A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  ‘Don’t make yourself any older than you are – you’re only twenty-nine,’ said Germany’s goalkeeping coach Andreas Köpke.

  After the 2006 World Cup, Oliver Kahn had stepped down. At the age of thirty-seven Jens Lehmann only had a limited future ahead of him as Germany’s number one. The goal was open, and Robert was the most likely applicant after Timo Hildebrand.

  When Denmark’s coach Morten Olsen learned about Löw’s line-up, he grumbled. They were too weak an opposition. It was a friendly but Olsen wanted his team to be put to the test. Seven players in the German team, from Robert Enke to Jan Schlaudraff, didn’t even have experience of ten internationals between them. But the future was supposed to belong to them. In fact the steepest career curve of all the newcomers in Duisburg that night would be that of the referee. Howard Webb, another international beginner, would go on to oversee the 2010 World Cup Final.

  24. ‘Enke flies’: one of Robert’s phenomenal saves in goal.

  In the tunnel outside the changing-rooms, before they went out, Robert’s hair stood straight up in the air. He had been tousling it with his gloves. His lips were narrow. There was nervousness in his eyes, not fear.

  The game left him no time to brood. Only a minute had passed when a free kick flew in from the left wing and the Dane Daniel Agger soared high seven yards in front of goal, unencumbered. It was an outstanding header, solid, aimed at the right-hand corner. Robert hadn’t yet touched the ball. He dived, and as he flew in the air parallel to the bar, his back arching with physical tension, he steered the ball around the post. People who have never been goalkeepers themselves see saves like that as a goalkeeper’s greatest feats.

  Shortly before half-time Thomas Kahlenberg ran towards him on his own with the ball. Robert just stood there. To the unpractised eye he was doing nothing. He didn’t even touch the ball when Kahlenberg ran past him. ‘Kahlenberg dribbled round Enke,’ the sportswriters wrote. In fact Robert had just executed the greatest feat of the evening. He had blocked the Dane’s line of fire so skilfully and for so long that all Kahlenberg could do was move past him on the left, where he found no space and inevitably ran out of play.

  ‘A lot of charisma and excellent reactions,’ the coach said of him after the game. Robert called his debut ‘quite decent’. Germany had lost 1–2, but the sports journalists wanted to make a winner out of him. Now he could lay claim to being Germany’s number two goalkeeper, couldn’t he?

  ‘You know you’re not going to get an answer to that one from me.’

  Didn’t he at least see himself fighting Timo Hildebrand for the number two position after that game?

  ‘You mustn’t forget that this is only the third time I’ve been named in the squad. Timo has been included many times before.’

  Germany defined itself as the promised land of the goalkeeper, the home of Sepp Maier, Toni Schumacher, Oliver Kahn. Even the most mundane question was enough for an extended debate, in this case: who would be the country’s substitute goalkeeper?

  ‘I’ll never be able to say publicly this colleague or that one is worse than me, I should be ahead of him. I know what respect is.’

  The journalists were disappointed. What had happened to German goalkeepers? Didn’t they like stirring up trouble any more? At least they still had Lehmann for a while longer – Mad Jens.

  In the summer of 2007, after Robert’s third summer in Hanover ended on familiar terrain – eleventh position in the Bundesliga – he and Teresa went to Lisbon for their holidays, as they had done the previous year.

  The comparison couldn’t be ignored: a year ago they had spent their time in Portugal in a state of euphoria, not least because Lara had made such good progress. And now? They were enthusiastic again, even if the excitement could no longer capture them completely. ‘The loss of a child is terrible, that never goes away,’ says Teresa. ‘But we had spent two years living with Lara in a state of emergency, with the constant fear that she might die. On holiday in Lisbon I noticed for the first time, unbearable though her death was, it was also to some extent a liberation. We could live without fear again.’

  They were sitting in La Villa on the beach at Estoril. It was half-past nine in the evening and still broad daylight. Even the sea was moving with the lethargy of a fading summer day.

  ‘I’d like to live here for ever,’ Robert said.

  ‘We could move back here when your football career’s over.’

  ‘Why don’t we buy a house? Then we could come to Lisbon for a few days all the time, not just in the summer holidays.’

  The next day the fantasy seemed to be taking shape.

  He met Paulo Azevedo. They had stayed in contact since the event at the Goethe Institute the previous year and Robert had discovered that they had something in common: almost ten years earlier Paulo had once scored two goals against him. Having grown up in Freiburg, Paulo had played as a professional for Carl Zeiss Jena in 1999. In one training session he had scored twice against Robert, who was there working out with his old club during a summer visit.

  ‘What would you say to me playing for Benfica again at the end of my career, at thirty-five?’ Robert asked.

  ‘Let me do the sums. You’ll be thirty-five in August 2012. That works perfectly: then you would have played the 2010 World Cup and the 2012 European Championship for Germany, and you can let your career fade away here in grand style.’

  ‘And what sort of smaller Primeira Liga clubs are there around Lisbon?’

  ‘Belenenses.’

  ‘Of course, Belenenses! I could play there from thirty-six to thirty-eight. I’m sure I could manage that.’

  It sounded like a joke, but as he was coming out with those words they turned into serious ideas in his head. He had dreams again.

  He went with Paulo to the German Embassy, where Paulo was now working. A reception was being held in the garden for the national deaf team, who were taking part in their European Championship in Lisbon. Robert Enke was the surprise guest.

  The deaf footballers shouted with joy when they recognised him. He tried not to let his uncertainty show. Could he talk to them, could they read his lips? He stuck with their coach, Frank Zürn, who wasn’t deaf but who had learned sign language from his deaf parents.

  Zürn was pleasantly surprised at how many questions the goalkeeper had. How did deaf people manage in their professional lives? How did they communicate on the pitch? Could they play in a normal football team? When Robert said at some point ‘Perhaps you know that I had a deaf daughter’, it was Zürn who didn’t want to let anything show. He was overwhelmed by the natural way Robert talked about her.

  Encouraged by the coach, who told him the deaf footballers would understand him if he talked slowly, Robert mingled among them. They kidded each other, as footballers do. He wasn’t as muscular as Kahn; why didn’t he come and play with them; why didn’t he switch to Werder Bremen. Two days later the deaf players were amazed. He was standing with them on the training pitch in Cascais and changing into his kit.

  That’s right, he was training with them. That was what they wanted, wasn’t it?

  A few months after this holiday, Robert rang up Zürn. He had thought about what Zürn had told him that evening at the embassy in Lisbon, that the deaf players had problems funding the running of their team. He had had a word with his glove sponsor. Frank Zürn could buy the team’s equipment from them at cost price.

  Lara’s death had given Robert a deeper sensitivity to the needs of others and a sure sense of how he could bring joy into their lives.

  He sat in his neighbours’ garden in Empede and heard about how Uli Wilke’s brother-in-law, a roofer, suffered from chronic back pain. He took the roofer along to training and walked him into the team changing-room. ‘See that you make this guy fit again, he’s my handyman,’ Robert said to the physiotherapist.

  25. Robert in the pool at his holiday home in Lisbon.

  He asked the clinic at the University Hospital to set up a room so that parents
could be alone with their child as his or her life came to an end. He collected donations to finance the conversion. He went to Göttingen to play football with children with cardiac problems, children who had to be connected to oxygen-bottles after the strain of shooting at goal. ‘Shoot low – I can’t reach the high ones at my age,’ he told the children.

  But he didn’t want to help everyone. In his obituaries it often said he never turned down requests for autographs – as if that was the highest level of niceness for a footballer, as if that showed human greatness. In reality he always wondered why he should give rude people autographs.

  ‘That’s unreadable,’ a woman once said when Robert had signed something for her.

  ‘Oh really?’ asked Robert. He took the card back and wrote his name in childish capitals underneath. ‘That better?’

  ‘Hey, Enke, got an autograph?’ a boy asked another time.

  ‘For someone who says Robert or Mr Enke and then please, then yes, I would have one,’ he replied, and walked on.

  But he still found it hard to say unpleasant things to people. In January 2008 he had to talk to an office clerk at Hannover 96. The woman who cleaned the changing-rooms had come to see Robert: the clerk, who was always very polite to the players, talked down to her. Robert took him aside and explained the principles of courteous behaviour. He could speak quietly and still sound thunderous; he had learned that from giving orders to the defenders and the dogs. But when it was over he felt relief, not contentment.

  All the disputes in the team now came straight to him. He had been club captain since August 2007. He was Hannover 96’s figurehead. ‘I also thought he’d grown up since coming to Hanover,’ says Tommy Westphal. ‘From an introverted player who was grateful to be back in the Bundesliga, he had turned into a professional who was interested in the club as a whole. But making Roba the captain – I don’t know. To my way of thinking that wasn’t his natural role. He wasn’t someone who naturally took a position on everything, who settled all kinds of conflicts.’

  He had been a captain once before, in his last year in Lisbon. Once, the Brazilian Roger Flores had taken a free kick quickly, just because he felt like it, even though as Benfica’s free-kick specialist Pierre van Hooijdonk should have done it. Roger’s shot flew high over the goal. After the game Robert went up to him with his index finger raised. ‘You never do that again, do you hear me?’

  When he was angry, he often stumbled unexpectedly into arguments. But when Hannover’s coach Dieter Hecking and Michael Tarnat fought out a quiet little war, he understood both sides and chose to stay out of it. ‘There were situations when the whole changing-room was arguing noisily – about whether we should play in diamond formation in midfield, for example – then Robs would say something from the back corner of the room, and everything would calm down,’ Hanno Balitsch remembers. ‘But I think he felt better when Altin Lala was captain.’

  The captain of Hannover 96 had countless duties, Robert discovered during Advent in 2007. He even had to write the team’s Christmas cards to the attendants.

  During the holidays, Marco rang him. Robert thought he was going to wish him a happy Christmas. Instead Marco told him he wanted to go into treatment with Dr Markser.

  Robert was amazed – almost angry, Marco thought. Marco, after all, was blessed with a cheerful demeanour, he was always up for a silly joke, always at the centre of any group; Robert had often taken his lead from Marco’s good mood. So what made Marco think he had problems like his own? ‘Well, yeah, you often had worries about injuries,’ Robert conceded at last, as if he was still thinking about what to make of this turnaround.

  Marco didn’t suffer from depression; he had no idea what was wrong with him, he just knew he had to do something. He was playing in Serie D now and at that level he was without doubt an outstanding footballer, but even that certainty didn’t free him from a self-inflicted tormenting pressure. On the contrary, he just felt a new pressure: didn’t they now expect him to be the best every Sunday?

  He often thought back to the moments in his career when everything could have gone differently. At the age of twenty, still the talent with those three Bundesliga goals in his first seven games, Hertha BSC were desperate to sign him. In a hotel in Essen he’d actually shaken hands on a deal with Hertha’s sporting director Dieter Hoeness. Ten days later his agent Norbert Pflipsen suddenly said to him: you know what, son, you’d be better off staying in Mönchengladbach. Marco didn’t understand: he would get a bigger salary at Hertha, the coach there envisaged him as a regular player. But he was twenty and he didn’t dare contradict his agent. Flippi knew what he was doing. ‘Don’t you know why Flippi didn’t want you to go to Hertha?’ his older team-mates told him later. ‘Because Mönchengladbach threatened him: if Villa goes, you won’t earn anything from any other transfer here.’

  Memories in an endless loop … How Liberopoulos, his strike partner at Panathinaikos, played his passes too hard and inaccurately, so that Marco missed out on a goal – because Liberopoulos really saw him as his rival. How the newspapers in Nuremberg called him a ‘non-starter’ who should be ‘mucked out’. Memories that turned into eternal questions … Did a professional footballer have to put up with cruelty like that? Should a professional have stood up to Flippi and insisted on switching to Hertha? Should a professional have kicked Liberopoulos on the ankle the next day at training? (An unfortunate tackle, not even a foul – you could easily fake something like that with a bit of skill.) Shouldn’t a professional have shrugged when he was treated at Nuremberg like a ‘piece of meat, a piece of pizza, a piece of cheese that you have to get rid of’? His parents and teachers had always taught him that sensitivity and good manners were among the most important things in life.

  But was it perhaps simply a question of being strong? And if so, could Dr Markser make him strong?

  ‘I went to Valentin Markser with the goal of freeing up my head,’ Marco says.

  What he initially got from his conversations with the doctor was just more and harder questions. What did he consider to be a successful life? Was it just a clever move in front of goal? Did he actually know what he wanted to achieve? What sort of things did he notice in life generally – was he even enjoying the coffee he was drinking, for example? Marco Villa needed time to come up with answers to such questions. And he slowly came to see not just himself but his friend more clearly. Robert now seemed to know exactly what he wanted to be: a goalkeeper with a healthy detachment from the excitements of the professional footballing business.

  But Marco could also see how much more difficult it was becoming for Robert to maintain his composure.

  Even though thirty to forty thousand spectators still came to Hannover 96 games, Robert suddenly felt far more eyes than that weighing down on him. The country wanted to know whether he was really good enough for the national team. The 2008 European Championship was fast approaching, and the question of which goalkeeper was the right one for Germany was becoming a national pastime. Could Jens Lehmann stay as number one even though he had been on the subs bench at Arsenal for weeks? Shouldn’t one of the talented young players like René Adler or Manuel Neuer be appointed rather than Timo Hildebrand and Robert Enke? The internet surveys, interviews with experts, newspaper campaigns and general lobbying were endless. ‘You can forget about Enke and whatever all those other people are called,’ said Bayern Munich’s manager Uli Hoeness – Bayern’s Michael Rensing was going to be the next national goalkeeper. Nobody except Hoeness thought that. So Robert told himself it was a lot of fuss about nothing; the only important thing was the objective assessment of the Germany coaches. ‘If Hoeness wants to push his player, then let him get on with it, but he still has to behave with decency – and he’s lost that,’ he replied. It sounded level-headed. He himself had thought that he was past letting such skirmishes drive him mad. He had to admit to himself that he had been wrong. Criticism wound him up.

  Hannover’s coach Dieter Hecking criticised him just once
in public. In a friendly against Grasshopper Club Zurich Robert had missed a corner and slipped during a goal-kick. ‘He wasn’t concentrating as much as he needed to,’ Hecking said to the journalists. It was just a friendly, it was just a casual remark, it was forgotten by everyone two days later. Only Robert was still talking about it three weeks later, his hand clenched with fury on the steering wheel. What had made Hecking think he hadn’t been concentrating? What had made him pillory him in public?

  In April 2008, with two months to go to the European Championship, Hannover 96 beat Eintracht Frankfurt 2–1. At home at night Robert watched the Bundesliga highlights on television in his sitting-room. The camera moved with slow relish when Stuttgart’s goalkeeper Sven Ulreich punched a cross away only for Leverkusen’s Simon Rolfes to trap the ball and slot it home. Minutes later, Ulreich couldn’t hold on to a shot, Leverkusen’s striker Stefan Kiessling was quick to convert the rebound. ‘Football is sometimes very simple,’ the Stuttgart coach Armin Veh told the television reporter: ‘We lost as the result of two goalkeeping errors. Everyone saw that. It’s no good protecting the goalkeeper.’ Robert was furious. How could a coach say that about his goalkeeper! Particularly when the first goal hadn’t been a mistake, just a decent punch that had unfortunately been picked up by an opponent. He was used to television reporters overlooking something like that, but a coach! Robert yelled at the television: ‘That’s completely out of order!’

  Sven Ulreich was nineteen and still living at the family home. He had played in the Bundesliga only ten times and was wondering dejectedly the next day whether that was it, whether he’d blown his chances, when his phone rang. He looked at the caller’s number and didn’t recognise it. He thought for a moment, then picked it up.

  ‘When I heard the voice, I was startled,’ says Ulreich.

  Robert didn’t really know Ulreich. Two weeks earlier, after a Hannover–Stuttgart game, they had talked to each other for three minutes. He’d got his mobile number off his glove manufacturer. Robert thought he knew the situation Ulreich was currently in.