The Keeper

by Tim Howard

  They played in a great old-time stadium, Goodison Park. I’d always loved the feel of the place when Man U visited—it felt like going back in time in all the best ways.

  Dan described his discussions with Everton’s manager, David Moyes. “It’s a really good club. I like Moyes, and I think you’ll like him, too. And, Tim, they seem to really want you.”

  The morning after another match that I watched from the bench, I punched the address of the Everton training ground into my car’s satellite navigation system and headed out to meet Moyes. He was waiting when I arrived. Lanky guy. Taller and younger than Ferguson. Red hair, firm jaw, Christopher Walken eyes. He had a scar above his eyebrows—reminders of wounds from his own days as a player.

  We shook hands, then he cut right to the chase. “Look, Tim,” Moyes said. “We could use a keeper like you.”

  He told me about Everton. The club wasn’t Manchester United, he explained; they didn’t have the massive budgets to buy any player they wanted. They had a fraction of the staff that Man U had. They didn’t have the worldwide brand, the built-in cachet. They didn’t have the same level of corporate sponsorships. Or, frankly, the winning record.

  But, he explained, they had their own rich history. They’d competed in the top flight of English soccer for over a hundred seasons. And they had plans. When Moyes came on as manager late in the 2001–2002 season, the club was dangerously close to relegation. Yet he’d guided them to safety, in fifteenth place. The next year, they’d risen to seventh. In the most recent season, they’d gotten to fourth place and qualified for the Champions League.

  “We’re ambitious,” he said. “And I know you’re ambitious, too.”

  Moyes had been working with a crop of homegrown players—like Alan Stubbs, Leon Osman, and Tony Hibbert—guys who were raised in Liverpool, and who had supported Everton since they were kids, later moving up through the ranks of the club’s academy. Moyes was trying to round out that core group with shrewd transfers. The Australian Tim Cahill, for example, who scored 12 goals in his first season with Everton. The Spaniard Mikel Arteta, a smooth midfield general. And my old teammate Phil Neville.

  “We’re hungry,” said Moyes, “but I don’t tolerate egos. We’re a family club. An old-school working-class club, through and through. It’s a great playing environment.”

  While we were sitting there, it dawned on me. He’s selling me.

  And that felt so good after being shunted aside for the past year at United.

  Moyes told me that if I was interested, he’d try to work out a deal where I’d come on loan as Everton’s starting keeper.

  Then I asked the make-or-break question: “And what if I have a bad game?”

  He didn’t blink. “Tim, you’re young and I want you to learn,” he said. “Learning requires risk. So I’m going to encourage you to take some risks. Sometimes you’ll make mistakes. When you do, I’m going to be honest. I might even scream and snarl from time to time. But I’m not going to take you out of the game. In the end, I know you’ll win us more games than you’ll lose us.”

  I’m not going to take you out of the game.

  In that moment, it was as if somebody had opened up a window for me, let a blast of fresh air in.

  Dan arranged a meeting with Alex Ferguson. Ferguson held the meeting in his office with a view of the training ground. A chef wheeled in a steak dinner on a white tablecloth. They made polite small talk; when Dan mentioned his Oxford history degree, Ferguson spent close to an hour talking about his cache of rare documents.

  It was only toward the end of the meal that the conversation rolled around to my transfer.

  “Tim’s a good lad,” said Ferguson. “He’s held true to his part of the deal. He can go on loan to Everton.”

  Truth is, I’m not sure Ferguson cared much. I wasn’t really a part of his plans by now.

  Everton called to ask what number I wanted to wear.

  Call it OCD, or call it a personality quirk, but I’ve always liked even numbers better than odds, 2’s and 4’s best of all.

  Number 24, I said. I want 24.

  Laura ordered a custom Everton jersey in Jacob’s size. The morning I left for my final Manchester United game, Jacob was crawling around the house in that shirt with the number 24 on his tiny back.

  I scooped him up. “Looks good on you, little man.” I kissed his cheek, his neck, the top of his head.

  Oh, man, how I adored this kid.

  I hugged him and set him down. Then I walked out the door.

  My deal with Everton was just a loan; there was no guarantee of anything. It was certainly possible that after a year, I’d return to the Old Trafford bench.

  But that’s not what I believed.

  From that first day with David Moyes, I felt I’d be at Everton for a long, long time.

  LIKE COMING HOME

  On Saturdays, they come streaming toward Goodison Park, a parade of blue. Blue scarves, blue hats, blue jerseys, blue jackets. They crowd into pubs—the Thomas Frost, the Brick, the Leigh Arms, the Lisbon—to knock back pints before the match. Some remain in the pubs through the game; others depart for the stadium—pass through Goodison’s turnstiles and take their seat in the bright blue stadium chairs.

  If they’re loud and rowdy, they head for the lower Gladwys section, behind the goal at the north end. That’s where the hard-core fans, the true nutters, congregate—the boisterous heart and soul of the home crowd. It’s in Gladwys that the madness of the stadium reaches its fever pitch. It’s where the songs echo loudest, where the ebb and flow of the game, the despair and the ecstasy, are felt most deeply.

  Not that there’s a single inch of Goodison where the fans stay quiet. Their cheers and groans and chants mirror precisely the action on the field. I swear, there are days when it feels like cause and effect have merged into one, as if those supporters are no longer reacting, but are instead dictating the tempo of the game.

  Looking back, I think it was those fans, above all else, who saved me.

  I loved Everton from the start. I loved that in this funny old stadium, I felt closer to the fans than I’d been since my Imperials days. Goodison Park is so compact there’s not even room for a security gate between fans and the field. When I took my place in goal, I didn’t simply hear the roar of the crowd, I heard individual fans calling out, “Come on, blue boys!”

  This was English “football” the way it used to be, from the rowdy fans right up to its Liverpool born-and-bred owner, Bill Kenwright, an Everton fan from boyhood.

  Even the locker room felt so much more down-to-earth than at United. On one wall was an image of Alan Ball, one of the Everton greats, with his quote: ONCE EVERTON HAS TOUCHED YOU, NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME.

  It was true: I was welcomed with open arms. Somehow it didn’t matter to my new teammates that I’d been warming the bench. I’d been at Manchester United, the holy grail of English clubs. They were ready to listen to what I had to say.

  I felt like a leader for the first time since arriving in England.

  My new goalkeeping coach, Chris Woods, was confident enough to trust me, to ask what I needed. On our very first day of training together, he set up a bunch of drills, but added, evenly, “If you feel like you need something specific, something I’m not doing, let me know.”

  Those were words I never heard at Manchester United. Not when I was playing well, not when I was playing poorly. Nobody once asked me what I needed to be comfortable. Somehow, it had never occurred to anyone at United that perhaps the key to working with an OCD goalkeeper might just be to give him a sense of control.

  Chris Woods let me be my own man from the start. It was clear how sharp his eye was, how instinctively he understood the position. He challenged me, too. He pushed me to do some new footwork drills that required dexterity and balance.

  I couldn’t find a rhythm with that footwork. I’m a perfectionist, so when I can’t grasp something, it’s infuriating.

  “Let’s stop this,” I s
napped when I started getting frustrated.

  “Sure, Tim,” Woods said. “We can come back to that one.”

  I got aggravated again the next day—and I cut it short again. But after a while, I was more exasperated by my inability to grasp it than I was by the drill itself. Eventually, I came to training and said, “Let’s try that footwork drill again.”

  Chris was taking me to the next level. Yet he was comfortable enough in his own skin, his own success, that he didn’t need to micromanage me.

  Whereas Tony Coton had walked around like a used car salesman, chest all puffed out, and always looking to cut a deal, Chris’s demeanor was both calm and calming.

  Coton had been a good goalkeeper, but not at Chris’s level. Chris had been capped 43 times for England. Maybe that accounted for the gulf between them. Or maybe they simply had different relationships with the manager—Alex Ferguson versus David Moyes. Coton was never close to Ferguson, not really a member of his inner circle. Chris, like the rest of Moyes’s staff, was a core part of the coaching team.

  Whatever the difference was, it was profound. I’ve since played with Chris for hundreds of games—at Everton, and later, too, on the U.S. Men’s National Team. His confidence to see our relationship as a collaboration has never wavered.

  Every single game, win or lose, he shakes my hand, pats me on the back.

  Then we get back to work.

  There was a lot to like about Everton. But it was the Merseyside derby that really sold me.

  The city of Liverpool has two Premier League teams—Everton and Liverpool—and the rivalry between them pits neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member. Driving through Liverpool’s streets, you’ll see blue Everton flags hanging mere feet from red Liverpool ones. Were you to walk inside those homes, you might see half of a household in red, the other half in blue, all of them “winding each other up”—trash-talking.

  Liverpool is a port town, built on the bank of the Mersey River, and the folks who live there—these “Scousers,” as they’re known colloquially, after the traditional Liverpudlian stew—are the dockworkers, the steelworkers. They are hard people, and they’re fierce in their loyalties. Liverpudlians are so passionate about their respective teams that the trash bins (“wheelie bins”) can’t be either red or blue, lest they risk vandalism by a devoted fan of the other color. The trash bins are all purple.

  Twice a year, Everton and Liverpool meet in a derby (pronounced “darby”)—once at Goodison, and once at Anfield, Liverpool’s stadium. While there are plenty of other crosstown rivalries—Arsenal versus Tottenham, for example, or Manchester United versus Manchester City—the Merseyside derby is the most combative of all, complete with more red cards than any other in the Premier League.

  My fourth game with Everton, September 9, 2006, would be my first Merseyside derby. I could feel the tension grow as we got closer to the match. Half of Liverpool shouted to me from the streets, “You beat those Reds this weekend.” The other half—those dressed in red—shouted, well, different things entirely.

  Inside our training complex, the halls buzzed. Not just the players, either. The cooks in the kitchen, all the support staff.

  “You make sure you get those Reds!” called a laundry lady to me as we passed in the hallway.

  “Gonna take ’em down, are ya?” said a woman who cleared my plate after breakfast.

  Jimmy Martin, Everton’s curmudgeonly “kit man”—the guy who’s in charge of all the clothing we need for every training session, every warm-up, every game—regaled me with stories of past derbies.

  “Ninety-one was the greatest of them all,” said Jimmy. He was in his sixties, with a thick Scouser’s accent, a short temper, and a fondness for profanity. “Fuckin’ eight goals! One of ’em a last-second equalizer. A brilliant FA Cup comeback. We might have drawn ’em 4–4, but we showed the Blues spirit that day, I’ll tell ya. Then we came back to beat ’em in the replay. . . .”

  Jimmy narrowed his eyes. He challenged me: “I know you’re on loan, but you’re going to play it like a real Blue, aren’t ’cha?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy,” I answered. “I sure am.”

  And I meant it.

  There’s a lot to remember about that first derby. I recall, for example, the moments before the game: lining up in the tunnel with my new team against our historic rivals. Neither side looked at the other. There were no hands shaken, no half hugs or fist bumps or friendly claps on the back. All eyes were fixed forward. I remember the flood of pride I felt when the theme from Z-Cars (an old British television show), today the Everton fight song, started up, the crowd going wild. I remember the walk out to the field, all my new teammates touching the Everton sign, HOME OF THE BLUES.

  I didn’t touch it; I was only on loan, and I hadn’t earned that honor. Not yet.

  But what I remember most are those fans. They reminded me, in many ways, of my own family: they were roll-up-your-sleeve, blue-collar fighters who’d had to scrap for everything they had. In the same way that I once wanted to give my mom that Mother’s Day goal, I wanted to give these guys something to cheer about. I wanted them to be able to walk into work on Monday morning with their heads held high.

  I made my first save inside of ten seconds, and I made every one after that. We won the game 3–0. We crushed Liverpool. It was Everton’s biggest victory over their neighbors for 42 years. The crowd went absolutely bonkers.

  Later that afternoon, I was back home with Laura and Jacob. Jacob and I were playing peekaboo—every time I pulled my hands away from my face and cried, “Peekaboo!” he burst into fits of giggles.

  Laura sat beside us. “You know what, Tim?” she said. “You haven’t once wondered what David Moyes thinks about you.”

  I glanced at her. “I’m not worried.”

  Jacob kicked out his chubby feet, so I did another peekaboo.

  She was right: I hadn’t felt insecure around Moyes or doubted that he was behind me. Although I’d noticed him during the game and hugged him proudly at the end of it, I hadn’t been concerned about what he thought. For me, it was all about those fans.

  I swept Jacob up in my arms then and buried my face in his belly. I gave him some raspberry kisses and he squealed happily.

  “Bedtime for you now, little man,” I said.

  As I walked up the stairs I called back to Laura. “I love this team!”

  At the same time that Chris Woods allowed me to take charge of my own training regimen, I began to cement my own series of personal rituals, those tiny motions that made me feel prepared. It was all coming together for me: my confidence, my control.

  I’ll admit up front that the line between superstition and preparation—maybe even superstition and OCD—can be very blurry. But the things I did before those early Everton games felt right. So I did them the next time. And the time after that. For example, I didn’t touch the Everton sign in the tunnel before the derby. Although by now I’ve earned the honor, I have never touched it since. Hundreds and hundreds of games later, I still won’t do it.

  When I taped my hands for those early games, I did it in a specific order—left index, left pinkie, right index, right middle, right pinkie, left ring. I’ve never done it differently.

  My own rituals quickly blended with my teammates’. When Leon Osman and I shook hands before an early game, we bumped shoulders. To this day, if we don’t follow the handshake with a shoulder tap, I’ll say, “That doesn’t feel right.”

  And Leon will agree. “Let’s do it again.”

  Same thing with Chris Woods. When he fired balls at me in warm-ups, I had to deal with them in a way that felt exactly right. I could see that he didn’t know what constituted “exactly right.” But he listened when I said, “That’s good, no more.”

  Poor Jimmy Martin, too. I quickly started to drive that man crazy.

  Before games, Jimmy set out my warm-up clothes, all in a size large. But one day I tried them on and they felt . . . wrong. Wrong in the same way that
packing my bags before youth league games in New Jersey felt wrong. Wrong as in, it had to be changed right now.

  I sent for him, and he came in grumbling. “What’s the matter? I know I set it out right for ya, Tim. I check and double-check your kits, you know.”

  “I need a medium,” I said.

  “You’re a large.”

  I shook my head. “I need a medium today, Jimmy.”

  It didn’t take long for Jimmy to start setting out two complete outfits, one large, one medium.

  But I’m telling you: it helped. It was important that I was wearing the exact right-feeling shirt on the exact right day; it gave me a sense of control. And if I was going to succeed, I needed to feel in control.

  The Everton players had their own rituals, too. I learned pretty quickly that you don’t close the door to the bathroom stall. Ever. Not even when you need to—to put it euphemistically—sit down.

  Mind you, these bathrooms are tiny. The whole locker area is small, no clubby chairs, no frills. Some hooks and stools, a refrigerator, and maybe a massage table crammed in a corner. When you’re sitting there with the door open, there’s no one who doesn’t see you.

  But that’s the superstition. And by now I’d learned: you honor rituals when you have them.

  If Moyes walked in while I sat on the pot, pants at my ankles, I’d shrug, like, Yeah, I know this is weird, but what can you do? He shook his head and averted his eyes, as he did for every player.

  Whatever, he seemed to be saying. Whatever we needed to do to feel prepared out there.

  At Christmas, I joined the team for their hospital visits, followed by the Everton Santa Claus—dressed only in blue and white, because of course he can’t wear any red—and handed out presents to children. After our hospital visits, one of our defenders, Alan Stubbs, walked over to me. Alan was a Scouser through and through; he’d grown up in Kirkby, one of Liverpool’s hardscrabble neighborhoods. Stubbs was stubborn, blunt, and tough. The guy had battled cancer and came back even harder than before.