The Keeper

by Tim Howard

  Scanning the roster, I realized that some of these guys were closer in age to my son Jacob than they were to me. Between us, only two players had ever scored in a World Cup: Clint had scored twice, and Michael Bradley once. Our leading World Cup scorer, Landon Donovan, was no longer here. Of the 23 guys who were going to Brazil, fully 17 players were heading to their first World Cup. Since goalie Brad Guzan, hadn’t yet played, that meant only five of us had ever seen the field.

  We’d been placed into the so-called “Group of Death”—the toughest of all eight groups. We’d open with Ghana, the team that had knocked us out of the round of 16 in the last World Cup. They had also helped send us home in 2006. We’d play Portugal, where we’d face the newly crowned World Player of the Year, Cristiano Ronaldo. We’d play Germany—the team I was betting would win the whole thing.

  Plus, our matches would require nearly 9,000 miles of travel, including a visit to Manaus, Brazil, a city deep in the Amazonian jungle, which was known for its steamy and strength-sapping weather conditions.

  Jürgen called our draw “the worst of the worst.”

  In the days between the roster cuts and the team heading to Brazil, our training tended to be light. We played beach volleyball. We turned a sandpit into a soccer tennis court. We spent a lot of time at the Aquatics Center. It’s an amazing facility—four pools, all outdoors. There’s a regulation Olympic diving platform—a tower with boards at 1, 3, 5, 7.5, and 10 meters. Brad Guzan was like a kid at an amusement park—he went right up to the 10-meter board and leapt off.

  I don’t know who got the brilliant idea, but someone decided it would be a good team-building exercise if every one of us jumped off that board.

  If you’ve never bounded off a platform three stories high, let me tell you, it goes against every instinct a sane person has.

  I’d done it once before—back when I was a teenager, visiting Mexico, the very first time I’d ever left the country for a youth national game. I’d been terrified when I’d gazed down at the water—it seemed a million miles away. But, of course, I wanted to look like a man, so I’d closed my eyes and jumped, all the while thinking Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

  I did it again here—fast, because I wanted it over with. Clint and Michael approached it the same way: do it quickly and move on. Some of the guys stalled before jumping. A couple—Jozy and Jermaine—were genuinely afraid. As each of them hesitated, we waited 30 feet below, hooting at them.

  We called them chicken. We chanted their names over and over—Jozy, Jozy, Jozy! Then, Jermaine, Jermaine, Jermaine!

  We shamed them into it, and when they finally took that scary leap, we cheered.

  Brad Guzan whooped loudly, then went back to the board and jumped again.

  We were determined to make as big a splash in the World Cup.

  Twelve years after I played my first senior game for the United States, I received my 100th cap, this one against Nigeria. The game was held in Jacksonville, Florida, on June 7. Laura brought the kids down. Friends and family from all over came to watch: Dan. Mulch. Some of my high school buddies. My brother, Chris, hadn’t been able to make it—he and his girlfriend had recently had a baby girl—but aside from him, it was almost everybody who mattered in my life. I’d never had all of these people in the same place, at the same time.

  I was only the 15th player in U.S. history to reach the 100-cap mark. I now held the team record for wins as a goalkeeper.

  I was also the oldest player on the World Cup squad.

  U.S. Soccer made me a jersey with the number 100, and there was a brief ceremony on the field.

  I cherish the pictures from that day. The stands are filled. My teammates are off to my side. My dad is on my left, with his hand on Jacob. My mom is on my right, and my arm is around her, tight. And in front of all of us is Ali. She and her brother are holding up that commemorative jersey.

  HOWARD

  100

  All those game I’d played. A century of them now. All those friends I’d made and kept along the way. All of them here now—well, almost all of them, minus Landon and Carlos—watching and cheering.

  Even Laura—standing on the sidelines, but unmistakably still proud of me.

  It was an extraordinary moment, but I couldn’t bask in it for long.

  Right after the game, we were flying to Brazil.

  TEAM USA

  There is a photograph I look at sometimes. It has nothing to do with soccer, yet for me, it’s somehow intimately connected to what I do every day.

  The picture was snapped at roughly 5 p.m., September 11, 2001. Three firefighters stand atop a mound of rubble. Behind them lies the vast, impossible destruction of splintered buildings. These men are working together to hoist an American flag. They are covered in ash, looking upward. They have surely witnessed unimaginable things.

  When the planes hit the World Trade Center, I’d been driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. I was on my way to practice with the MetroStars. It was a crisp, clear morning, not a cloud in the sky—one of those spectacular days where even the weather forecasters on TV use the word perfect. Just a picture perfect day.

  The turnpike runs due west of the Hudson River, parallel to Manhattan—maybe six miles from the World Trade Center. From the highway, I saw plumes of smoke, like dark cumulus clouds that made no sense against the blue sky.

  I turned on the radio. I heard the news.

  In the MetroStars locker room that day, we clustered around a television. Our training ground was on the flight path of the Newark Airport, and as we sat together, numb from all we were seeing and hearing, we heard fighter jets flying overhead.

  I knew all around us, here in my beloved Jersey, good people had gone to work on an ordinary day—account managers and messengers and receptionists and waiters, mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, grandmothers, sons. Many would never come home again.

  I play soccer. It’s what I do. I’m not a firefighter or soldier. I catch balls. I play a game for a living.

  But it means something to me when I put on that USA jersey. It sounds clichéd, but it’s real: I believe I’m representing something that matters. I’m serving in the best way I know how—in a way that engages my heart and soul and mind and body completely—on behalf of the country that gave my family opportunity.

  It is the country that my ultra-progressive immigrant mom has always told me is the greatest on earth. It is the nation that gave my poppa sanctuary after he’d fled Hungary for his life.

  Soccer is the gift I was blessed with. On the U.S. National Team, I use that gift to represent all the things I see when I look at that photograph from 9/11: Unity. Spirit. Resilience.

  Our team had players who weren’t born in America, for whom English isn’t their first language. Players whose club careers had taken them to Mexico, England, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Turkey, Germany, and England.

  I realized that some of these guys—the Americans who’d been raised abroad—didn’t know the national anthem. John Brooks, for example, a German American born in Berlin, had no idea what the words were.

  I liked John. He was quiet and humble, and at 21, he was already an assured defender. He understood positioning, he was composed, and he gave as good as he got. John and I spent a lot of time with each other on the field, and we often roomed together—the old man and the new kid on the block, just as Tony Meola and I had once been.

  I felt comfortable giving him grief about the anthem.

  “And you call yourself a U.S. National Team player?” I asked.

  I got a hold of some printouts of the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I handed them out during a team meal. “Learn this,” I said. “You’ve got a few days, and then we’ll all sing it together.”

  Occasionally I’d taunt my teammates: “Have you memorized the words yet? You ready to belt it out?”

  And when we finally sang it together at the end of training, I suddenly understood how lucky it is that our voices are usually drowned out by the cr
owd. We sounded horrendous.

  We trained in São Paulo, an enormous concrete jungle, amped up with energy and urgency. São Paulo has two and a half times the population of New York City, 20 million people spread out over 3,000 square miles, packed into modern high-rises, luxury mansions, and the endless shantytowns and slums.

  São Paulo pulses. It feels alive.

  We stayed in a downtown hotel famous for its chic lines and minimalist décor. In 2010, we’d been effectively quarantined, with little access to anyone else. Now we were in the beating heart of Brazil.

  We’d crisscross the country for our games—which, given Brazil’s enormous size, means traversing the continent.

  Our first match against Ghana would be played in Natal, on Brazil’s northeastern coast. In the days before we arrived, the area had 13 inches of rain, more than the city typically receives in an entire month. There were sinkholes all over, along with suffocating humidity.

  Although I was painfully aware of what happened in our previous World Cup matches against Ghana, some of the guys on the team were so young that they didn’t even remember the 2006 game, and probably couldn’t have told you the score. But I recall those games all too vividly. How they muscled us off the ball. How they counterattacked with speed and precision. How they sent us home in both 2006 and 2010.

  I sure as hell didn’t want to let it happen a third time.

  Before the game, we sang the national anthem. I stood on the field, one hand on my heart, the other on Matt Besler’s shoulder. I glanced over at the sidelines.

  There was John Brooks, in full voice. He nailed every single word.

  We couldn’t have scripted a better start to the match. Thirty-one seconds in, Clint Dempsey settled the ball off a Jermaine Jones throw-in. He went on a surging run toward Ghana’s goal. He blew by two defenders, then coolly steered a low shot inside the far post.

  It was 1–0 and the game wasn’t even a minute old. But whatever jolt of euphoria we felt was soon replaced by concern for three of our players who were injured in a physical first half. First, Jozy dropped to the ground clutching his hamstring—it would turn out to be a serious tear, one that would keep him out the rest of the tournament. I felt terrible for him—not only because he’d be missing this huge opportunity, but also because his goal-scoring form had been off coming into Brazil and he was hoping to have a big Cup to prove his critics wrong.

  Midway through the half, Clint came down from an aerial collision. Blood poured from his nose. But leader and warrior that he is, Clint shrugged it off. He stuffed his nostrils with cotton and played with his usual edge. Then right before the half, Matt Besler pulled up, grabbing his hamstring. It didn’t look as bad as Jozy’s injury, but Matty was unable to continue. We still led 1–0.

  In the second half, Ghana banged at our door for a long time. They finally forced their way through in the 82nd minute. That’s when the always dangerous Asamoah Gyan sent a blind heel pass to André Ayew, who fired a left-footed shot right past me.

  We weren’t about to settle for a draw. We kept pushing for the winner. In the 86th minute, we won a corner and Graham Zusi sent in a perfectly weighted ball. John Brooks, our young anthem-singing, German-born defender who had come on for Matt Besler, soared above everyone else in the box and powered a perfect downward header into the net. It was a heart-stopping moment, one of those last-gasp miracles, like the kind Landon had pulled off against Algeria.

  You could see that Brooks barely believed what had happened. He scrambled toward the edge of the field and lay still for a moment, facedown. Later, he’d reveal to the media that he’d dreamed that he’d score a game-winning goal in the 80th minute of the Ghana game. He was off by six minutes, but nobody was about to quibble.

  USA 2, Ghana 1.

  Portugal, our next opponent, had the look of a wounded animal. Not only had they been humiliated 4–0 by Germany in their opening match, but their hot-tempered central defender Pepe, had been sent off for head-butting Germany’s Thomas Müller. This meant he would miss our game.

  But Cristiano Ronaldo would be there, and even if he was reported to be carrying an injury, I knew he could still tear us apart. We worked long and hard on a game plan to funnel him into areas where he’d do the least damage.

  Laura had brought the kids to cheer me on. We swam in the hotel pool and played video games. Jacob had World Cup fever, so he and I watched England play Uruguay and rooted for my Everton teammates, Leighton Baines and Phil Jagielka. Later, Laura would tell me that Jacob spent the whole flight home debating whether he should play for England when he grows up, or for the U.S.

  Sometimes all the kids got together for a game of hallway soccer outside the media room. I played goalie on my knees, letting Michael Bradley’s toddler son—like a mini-Michael, but with more hair—kick the ball past me. Ali was on my team, and she was endlessly frustrated with my goalkeeping in those matches.

  “Daddy,” she scolded. “You have to stop the ball!”

  We felt good about our preparation as the match kicked off, but it’s like what Mike Tyson used to say about his opponents: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

  What made Portugal’s goal in the fifth minute so painful is that we basically punched ourselves in the face with a mistake in the box that allowed Nani to score from point-blank range.

  But we’re a resilient group, and history has taught us that we can fight back from early deficits. In the next 20 minutes, we found our rhythm and started playing our best soccer of the tournament, moving the ball crisply and to great effect. Clint and Michael were immense. Both of them forced the Portugal keeper into sprawling saves to preserve their lead. Meanwhile, you couldn’t even tell Ronaldo was on the field, he was so quiet.

  Instead, it was Nani who caused us problems. Before the half, he hammered a shot from outside the box that looked to be coming right at me until at the last minute, it dipped sharply. I managed to get a finger to the ball and tip it onto the post. It rebounded straight to Portugal’s Éder, who had a wide-open goal from three yards out. I started to scramble right: I could see by the shape of his body that he was going to put it in the bottom far corner. I lunged flat out across the width of the goal.

  If Éder had struck his shot cleanly it would have been 2–0, but he scuffed it and the ball bobbled right over my head. Mid-dive I had to change course. I arched backward and threw my left hand in the air. The ball was beneath the crossbar when I scooped it up and over to safety. Now that’s a save I hope to tell my grandkids about one day.

  Later, I’d observe to Chris Woods how surreal the moment was. “A few centimeters’ difference,” I said, “and they’d be calling it a horrendous mistake.”

  Chris gave me a knowing look, one battle-hardened veteran to another. “Goalkeeping margins are razor thin.”

  We were still down 1–0 at the half. It wasn’t until the 64th minute that we busted through. Jermaine latched onto a poor clearance off a corner kick and unleashed a howitzer that flew through the packed box and into the far corner.

  Game on.

  We thought we had it won ten minutes from regulation when Zusi squared a pass across the goalmouth. Clint was first to the ball, knocking it in off his chest. Judging by the roar that shook the stadium, our fans believed the game was over.

  You can never count out the great players, though. They are always capable of producing something special as long as there are still seconds on the clock.

  And there were. Michael lost the ball in midfield and Cristiano pounced. The lob he floated over our defense was inch-perfect, far enough out of my reach that his teammate Silvestre Varela could run onto it. He headed in the equalizer as the last seconds ticked off the clock.

  What a sucker punch by Cristiano that was! He was barely noticeable for ninety minutes and then on the last play of the game, he came up with a piece of artistry that only a few players in the world could have pulled off.

  We were numb as we walked off the field. Truth
is, 2–2 is not a bad result against a team of Portugal’s pedigree, except when you think you’ve already beaten them. But as deflated as I felt, I couldn’t let my disappointment get in the way of seeing my family. Ali, Jacob, and Laura would return to Memphis in a couple of hours.

  In the locker room, I quickly stripped down to my shorts and T-shirt, put my running shoes on, and jogged back onto the field. I waved to Ali and Jacob, blew kisses, and pretended to catch their kisses back. We had as much fun as we could given the distance between their seats and the grass.

  When it was time for them to head to the airport, I blew them one final kiss—just the latest in our countless goodbyes—and I began to think about Germany.

  There were many intriguing subplots to our Germany game. For one thing, Jürgen had coached their national team two World Cups ago and some of the same players were still on the squad. For another, Joachim Löw, the guy who had helped Klinsmann transform that 2006 German team into an attacking force, would now be matching wits with his old mentor. And then there’s the number of German American players on our team. Five of them had been born and/or raised in Germany and had spent their careers in the country’s top-tier Bundesliga, going head-to-head with many of the players we were about to compete against.

  There wasn’t a question in my mind that Germany was the best team in the tournament. They had physicality, skill, guile, and remarkable tactical awareness.

  They were as close to the perfect side as there was in Brazil.

  Fortunately, we didn’t need to beat them to advance; a draw would automatically get us through. There was even a scenario by which we could qualify for the knockout round with a loss; we had a slim margin over Ghana based on goal differential. As long as we could maintain that, we could still advance. Ghana would play Portugal as we faced off against Germany.

  “I need to know the Portugal-Ghana score,” I told Chris Woods. Depending on what happened in that game, I could adjust our defensive strategy. If we absolutely needed a goal to advance, I could push one of my fullbacks forward, take more risks. But if we might get through even without a goal, I could tuck players in, hold them back, and concentrate on not letting Germany score on us.