to me in the days after my injury,’ says Álvaro, who would, in spite of this setback, assert himself in the Second Division until the age of thirty-six.

  In the ninth year of Robert’s career it still looked as if things were going to go on like this for ever: his teams had high expectations which they never lived up to. Mönchengladbach, Benfica, Barça, Fenerbahçe – wherever he was, his team stumbled. Things were no different in Tenerife. Before the season they had had an eye on the top of the table. Before their game against Elche in mid-April they were on the brink of relegation.

  Robert was back where he had started: a half-empty stadium in a second division, like Hannover versus Jena in November 1995. Sporting director Lobo Carrasco didn’t find the comparison at all defamatory. ‘Robert had the enthusiasm of a beginner,’ he says.

  He strapped on his gloves – he had decided on Absolutgrip, as always. He hadn’t played for nine months.

  The game hadn’t been going for a minute and he hadn’t yet touched the ball when Elche broke through on the flank. The cross came over, high but not too hard. Tenerife’s centre-half Miroslav Djukic´ didn’t go for the ball, he waited for Robert to come out – the ball was easy prey for a goalkeeper. But Robert stayed on his line. He was lucky. The ball flew past both friend and foe and trickled out of play.

  Robert apologised to Djukic´ with a raised hand and a faint smile. It looked as if he was no longer treating his own mistakes in a doom-laden way. Of course, the fans thought, an experienced goalkeeper like Enke wouldn’t be driven mad by anything.

  It was one of those football matches in which the goalkeeper is reminded of his impotence, that sometimes he can do nothing but wait. In the fifty-third minute Elche’s Nino finally broke through. He shot, putting some elegant spin on the ball with his instep. Robert saved majestically. Tenerife won 2–1, defender César Belli responsible for the goal against. After hesitating on that first cross, Robert had sorted out the nuts-and-bolts work of a goalkeeper and had caught a few half-dangerous shots. His throws were long and punchy, too. There was nothing more he could do.

  The sportswriters in Santa Cruz tried to portray him as the great goalkeeper everyone in Tenerife wanted to see. ‘A header from Zárate flew over the goal as if Enke had guided the ball over the bar with a look,’ wrote El Día.

  The day after the game, for the first time in his life, Robert read five newspapers in one go, all of them reporting on his comeback in one way or another.

  He rewarded himself with a day in Barcelona – out in the morning, back in the evening. The second ultrasound scan was imminent, in the twentieth week of pregnancy. You’ll be able to see the child’s hands and head, said friends with children; if you’re lucky you’ll even be able to tell whether it’s a girl or a boy.

  A nurse ran the probe over Teresa’s belly and a picture appeared on the screen, white outlines on a night-black ground. It was a girl. It was Lara.

  They sat down in the waiting-room. Dr Onbargi would discuss the scan with them in a moment.

  Teresa felt as if they had to wait for an extraordinarily long time.

  ‘Señora’ – Spanish receptionists always pause before they pronounce foreign names – ‘Enke?’

  Dr Leila Catherine Onbargi-Hunter, trained at the Northwestern University of Chicago, with a diploma from the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, was one of the doctors who gave the Teknon Medical Centre in Barcelona the reputation of a superior hospital. But she had no easy answer for the biggest problem all doctors face: how do you pass on bad news?

  Teresa was crying when she ran from the room. Robert tried to support her, even though he himself was having trouble maintaining his composure.

  Lara had a heart defect. ‘There’s a high probability that the child will die in the womb, but let’s wait another week, then we’ll examine it again.’

  Teresa’s phone rang. Outside the hospital palm-trees stood above hedges trimmed into geometrical shapes. An appointment had been arranged with a heart s
pecialist, immediately, Onbargi’s assistant said. Robert’s return flight was leaving in eighty minutes. It was his last chance to be on time for training the next day.

  ‘Robbi, get your plane, I’ll do this.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you on your own right now.’

  ‘Please, we have enough problems. We don’t want to create another one in football because you don’t make it to training. I’d like you to get your plane.’

  He phoned her from the airport. The specialist had recommended that the child be taken from the womb as quickly as possible and given a heart operation.

  A day later, Teresa wanted to have Dr Onbargi’s diagnosis calmly explained again. But she was worried that she would be so nervous she would misunderstand certain details. She asked a friend to come along to see the doctor. The child didn’t just have a heart defect, said Dr Onbargi, it also had chromosomal damage. They were talking about Turner Syndrome. People with Turner Syndrome are growth-restricted, they have a high risk of deformations of the ear and a short life expectancy.

  Teresa flew to Munich to get a second opinion from the German Heart Centre, and, to cover all scenarios, to find out from a gynaecologist how an abortion would be organised. The cardiologist there diagnosed hypoplastic left-heart syndrome. On no account should a premature delivery be induced, as his colleague in Barcelona had suggested – that would be certain death. After the first year of life three heart operations would be necessary, then your child will live. Teresa thought he sounded perfectly calm about it.

  Turner Syndrome children are of average intelligence, another friend discovered, and hormone treatment from the age of twelve can regulate their growth. Given the possible damage that had originally been mentioned, these were only the most extreme features of Turner Syndrome, and only a very few patients were badly affected by them.

  Teresa’s parents and brothers told her she didn’t know what it meant to bring up such a seriously ill child. Robert’s parents told him they would support whatever decision was made.

  Robert was sitting on a holiday island near Africa dealing with all these contradictory opinions being delivered to him from a long way away. How was he to estimate how serious things really were for their child? When Teresa reached a decision about what was to be done before he did, he was glad. Aborting or bringing into the world – he no longer had to make the choice, he realised with relief. Now that she had made her mind up he would of course go along with it, because she was the one carrying the child in her belly. It was only a matter of developing the same solid conviction as Teresa.

  This was her child, she said. It should live, with all the consequences.

  All of a sudden everything seemed very simple. They knew very well that life with a seriously ill child would be difficult, but the difficulties were abstract so long as the child wasn’t there. Still, when they tried to imagine their life, all three of them together, they felt confident that they would manage, somehow.

  One sentence sprang back to life, one he had uttered a year and a half earlier, when Kaiserslautern didn’t want him and Barça rang up: ‘Clearly nothing works normally for me.’ We had laughed at the time.

  While he was worried about his child’s life he was ‘reborn as a goalkeeper’, says Lobo Carrasco. Club Deportivo Numancia from the little town of Soria, named after the Numantians who bitterly resisted the Romans 150 years before the birth of Christ, came to Santa Cruz as division leaders and went home defeated. Robert made three saves that made the eleven thousand fans in the terraces leap to their feet. ‘People fell in love at first sight,’ says Carrasco. ‘They acknowledged the goalkeeper that Barça had bought, all the more powerfully after everything he had been through. People were gripped by the idea that someone like that was playing for Tenerife.’

  Robert was carried by the feeling of being content in goal. Perhaps he would never again turn out for a big club like Benfica or Barça, perhaps he would end his playing days in the Segunda División, but he now knew exactly what he wanted to be like as a goalkeeper, and if he came close to this ideal he would be glad, regardless of which level he was playing at. He had, in the middle of his career, found his style.

  He had always taken his bearings from others: in Mönchengladbach from Uwe Kamps, who stuck to the goal-line, who wanted to be spectacular, who dived and punched; in Barcelona he had been driven crazy by Frans Hoek with his cries of Further forward! Your foot! Van der Sar! ‘That was what annoyed me most, that I let him persuade me that I couldn’t do anything.’ He had always watched his colleagues very closely. Kamps, Bossio, Bonano, Valdés – he could learn something from all of them, even from Álvaro Iglesias, who had for a long time played only in Segunda B but whose positioning at corners and crosses was excellent. Playing abroad enriched him. Robert had noticed that in Germany, the self-appointed country of goalkeepers, he had grown up in the nineties with a very quirky theory of goalkeeping – lurking on the goal-line, exaggerated punches, holding on to the front post for crosses, storming out when the striker advanced on his own, training that was aimed at power endurance. The new goalkeeper was more influenced by the Argentinian school – standing motionless in front of the striker in one-on-one situations, and kicking out of hand sideways-on instead of chest-on. Argentina’s goalkeeper Germán Burgos had even invented an exercise to suppress the human reflex to turn the face away in response to shots from a short distance: the goalkeeping coach tied Burgos’s hands behind his back and shot hard at him from close range; all Burgos had to do was parry the ball with his face, again and again. Sometimes his nose broke. Robert learned more from an Argentinian, Roberto Bonano, than from anyone else. He improved his body posture in a duel with a striker after seeing Bonano: he no longer did the splits but, like Bonano, stayed upright, standing frozen in front of the striker, though he kept one knee bent inwards – his trademark – so that the striker couldn’t shoot between his legs. Other goalkeepers couldn’t spring powerfully off the turf with a knee turned inwards. He became a master in the art of stopping strikers in face-to-face situations. From the groin down his pose was still Enke, from the hips up it was Bonano.

  But he didn’t want to imitate anyone any more. For the first time he could clearly see what was good for him and what was unsuitable. So in Tenerife he screwed together from all the individual parts he had collected over the years the goalkeeper who would be a model to many others. He placed soberness, calmness, at the heart of his game. He positioned himself clearly further in front of goal than Oliver Kahn, the spectacular saver, but not as far forward as van der Sar, the eleventh outfielder. He wouldn’t hurry out at every cross, as Hoek had demanded, as the next generation of goalkeepers was already learning to do, not least in Germany. Even Álvaro placed himself in the middle of the goal for crosses, three or four yards in front of it, while Robert stood closer to the near post and the goal-line. ‘Robert, it’s too far from there to the back post; when a cross flies over there you won’t be able to get to it.’ He knew Álvaro was right, but this conservative positional play had been a part of his approach to goalkeeping since childhood; he felt secure with it, so he would keep it and leave some crosses to the back of the box to the defenders. But when he did come out for a cross, he caught it safely.

  Robert Enke was the mid-point between Kahn and van der Sar, between reaction and anticipation, between conservative play and risk. The middle way often seems boring and is usually sensible.

  CD Tenerife, on the brink of relegation when Robert started with them, no longer lost. ‘There are a lot of footballers who have individual significance, and there are a few footballers who have significance for the collective,’ says Lobo Carrasco. ‘Robert belonged to the second category. Before then we were a featherweight team, with him we developed a different mentality, a different inner conviction.’

  It’s only two degrees in Madrid and between his fine light-blue shirt and his jacket Carrasco is wearing a kind of polyester tracksuit jacket. On him even that looks fashionable. ‘Just one momen
t, please,’ he says, and takes out his laptop. He’s writing a book, he says, about a boy who moves into professional football and talks about his experiences. He has a lot of respect for writing, and reads a lot to get better. ‘I’ve built Robert into the book. Because he showed us what a footballer ought to be like.’ He runs his index finger over the laptop screen. Suddenly it’s no longer clear whether he’s speaking freely or reading from a script. ‘In Tenerife, Robert, polite, sensitive in his seriousness, showed us that things can be sorted out when someone rebels against a failure, against an injustice. And how he rebelled against what had been done to him at Barça.’ Carrasco is moved by his own words. ‘If he had had a coach at Barça who had told him after Novelda, “Hang on, you will continue to be my number one, I trust you,” in Barcelona he would have become the player we saw in Tenerife.’ Carrasco, who has worked in professional football for three decades, folds his hands behind his head. ‘In my life I haven’t seen ten goalkeepers with Robert’s potential. He was like a bull. But our life is determined by who we meet at which point in time. If a goalkeeper happens to work with a coach who eliminates him after just one mistake, the damage is done, and that’s psychologically terrible.’

  Carrasco hasn’t ordered a coffee or a glass of water. He spends his morning break without a drink. ‘I can’t help remembering that he gave the other goalkeepers gloves – what a magnificent gesture. As if he were saying to his opponents: I’m giving you the same weapons.’

  The screen of Carrasco’s laptop is still glowing. ‘It’s the Thursday after Robert’s death’ it says in the middle. ‘I haven’t been able to write since then.’

  In Tenerife Robert developed a new awareness of distance. He wasn’t just geographically far away from his previous life, some 2,236 kilometres south of Barcelona, it also felt a long way away. He read the news in the sports papers from the same perspective as the dockers next to him in the café. He had become an outsider. Once he discovered by chance that Timo Hildebrand had mentioned his name in an interview. In 2004 Hildebrand was the rising star among German goalkeepers; he had just set a Bundesliga record: 884 minutes without conceding a goal. You have to think very hard about switching to a big foreign club, said Hildebrand, otherwise you could end up like Robert Enke, who went abroad far too young.