by Tim Howard
And then there’s the rain, thin and persistent. The dampness seeps into your bones. Not long ago, a Manchester resident tracked the weather for an entire year, taking meticulous notes, and found that rainy days outnumbered dry ones by 198 to 167.
That winter, taking Clayton out for walks with Laura became the best part of my day. Each afternoon, we strolled over to Carrs Park, a mix of woods and meadow along the Bollin River where Clayton would romp with his canine playmates, splash along the riverbanks, and pee on every available tree. At night, exhausted, we’d all curl up, close our eyes, and sleep.
I loved that dog. I loved that he didn’t know anything about goals or games, about hot-headed managers or boastful teammates. I loved that he wasn’t impressed when he heard passersby whisper Tim Howard . . . Manchester United . . . yeah, that’s him.
Most of all, I loved the way Laura looked at Clayton, how her eyes went soft just because he thumped his tail on the floor. And when I checked out—because of anxiety before a game or disappointment after one, or when I was too spent from a tough training session to utter a word—Clayton would step in wagging his tail and make Laura laugh. Even when I couldn’t.
I often lingered after practice. Just as I had enlisted Tab to fire balls at me back in our MetroStars days, now I asked Ruud van Nistelrooy to open up a can of thunder. Ruud was happy to oblige, sending balls in with swerve and dip at speeds up to 90 mph. But no matter how long we stayed out there, we were never the last to leave the field. That’s because no one could outwork Cristiano Ronaldo.
Cristiano has always had plenty of flash—the underwear commercials, the diamonds in each ear, the fleet of fast cars, the supermodels. And sure, he might strut into the locker room wearing shades and an air of superiority. But what I remember most vividly about him isn’t his cockiness. It’s how hard he trained.
As Ruud and I headed toward the locker room after practice, eager to put on warm, dry clothes and get home to rest and recover, Cristiano was still out there dribbling the ball around the perimeter of our training ground.
I remember watching him one afternoon as the rain pelted down. He kept on working on his ball tricks while the rest of us took shelter inside.
That guy’s going to be the best in the world one day, I thought.
Laura took control of the domestic details, from masterminding travel schedules and grocery lists to investigating local restaurants; she soon knew whom to turn to, and for what. With my fat new paycheck, we suddenly had money rolling in and nowhere to put it, so she researched investment options and hired advisors when necessary. Understanding that Manchester United players should dress the part—in the fashion equivalent of the luxury cars they drove—she even bought my clothes.
But that financial windfall caused some problems for us. Almost as soon as I’d signed with Manchester United, friends and loved ones began asking us for money. Within a few months’ time, I easily could have handed over hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, I kept thinking about Dan’s advice. My career is front-loaded. I have no idea what will happen from here. Take the basics off the table.
So I said no to any handouts, and I was amazed to see how quickly past relationships could fall apart.
We didn’t socialize a whole lot, but Laura carved out space for a few friends. Once a week we’d have dinner with Claudio Reyna, a U.S. star who played for Manchester City in the Premier League, and his wife, Danielle, usually at their place. Sometimes another U.S. player, Eddie Lewis, and his wife, Mari, joined us. With their kids running around, the guys and I would talk soccer while Danielle and Laura and Mari chatted about everything but. Danielle cooked, and we’d all relax over some wine.
Because Laura didn’t like to stay alone in our big house, she often slept at Claudio and Danielle’s whenever I had away games. She stayed in a room with their young son Jack, who was then four years old.
“Oh, Tim,” she’d say. “He’s the sweetest little thing.” There was a wistfulness in her voice as she described watching Jack’s little chest rise and fall as he slept.
Her smile reminded me of the one my mom had given me when I made that Mother’s Day goal. Laura was going to make an amazing mom one day.
In late September, Rio Ferdinand, our best defender, missed a routine drug test. It was a stupid mistake, not a sinister dodge; he’d simply forgotten to show up after practice as planned. As soon as he remembered, he’d turned around and returned to the training grounds . . . only to be told it was too late.
He was tested 24 hours later, with negative results. But that didn’t matter to the Football Association. Nor did it matter that he offered to have a hair follicle test, which would have registered results for the prior six months. Even when Alex Ferguson went absolutely apoplectic, demanding appeals, the FA was unmoved.
They fined Rio 50,000 pounds—about $82,000. Worse, they banned him from playing for eight months. He’d miss the entire second half of the current season, and some of the next.
It was a sucker punch to our defense and it meant more pressure on me to raise my game.
By March, I’d been playing soccer for 14 consecutive months. I’d gone from the MLS preseason in January 2003 to the regular season, and from there straight into the Premier League campaign. Even the holidays offered no respite. I trained on Christmas morning, and played a game the very next day.
Manchester United’s season wouldn’t finish until the very end of May. I was still staring down three more months of nonstop competition, game upon game upon game, without pause.
Never before had I faced stakes this high, for this long, at this level of intensity.
On the way to matches, I sat near the front of the bus and stayed quiet, while Ferguson played cards in back with Roy Keane and Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville, laughing and bantering from the hotel to the stadium. I closed my eyes and cleared my throat and tried to focus on my breathing.
I needed to concentrate.
When you win, you don’t question it. You don’t wonder how you pulled off that save or why you happened to play well in that particular game but not some other one.
It’s only when you lose that the self-examination begins.
I can pinpoint the day it started for me: March 9, 2004.
The top teams throughout Europe compete in the UEFA Champions League tournament—by far the most important, prestigious club competition. Earlier in the season, we’d played six Champions League games. We’d won five, and advanced to the round of 16.
We’d meet FC Porto, a club in the top league of Portuguese soccer. After playing them home and away, the team with the highest aggregate score would move on. In the event of a tie, whichever of us had the most away goals (weighted more heavily than home goals) prevailed.
We were the clear favorite, and we expected to win. But the first game, played at Porto, didn’t go as planned. Although we took an early lead, Porto’s striker Benni McCarthy sent two brilliant goals right past me. We lost 2–1.
Ferguson was so enraged he refused to shake hands with José Mourinho, Porto’s new manager, still a relative unknown.
Mourinho responded by mocking Ferguson to the media, saying, “I understand why he is a bit emotional . . . you would be sad too if your team gets as clearly dominated by opponents who have been built on ten percent of the budget.”
In the second game, a header from Paul Scholes gave us the lead in the 32nd minute. If the score remained 1–0, we’d be tied on aggregate at 2–2—enough to win, with the help of our away-goal advantage.
We held the line for nearly an hour. But with two minutes left in injury time, Phil Neville was called for a foul outside the penalty area. Benni McCarthy—the guy who scored on me twice in the last game—would take the free kick.
I organized the wall. McCarthy struck his shot. The ball flew past the line of defenders, curling toward the net.
I’ve replayed that moment a thousand times since. I know exactly what I did wrong. I had two options: catch the bal
l, or parry it into a safe area, beyond the box. A truly top keeper, an experienced keeper, would have had the confidence to do one or the other.
Today I’d have that confidence. A decade ago, though, I was still raw, not assured enough to act decisively. I knocked the ball right back into the danger zone: Smack dab in front of the six-yard box. Porto’s Francisco Costinha pounced on the rebound. His shot came sailing toward my right. I dove. I stretched. I extended my hands as far as I could. It’s possible the tips of my gloves even grazed the ball. Then it slid into the far corner of the net.
Before I even hit the ground I understood: we were out of the Champions League.
I lay facedown on the field for a moment. I looked up in time to see Costinha’s triumphant leap, fist pumping in the air. Then his teammates throwing themselves on top of him. Then Jose Mourinho’s now-famous manic dash down the touchline—arms toward the sky, dark trench coat flapping behind him in the wind. This celebration, which would be replayed again and again, essentially announced his arrival on the European stage.
Porto would go on to win that year’s Champions League title. In time, Mourinho would be considered one of the greatest managers in all of soccer.
But all I knew, lying there on the turf, was that it was over for us.
And that was on me.
BENCHED
Criticism hurts. But nothing hurts more than knowing you could have done better.
I took the blame for that Champions League loss—in the papers, among the fans, with Ferguson, and with my teammates.
“That’s not fair,” said Laura. “Phil Neville made the foul. The ball went past ten other guys before it got to you. And where were your defenders on the rebound? They didn’t follow the shot.”
She’d look at me earnestly. “Tim, honey. It’s not your fault.”
But I knew better. Stopping that ball, keeping it from hitting the net, was my job. It was the job I signed up for when I came to Man U. If I couldn’t take the heat, I shouldn’t have been standing in that box.
Mulch called me to see how I was doing. He was working for the Kansas City Wizards now, and he’d caught the last five minutes on the bus ride home from his game. I knew him well enough by now to know that his heart must have sunk down to his toes when he heard what I’d done.
“Listen, Tim,” Mulch said. “This is just another step in the journey. You’ll have other games. You’ll have other saves.”
I thanked him, but it didn’t matter.
That voice inside me was saying as it had all along, You kept calling me the next Peter Schmeichel, but I knew I wasn’t there yet.
I could be someday. I swore I could be, but I was 24 years old, still young for a keeper. I was fresh from the MLS. I needed time. But time was a luxury I wasn’t about to get at Manchester United.
Five days after Porto, we played our crosstown rivals, Manchester City, and lost 4–1. After that, Alex Ferguson announced that our backup keeper, Roy Carroll, would be playing in the next three games. It meant I’d be on the bench for our second Premier League match against Arsenal.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Laura when I told her. She had fire in her eyes. “We’re talking about one mistake, Tim. One.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well . . .”
She stood there, waiting for the end of that sentence.
“It was really big mistake,” I said.
Ferguson put me back in for the final month of the season, including the FA Cup, a tournament that runs concurrently with the Premier League. We beat Arsenal in the semifinals.
Something had changed, though. I could feel it.
I could feel it in the way Tony Coton spoke to me during practice—or rather didn’t. We went through our routines—our high volleys and low balls. Sometimes, if he didn’t like how I went after one, he’d snap at me. Beyond that, though, I got almost no feedback. After training, he disappeared, scurrying off the field, almost as if he didn’t want to be seen with me.
I always clear my throat before games—just another one of my tics. The closer to kickoff, the more I do it. Before one of the final games of the season, my phone rang.
“You okay?” Dan asked.
“Yeah, why?”
There was a pause. “Well, I got a call from Tony Coton. He said you’re throwing up in the bathroom.”
I scratched my head. Had Coton heard my throat-clearing and mistaken it for throwing up?
Dan added, “Tony’s asking a lot of questions about your Tourette.”
I felt my jaw harden. “Why?”
“It sounds as though he thinks it’s affecting your play.”
My TS had never been an issue in terms of my goalkeeping. Not here, not at the MetroStars, not even as a kid. But suddenly I felt like I was back in high school, like I had to hide my condition again.
The thing is, if that was in their head—that TS was behind my mistakes—that wasn’t something I could overcome.
“You tell him he has nothing to worry about,” I muttered into the phone.
Leaving Old Trafford that day, I kept my eyes fixed ahead. If Tony Coton or Alex Ferguson were somewhere in the vicinity, I didn’t want to run into them, because I had no idea what I’d do.
At the very end of the season, Tony Coton approached me before practice.
He told me I’d won the Professional Footballers’ Association goalkeeper of the year—the most prestigious award in England. He said it in such a matter-of-fact manner that it took a moment to sink in.
Each year, the PFA awards are given at an invitation-only gala dinner. It’s held in London and staged like Oscars night for the Premier League. Limos. Red carpet. Tuxedos. Paparazzi. If you’re one of the 11 men to earn an award—for your position—you go. That’s why it was so strange that Tony didn’t say a word about the event. He simply informed me I was getting the award, and then—bizarrely—he walked away.
A few months earlier, Coton had paraded me around and patted himself on the back for discovering me. Now it was like he was embarrassed that I would be representing Manchester United at the awards banquet.
The event came and went, and neither of us spoke of it again. I suppose my name must have been announced and politely applauded at the dinner, but I wasn’t there to hear it. A trophy arrived later, a silver symbol of where I hadn’t been.
Laura and I went home to Memphis at the end of that season. We had a party to celebrate our marriage; my Poppa and three-year-olds danced while wearing Manchester United caps. Claudio and Danielle flew in from England with the kids. Eddie Lewis and Mari. Steve Senior and some of my other high school buddies were there. Mulch and Dan brought their families. This is going to be my home someday, I thought. When all this soccer is done, I want to come right back here, to Memphis.
Laura’s mom approached me at our party. She gave me an enormous hug. “You two will always be married,” she said. “Because you have God in your marriage.” I hugged her back with gusto.
I believed it.
Roy and I spent the following season, 2004–2005, playing goalkeeping musical chairs. Roy was Ferguson’s first choice for a while. Then, when he made a mistake, he put me in the game. I lasted until my next error. Then I was out, and Roy was back in.
Laura was furious on my behalf.
Shaking her head, she’d say, “I can’t believe they ripped you out of the lineup like that.”
When I didn’t respond, she folded her arms over her chest, tapped her foot impatiently. “You do know it’s because Tony Coton’s afraid to stand up to Alex Ferguson, right? Because Ferguson is a big old bully and nobody stands up to him.”
I loved her loyalty. But the truth is, it wasn’t one mistake anymore. I was making many.
In October, we played Arsenal at Old Trafford. I didn’t play, but I joined the fight, in a way.
Arsenal had swaggered in on the back of a 49-game unbeaten run. They skulked out with a one-match losing streak after we beat them 2–0. Ruud converted a penalty kick, and a 19-year-old prod
igy named Wayne Rooney, who had come over from Everton, scored a stunning strike in stoppage time.
It was a physical game from the start and the bad blood flowed past the final whistle. We were in the locker room celebrating our victory when Ferguson walked in. He had this massive stain on his crisp white shirt—some kind of red splotch. He looked totally bewildered.
“Gaffer?” someone asked. “What happened?”
Ferguson said that as he walked past the Arsenal locker room, someone had hurled a slice of pizza at him. Outside the locker room, we could hear a commotion—loud, aggressive voices.
Some of our own teammates were out there, with several of the Arsenal players, and they were about to have a throw-down.
That was it. We leapt up and ran out into the hallway that separated the two locker rooms. It was a narrow space, and everyone was pushing and shoving, grabbing shirts, trying to swing at each other. It was like fighting inside a phone booth; nobody had the room to throw a punch; all we could do was push a palm in someone’s face. A couple of police officers were trying to break up the fight, but they were no match for the out-of-control players. I watched as one of the police officer’s hats got knocked off in the scuffle.
For whatever reason, Rio Ferdinand was late getting to the locker room—Rio’s tall, and from where I stood, I could see him barging his way through the Arsenal players. When he reached our side, he turned around and starting whaling on anyone in a yellow jersey. He couldn’t have even known what we were fighting about, but it didn’t stop him.
When I got home that afternoon, I looked at Laura and shook my head.
“This is a weird job.”
I’d started playing cautiously, tight. I knew I was on a short rope—a very short rope—and that everything I did was going to be scrutinized in a way it never had been before.
My game had changed.
I was focusing more on avoiding mistakes than on winning games. I was thinking, Get through this game. Make sure that if a goal does go in, it’s not your fault.
