by Tim Howard
No words came. I was helpless—yet again—to control my own brain, my own body.
Mom took me to a pediatric neurologist. He peppered us with questions about my behavior. If I’d had any doubts about whether I’d been hiding my symptoms, that visit made it clear: I hadn’t been. Mom described it all: the compulsive touching, the twitching, the blinking. She’d noticed everything.
The doctor put words to my symptoms. I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, and Tourette Syndrome, TS—a double whammy of brain difference, a worrisome one-two punch.
OCD is an anxiety disorder, one that brings conscious intrusive thoughts and compulsions—Touch the bannister. Pick up that rock. You’d better do it or something terrible will happen.
TS, on the other hand, creates almost unconscious physical urges.
The two are closely related—at least a third of TS patients have OCD. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell the difference between a tic and a compulsion. But while tics stem from an urge in a specific part of the body—either completely unconsciously or through a premonitory sensation that’s satisfied only by the tic—OCD bubbles up as conscious thoughts in the mind.
“His certainly isn’t the worst case I’ve ever seen,” the doctor said to Mom. I wondered then what the worst case might look like.
What Mom already knew, and I learned over time, is that most people don’t understand TS. They think of it as a “cursing disease,” a disorder that makes people swear uncontrollably. That’s how it’s usually depicted on television. It’s a trope, because it makes a great punch line. And sure, that form exists, but it’s rare—fewer than 10 percent of all diagnosed TS cases. But there are myriad possible tics. In fact, TS looks different in everyone who has it—I’ve heard it called a “fingerprint condition,” and that’s exactly right. No two people have the same case. Some people echo other people’s words. Some hoot, some cough, some hiss or bark or grunt. There are motor tics, too—in fact, it’s not TS unless a person has both vocal and motor tics—like nose wrinkling, grimacing, kicking, or even jumping. Complicating matters, even in a single person tics often change over time, too.
So now we had a name for my urges, but not much else. There was no reliable treatment or cure. Some children did extremely well on medications; others moved from cocktail to cocktail, each one causing different side effects to little avail.
But the doctor explained some other things, too—curious things. He said that he’d seen some examples of people with these disorders having some special gifts—an ability to hyperfocus, to stick with a task until it’s 100 percent mastered. He’d also seen a kind of hypersensitivity—an ability to see and feel and smell things that others couldn’t.
Mom described my challenges as a baby—how sensitive I was to sights and sounds and touch, as if my whole body were one exposed nerve.
The doctor nodded. “Sure. That fits with what I’ve seen in some patients.”
As we walked out of the office, he said, almost as an afterthought, “Mrs. Howard?”
She turned around.
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said. “And there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of: with every challenge a kid faces, there’s some flip side. I have no way to prove it, but I believe this: there’s always a flip side.”
Soon after, my mother met with teachers and administrators at my middle school. She’d gone in armed with all the information she could find: photocopies of books she’d gotten from libraries, pamphlets she’d ordered from organizations, copies of every article she’d been able to find. These were the days before the Internet, of course; Mom had to work hard for the information she had.
She sat in the classroom, a nurse, teachers, administrators, and the district psychologist arrayed in a semicircle around her. Not one of them picked up any of her handouts.
One teacher even asked, “Are you sure Tim has Tourette Syndrome? Because you know, Mrs. Howard, there are so many labels these days that people use to excuse bad behavior.”
Well shit, my mom thought. Now I’m going to have to fight these people, too.
Before she’d gone in, she felt alone. Now she felt worse than alone; she felt outnumbered.
She cried the whole way home.
But it was true what the doctor said about an ability to hyperfocus—at least when it came to sports.
I watched a documentary about Pelé, then spent hour upon hour in the backyard trying to master his techniques—step-overs, cut-backs, stop-and-gos. I practiced day after day, sometimes not even hearing my mom when she called me in for dinner.
I discovered that an Italian cable television station broadcast games of AC Milan, the European Cup soccer champions. Saturdays became devoted to studying Roberto Donadoni’s artful footwork, the way the ball seemed almost Velcroed to his foot as he dribbled down the field.
When the USA qualified for the World Cup in 1990—the first time in 40 years my country reached that big stage—I watched it on television, thrilled for our ragtag group of college players and semipros. There were even some New Jersey guys on the team: Tab Ramos and keeper Tony Meola. I jabbered on and on about these guys to my mother as she rattled pots and boiled water for our evening’s mac and cheese. Then I headed back outside with my ball to practice some more.
The thing is, all those teachers were right: if I had given school that same focus and attention I gave to my athletic pursuits, I’d have had endless potential. But I knew I would never care about homework the way I cared about making myself faster, stronger, quicker, more agile.
From recreational soccer leagues came traveling teams. The more I played, the more I began to understand what the doctor had said about enhanced perception. I could see things somehow, things that other people didn’t seem able to.
I could see, for example when a game was about to shift, could sense the attacking patterns before they happened. I knew exactly when the winger was about to cross the ball and whose head it would land on.
I could see the flicker of a striker’s eyes before he pivoted. Sometimes I even saw it in time to warn my defender.
I noticed things off the field, too.
I was beginning to see how different my mom was from the other soccer parents, the ones who rolled up in Lexuses and SUVs. The demographics of my New Jersey had started to shift. North Brunswick had once been the outer edge of the suburbs. Now new communities popped up all around us, massive homes occupying space that had previously been farmland and woods. These were every bit as grand as Fox Hill Run, often more so. The families moving into these houses formed the fabric of the New Jersey soccer world.
I also saw the way my mom avoided others parents’ eyes, stood apart from them as they talked about kitchen renovations and gym memberships. I observed her shoulders round as she got closer to them, as if she were sinking into herself. It was almost like she wanted to disappear.
It was as if simply being around these other parents—their crisp sweaters embroidered with tiny polo players, their absolute sense of belonging—diminished her, sucked some of the life right out of her.
I could see she felt less than them somehow.
If she was going to keep bringing me back to the field, week after week, no matter how out of place she felt, the least I could do was to make her proud. So, with my mom in my peripheral vision, I ran even faster and kicked even harder, imagining that I was Donadoni himself, one of the greatest in the world. When I scored a goal, I turned to Mom, eager to make sure she’d seen it.
She always had.
On Mother’s Day in my sixth-grade year, I played striker in a game during a cold, driving rain. Mom stood on the sidelines, apart from the other parents. She held a tiny umbrella for a while, but it was no use; the rain flew in from the side, pelting her face. Mom finally closed the umbrella, dropped it to the ground, and held her hands up to shield her eyes from the torrent.
I hadn’t gotten her a Mother’s Day gift. I didn’t have an allowance, and I didn’t have a dime to my name. I
couldn’t imagine a time when I would have enough money to buy flowers or perfume or even a decent umbrella.
But this game: this was something I could do for her. I could race down the field, splashing through puddles as I ran. I could slam that ball past the other keeper, score one for our team.
When I did, I turned to her and shouted over the heads of the other players, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!”
Even today, all these years and games later, I can still remember the expression that came over her face as she stood there, dripping wet on the sidelines. That smile on her face, pure and radiant against the battleship-gray sky, showed me everything I would ever need to know about love.
MY OWN PRIVATE SOCCER ACADEMY
You ready to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life?”
The man in front of me—a short, redheaded Irish guy—had an intense, restless energy. He looked like an oversized kid, the scrappy kind that was always ready for a fight. His eyes fixed on me with such hardness, such expectation, that I couldn’t quite tell if the guy was going to train me, or eat me.
Mom had brought me here, to the GK1 Club, so I could spend a few hours with Tim Mulqueen, the goalkeeping coach of Rutgers University’s men’s team.
Rutgers was a powerhouse. The previous year, they made it to the NCAA championship final, losing to UCLA in a penalty kick shootout. This year, 1991, they’d been ranked number one. One of their defenders, Alexi Lalas, had earned the Hermann Trophy for the best collegiate soccer player in the nation.
When Tim Mulqueen offered goalkeeping training for youth players, parents all over New Jersey clamored to give their college-bound hopefuls that extra edge.
Mom had scraped up $25 for a single session with Mulqueen.
He looked me up and down. “Okay, Tim. Go get in goal.” I started to jog toward the edge of the field.
“Sprint!” Mulqueen called after me.
I sprinted.
That afternoon, Mulqueen—Coach Mulch, as he was known to his Rutgers players—pushed me harder than anyone ever had. Before then, other coaches might fire four or five volleys at me at a time.
Not Mulch. He hammered ten in a row, so fast it was hard to get back on my feet between them. The moment I saved one, another was already whizzing past me.
“Recover faster,” he barked. “You can do better than that.”
Then he launched five more rockets.
“Some games are like this,” he said, sending another one flying at me.
“They keep coming at you.” And another.
“You’ve got to be ready.” Yet one more.
He watched me carefully, in a way he hadn’t been watching the others.
“Move your feet closer together,” he said. I did. He kicked a hard low ball at me, and I stopped it.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s do some more of those.”
When my mom came to get me, he ran over to her. “Mrs. Howard,” he said, “you’ve got to bring Tim back.”
Mom looked down. I knew she wanted so many things for me—warmer mittens, math tutors, sessions with a psychologist who could help me with my OCD. If we couldn’t afford those things, $25 a week for goalkeeping training was out of the question.
“This is, um . . .” She paused. “. . . a one-time thing.”
“Your son’s got something, Mrs. Howard. He’s got something I haven’t seen.”
I let those words sink in. I had something.
Mom shook her head. It was impossible, of course.
“I don’t care about the money.” Mulch looked intently at her now. “You bring him back. No charge. Ever.”
To this day, I believe the offer Mulch made that day—to work with me, for free, indefinitely—was as important, as life altering, as any I’ve ever had.
As we walked toward the car, Mulch called after me, “See you next week, Tim Howard!” Then he added, sharply, “Don’t be late!”
I trained with Mulch week after week. Eventually, we’d work together every day, year after year. The man was true to his word: he never asked for so much as one penny.
Within a year, a prominent New Jersey family put together a club team, hand-selecting the county’s—and then later the state’s—best young players to surround their own son on the field. Mulch was the guy they hired to coach us.
Mulch prided himself on his notoriously tough practices—he was like the Bobby Knight of youth soccer. His practices were so brutal, in fact, that kids often vomited on the field. Over time, it became a kind of joke: practice hasn’t started until someone has thrown up.
Sometimes parents complained, but Mulch shrugged. “Sounds like you need another coach, then.”
He wasn’t going to change his approach for anyone.
Of all those kids, Mulch pushed me hardest.
When other kids played badly, Mulch jogged over to me. “This is on you, Tim. Fix it.”
Me? I was standing all the way back here. I couldn’t help what was happening in midfield.
“Come on,” he’d push. “How do you make it better?”
I watched them for a minute.
“Well,” I said. “They’re pushing up too fast and leaving big gaps in the middle.”
“Right,” Mulch said. “So talk to your midfielders. Tell them what they need to do differently.” And then he stood there while I directed our midfielders to close up the center and force the opposing forwards wide.
If a kid came to practice even 40 seconds late, Mulch would yell at me. “Go have a word with him.”
“Why me?”
“ ’Cause I’m making you the leader. Go.”
And if I hesitated even a moment, if I sat there blinking, wondering why is that my job, Mulch snapped. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Go!”
Once, when our club team—the Central Jersey Cosmos—played a game in South Jersey, a few of the families got stuck in traffic on the way down. Mulch stormed over to me as I put my cleats on. “Four of your teammates are late, Tim.” He was fuming.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
He stood there with his arms folded.
“And?” I said. Nearby, players were already on the field, and I was ready to go warm up with them.
“And so you don’t get to play,” Mulch said.
“What?”
I thought he must be kidding, but his face was dead serious.
“Nope. Not when your teammates are late like this.”
“That’s not fair!” I hadn’t been late. It’s not like I had any control over those parents. Besides, there was no one on that team—no one—who was half as good a keeper as I was. He was putting the whole damn team in jeopardy.
“So I want you to make sure no one is ever late for a game again,” he said.
Our club team practiced in front of the Middlesex County correctional facility. As we played, the inmates watched through their bars. They called out to us, hooting and hollering and whistling. We did our best to pretend not to hear the catcalls and F-bombs.
I was pretty good at tuning them out, but when the ball flew past the post or rolled over the end line and I had to fetch it, their calls came back into sharp focus.
“Come on back here, boy,” the prisoners called to me.
“Hey, kid!” they called. “You come on over here, and I’ll teach you how to play games.”
I picked up that ball and sprinted back toward the goal, toward my teammates. Back toward my mom. Mulch. Back toward everything that made me feel safe.
As I moved up the ranks of youth soccer, Mom drove me all over the state—and eventually all over the East Coast—for my different teams.
Although I continued to play midfield on my school team, I was by now a full-time goalkeeper everywhere else. I’d come to appreciate the subtleties of the position, especially the mental part. I liked anticipating three moves ahead, then setting up our defense so it would be ready for any possible danger. And when the opposing team was able to get behind our back four, I loved fly
ing between the ball and the net, doing everything in my power to stop it.
The night before we left for each tournament or game, I packed and repacked my bag. Obsessively. Hours would pass, and I was unfolding and refolding and reorganizing. It’s good now, I told myself. Leave it alone. Just go to sleep.
But in the same way my OCD drove me to touch household items in a particular pattern, there was a right way to pack my bag, and a wrong way. Somehow I knew—with that familiar mounting sense of dread—that I’d packed it the wrong way. So I got out of bed again, unzipped my bag, and started all over.
Not right yet. Do it again.
Still wrong. Try again.
There was always a team hotel somewhere, but it was invariably too expensive for Mom. She and I stayed separately in motels a notch down in quality, always on strips lined with fast-food restaurants and car dealers and pawnshops. Instead of eating out, we looked for a grocery store. There we bought store-brand peanut butter and jelly. In the motel room, we made a pile of sandwiches and ate them while we watched television.
I think about those trips now, though—all those nights in roadside motels. Since those days, soccer in America has become more organized, more structured, more about tournament schedules. It’s about team hotels and long rides in minivans capped off with dinner at a burger joint.
I worry for the kids who can’t afford that. It’s become even harder for working families today than it was for my Mom. They have less recreational time, less wiggle room in their budgets.
And what does that mean for those kids who aspire to play at the highest—most expensive—level?
In much of the rest of the world, kids begin playing soccer in pickup games—a loose, often barefoot scramble in scrubby patches of dirt or smack dab in the middle of the street. These future Messis and Ronaldos don’t have uniforms or coolers full of juice boxes. Sometimes they don’t even have a ball; they make do with whatever they’ve got handy.
We could use a little more of that in America—a little more scrap, a little more pickup, a little less structure. U.S. Soccer and the U.S. Soccer Development Academy are trying to change the travel team culture today, and I’m glad about that. The truth is, until we get that right, I’m not sure we’ll ever become the nation of soccer champions that we all want to be.
