A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  He looked over at Heyne. The coach said nothing. But he’d seen what Kamps was doing.

  ‘Okay,’ said the coach, ‘now shoot the ball at each other, at chest height.’

  Kamps sent in shot after shot, each one getting harder, firmer and faster. He wanted to see Enke drop the ball.

  In the evening, with training behind him, Robert laughed at his experiences, and not without a certain sympathy for Kamps. What a guy. The next morning, on the way to training, the matter would strike him as serious again. He wondered whether a Bundesliga goalkeeper had to be like Kamps, above all whether he could be the same.

  Applying pressure was the Bundesliga motto in the nineties. Everybody had to be applying pressure at all times: the coach on the players, the substitute player on the coach via the press, the substitute goalie on the number one, the number one on the substitute goalies, and the manager on everyone. Back in Jena, the only person who had ever put Robert under pressure had been Robert himself.

  Sometimes after training in Mönchengladbach he went to the gym, because he was told it was important, and because most of his team-mates did. Before then he had hardly ever gone near fitness equipment; it meant nothing to him. He had enough talent not to have to do any additional training. Kamps usually went there with Jörg Neblung, Borussia’s fitness coach. The two of them competed at benchpresses. A long-legged former decathlete, Neblung had no chance of pressing as much weight as the short, bullish Kamps, but the athlete in Neblung was alive and well and he pumped, he pushed, he managed 120 kilos, and Kamps followed suit, wanting to outdo him every time. Robert pretended he wasn’t watching.

  ‘So, do you want me to get the weights down for you?’ said Kamps when he saw Enke reaching for a dumbbell. ‘You’d be better off using only the bar, so you don’t strain yourself.’ Kamps laughed as if he’d just made a great joke.

  That’s what a good relationship between goalkeepers ought to be like, Kamps thought: fair in sport, tough in life.

  ‘Uwe enjoyed turning everything into a competition,’ says Neblung. ‘He had an extremely professional attitude, always last to leave the training-ground. It’s only with that view of his job that a professional can be successful, we were sure of that in those days.’ With his uncompromising take on training, Kamps had overcome his natural disadvantages: he seemed too small to be a goalkeeper, but in spite of being only five foot ten he had been unshakeable in goal for Borussia for a decade.

  Neblung tried to persuade the new goalkeeper to do the same kind of weight training as Kamps. Robert was broad-shouldered, but he had the thin arms and legs of an unformed teenager. ‘There was an athlete slumbering in there,’ says Neblung. As a former track athlete, Neblung initially had a hard job with the footballers because everyone knew that you didn’t become a track athlete unless you were useless with the ball at your feet. Gradually more and more players had come to see him – ‘Jörg, we need to stretch’; ‘Hey, Neblung, I want to do something about my speed’. In his third year with Borussia he had only half established himself on the team so he didn’t push it when Robert dug his heels in over the idea of directed athletics training. He was, after all, only the third-choice goalkeeper. ‘I didn’t really notice him much,’ says Neblung.

  As a schoolboy he had made contact with others. As number three goalkeeper he became an observer.

  The previous season Mönchengladbach had won the German Cup, its first trophy in sixteen years. The cup-winners had been given hero contracts. Financially, their pay-rises were frighteningly risky, but sporting director Rolf Rüssmann thought about possible future successes first and credit repayment models only after that. An expectation had quickly built that this could be the 1970s all over again, when the club was the epitome of the avant-garde. With its long-haired players and free-spirited football, Borussia had won a whole series of championships. Now, with world-class players like Stefan Effenberg, Martin Dahlin and Christian Hochstätter, Mönchengladbach had some serious figures on the team again. And they liked to demonstrate their status.

  On the bus from the training-ground in Rönneter back to the showers in the stadium at Bökelberg, Robert had to stand. There weren’t enough seats. The youngest stayed in the aisle. They had to prove themselves first, the others thought. When the bus turned sharply from Kaldenkirchener Strasse into Bökelbergstrasse, Robert collided with another of the younger players, Marco Villa. Villa was eighteen and lanky. When coach Bernd Krauss put him up front at the start of the season because the established players weren’t winning anything, Villa scored three goals in his first seven games. That had never happened in thirty-three years of the Bundesliga. Villa smeared soap in the older players’ underpants when they were in the shower. And the older players laughed. Anyone who achieved something, who really applied the pressure, was accepted, even at the age of eighteen Robert understood. Villa didn’t do his pranks out of rebelliousness, he just wanted to have some fun. ‘I didn’t think a lot,’ Marco says. ‘Basically I just wanted to be accepted by the established players on the team like Effenberg and Kalle Pflipsen. I wanted to be like them.’

  When Kamps was giving Villa a top-down lesson one day, Villa said, ‘You know, Uwe, there are players who are respected, and others who would like to be respected. You fall into the second category.’

  ‘Have you heard that!’ cried Christian Hochstätter, who liked to think of himself, at the age of thirty-three, as the team’s tribal elder.

  When Villa dared to do what no eighteen-year-old was allowed to do at Borussia, the older players grinned, and Effenberg slapped him on the shoulders. Villa was a goal-scorer. Also, there are people everyone likes straight away without understanding exactly why. Marco Villa is one of those.

  Robert never played jokes with soap and underpants. But he felt happy, in a wonderfully weightless way, when other people around him were being silly.

  One day Rolf Rüssmann came into the changing-room. ‘Has anyone got any face-cream? My skin’s so dry.’

  ‘Here,’ said defender Stephan Passlack.

  Five minutes later Rüssmann’s face was frozen in a plastic mask. Passlack had given him hair gel.

  After training, Robert went straight home. It was only five minutes from Bökelberg to the flat he shared with Teresa in the Loosenweg. He didn’t join in when the other footballers went out for something to eat. He thought he didn’t belong there – the newbie, the third-choice goalkeeper.

  Three- and four-storey apartment blocks made of ochre-coloured clinker bricks stand side by side on the Loosenweg, where the city of Mönchengladbach peters out. German flags flap in the gardens now. In those days china geese with ribbons round their necks stood on the grass of the communal garden.

  Although Robert was already in a high-income bracket, Teresa’s parents paid half of the rent every month, as they thought only appropriate, given that their daughter was still studying. Every day Teresa travelled the thirty kilometres to university in Düsseldorf – teacher training, sport and German – and after lectures she drove home again. She wanted to be with Robert, and the other students already seemed to have formed solid circles of friends in their student residences. There were posters up announcing a big student union party, and she decided to go along with Robert. They spent most of the evening standing on their own.

  She couldn’t help thinking of her old schoolmate Christiane from Bad Windsheim. Sadly, she sent her old girlfriend a text: ‘You remember when we used to sit in the Café Ritter when we were thirteen, and imagined how university life would be, having to ask yourself that daily question: shall we go to a lecture, or just to the café?’ Only her student job reminded her of this first idea of hers of university life. She worked in a shoe shop. ‘Unfortunately I got a thirty per cent discount, so all the money I earned went straight back to the shop,’ she confesses.

  Robert was amazed at how easily she spent her money on shoes. He found it hard to buy anything expensive for himself. You should, he figured, be careful with your money.

/>   ‘Forgive me,’ said the bank clerk when Teresa withdrew some money from their shared account, ‘but I’m just wondering whether you and your boyfriend mightn’t possibly want to invest your money in shares or some kind of fund at some point?’

  Robert’s salary went into his giro account, and he left it there. He had exchanged Flippi’s used Peugeot for a little Audi, and he bought himself clothes twice a year – in the summer and winter sales – but otherwise he didn’t want much that cost money. He liked to lie on the sofa at home with Teresa. When she was studying, he turned the television on or read the paper, sometimes a thriller, but he didn’t go out. He waited for her to finish studying.

  The day after her husband’s death, when Teresa moved the public by speaking so openly about Robert’s depression, lots of people will have seen her as the strong woman who stands behind every strong man. In all the years leading up to that, however, her friends had the feeling that the two of them were simply there for each other. In Mönchengladbach, alone together in a strange city for the first time, they developed a total affinity. ‘We’d sometimes go out without our wives,’ says Torsten Ziegner, Robert’s friend from Jena, ‘but Enkus didn’t actually do that. If you’d arranged to see Enkus, you’d arranged to see Enkus and Teresa.’

  They were happy in their new-found independence, in all the experiences of that stage of life that may seem slightly embarrassing later on, like the limitless loafing or using the clothes horse as a substitute wardrobe. But love and a sense of the freedom of life could only mask their unease; they couldn’t eradicate it. ‘We were two nineteen-year-olds who should have been in a shared apartment with others, who had been part of a group in Jena only months before,’ says Teresa. ‘And suddenly we’d been thrown into this little town without a student scene, where we had no friends and didn’t make new ones very easily.’ Sometimes she wondered: is this what adult life is like?

  Every sixth Friday Teresa or Robert cleaned the stairwell; the other five groups of tenants in the block had decided to save the twenty marks needed for a cleaning woman. One Friday Teresa came home early from her lectures. Robert was away at a match with Borussia’s reserve team. She would clean the stairs on Saturday, Teresa thought.

  On Friday evening the doorbell rang. Corinna, a neat and tidy neighbour of theirs, stood in front of Teresa.

  ‘The stairs haven’t been cleaned!’

  ‘I know. Robbi’s not here, and I’m a bit tired after university. I’ll do it tomorrow, first thing.’

  ‘The stairs must be cleaned on Friday!’

  Corinna began to ring the doorbell more often. The stairs hadn’t been cleaned properly at the edges. Someone had walked up the stairs in dirty shoes while the floor tiles were still wet. Robert tried hard to go on meeting the woman as he had done before, with shy politeness. For a few weeks, an intimidated Teresa took her shoes off down in the hall and walked up to the third floor in her stockinged feet.

  Marco Villa sometimes visited them at Loosenweg. Robert and he had known each other now for three years – they had played together for the national youth team – without knowing anything substantial about each other. Marco came from Neuss, Robert from Jena. Their first coach on the national youth team, Dixie Dörner, had encouraged people to think in terms of East and West. Even when they were warming up there had been an eastern group and a western group.

  Once Marco came to lunch. Robert was sitting in a red leather armchair reading a book. Marco glanced at the title: 100 Jobs with a Future, by Claudia Schumacher and Stefan Schwartz.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading? Are you looking for a new job, or what?’

  ‘I just wanted to see what you can do apart from football.’

  ‘Are you off your trolley? You’re a professional, in the Bundesliga!’

  ‘It’s different for you, Marco. You play, you score your goals. But I’m not even a substitute at the matches. I do my training, and I sit at home or in the terraces. I’m useless.’

  ‘You’re nineteen, Robbi! It’s still your first year here. You’ll be playing in a few years. Don’t drive yourself mad.’

  They left it there. Years later, when Marco reminded Robert of that scene, Robert said, ‘What are you on about? I can’t remember ever owning a book like that.’ But even today the book is still in his office in Empede, a European Championship silver medal dangling next to it. Teresa’s father had given him the book. ‘Take a look at it,’ he had said, ‘you might find you’re interested in a different profession.’ If football’s really as bad as that.

  He didn’t want to go to training any more. It was winter, January 1997, dark at half-past four, and he was sitting in a building where the garden gnomes were treated more kindly than the tenants, in a little town with which he had no connections. And all that to be a third-choice goalkeeper; to play in front of 120 spectators for the reserve team; to put up with the exertion of training every day.

  The mood in the changing-rooms was irritable. Every Saturday coach Bernd Krauss had been an hour and a half away from being sacked, and in December 1996 it had happened. The cup-winning team, having been cranked up for an attack on the top spots in the Bundesliga, was wallowing around mid-table.

  In a training match against the Second Bundesliga team Fortuna Köln, Robert was allowed to play for the first eleven. Again he felt that hot, hectic thumping inside him. The fear that he had felt on the Under-18 team, the fear that he might disappoint the grown-ups, was back. He was frightened that he might never be like Uwe Kamps, always applying pressure, always putting up with the pressure. He couldn’t shake the feeling that no one was interested in what the number three goalkeeper did, that he was invisible – and at the same time he was afraid that in that tense situation he might attract the fury of the senior players. It was a contradiction, but that kind of anxiety is one great paradox.

  This was a new Robbi as far as Teresa was concerned. She was confused. Where did this anxiety come from? She didn’t know him when he was like this. At the same time she too was feeling disappointed with her anonymous life at university; perhaps he was just as troubled as she was by longing for their carefree life with their friends in Jena. Or else he was just having a bad day or two.

  A week passed, and every morning started the same way.

  ‘I don’t want to go to training.’

  ‘Robbi, it’s not as bad as that.’

  ‘I don’t want to go, do you understand? I just don’t want to.’

  ‘Marco will be there. You’ll see, once you’re there, it’ll be fine.’

  When he was out of the door, she called his father.

  Dirk Enke came to visit the following weekend. He knew all about anxiety from his patients. ‘But you see,’ he says, ‘as a therapist I’m simply not responsible – a father can’t do that.’ He could only say to his son: give your day a fixed structure. While he was there he threw Robert out of bed at seven in the morning, so that the day would get going straight away, and made sure there were solid goals on the horizon, things his son could do, even if that just meant going for a walk. Things that would make him feel that he’d achieved something.

  ‘And go and see a doctor,’ his father advised as he left.

  Borussia were about to begin their winter training-camp. Anxiety turned to panic. Robert thought there was no way he could go, spend a whole week exclusively as a part of this football team where he thought he wasn’t respected, and where he feared his every mistake during training would be precisely recorded.

  He went to see Herbert Ditzel, the team doctor.

  Medical staff at professional football teams are always under huge pressure from the coaches. Week after week they’re urged to send injured players into battle with painkillers, often against their better judgement. But this time the doctor thought only of the person in front of him, not of the club. Ditzel liked this shy young man. He signed him off with a flu virus so that he wouldn’t have to go to training-camp.

  When the team returned he was given a
new nickname. Robert’s colleagues now called him Cyrus, after Cyrus the Virus, a character from the movie Con Air. No one doubted that he was suffering from a flu virus, and he was able to have a good laugh about his new nickname. The anxiety had faded away after a few weeks.

  He made a great effort to study Kamps. If the older man needed to see him as a rival in order to motivate himself, he would secretly learn from him. He watched the veteran keeper out of the corner of his eye during training. He started to jump early, even a split second before the striker hit the ball, speculating where the shot would fly to, and punched away crosses he might have been able to catch. Robert said later, almost shamefacedly, ‘I copied Uwe’s style a bit.’

  After a successful diving save, some German goalkeepers like Kamps would do a double roll on the pitch, to the roar of the crowd, taking their example from eighties idol Toni Schumacher. If the striker advanced on his own, they threw themselves in front of him with all their might. If they tipped the ball over the crossbar, they drew their knees up when jumping, so that even the slowest fan could grasp the drama of the situation. German goalkeepers were the best in the world, the Germans thought.

  In the late nineties no German fan was bothered by the fact that even excellent goalkeepers like Andreas Köpke, Stefan Klos and a young man from Karlsruhe called Oliver Kahn played deep in their own box, close to the goal-line, while in Argentina, Spain or the Netherlands the goalkeeper became a substitute sweeper. Advancing far up the pitch, he made it impossible for his oppenent to hit long balls behind the defence. Also he became an extra option for his defenders to pass to, and hence break up the opponent’s pressing game. One of the most radical prophets of the new goalkeeper play was Edwin van der Sar of Ajax Amsterdam. Robert watched van der Sar on television, he watched Kamps in training, he compared the two and he took his bearings from the German model of saving spectacularly rather than acting in anticipation.