A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  After nine months in Mönchengladbach he received his first praise. ‘Borussia can consider itself lucky to have this young man,’ the new coach Hannes Bongartz told the Rheinische Post. ‘He’s the man of the future.’ In his first months with Borussia, Robert had learned that football is not a game but a battle, that footballers achieve their aims by applying and taking pressure. But he felt far more inspired by Bongartz’s praise than by any such pressure.

  At the end-of-season party, at which Borussia wasn’t so much celebrating its eleventh-place finish as the fact that the campaign was somehow over, he wanted to go home at around midnight. Teresa wanted to stay. She was curious about this Bundesliga world, and at last here was a party of the kind she’d been hoping for at university. They were sitting in a greenhouse. A garden centre had been rearranged for the party.

  ‘Then you stay, I’m going home,’ Robert said, and walked off.

  The last handful of players were still hanging on at the party when Stefan Effenberg called out into the night, ‘So, where are we going now?’

  ‘We could always go to ours,’ said Teresa, as she would have said at university.

  ‘No, let’s not,’ said Effenberg’s wife. It was clearly out of the question.

  When Teresa told Robert about that the next morning, he replied, ‘If you’d come here I’d have thrown them out. And you too.’ She was startled by the serious note in his voice. She found it hard to understand why he usually grew quiet when other people were partying noisily but resolved to think, ‘Today I’m proud of him for having such a firm character and saying “I don’t like partying, so I’m not going to a party or a disco even if everyone else urges me to.”’

  Robert liked Effenberg, for the solicitous, big-brother way he treated the young players. If someone like Marco Villa played inspiringly at the age of eighteen, Effenberg didn’t just show him respect, he also offered him protection. But unlike Marco, Robert wasn’t interested in exploring the world of the Effenbergs and the Kamps away from the Bökelberg. He had an image in his head of nights in neon light with all sorts of cocky behaviour, and he felt he didn’t fit in with that.

  Robert continued to have the occasional holiday from his anonymous everyday life as the substitute for the substitute goalkeeper. He was still called up as number one for the Under-21 national team. In Belfast he played against Northern Ireland, and shared a room with Marco. They knew about the habit junior national coach Hannes Löhr had of coming into their rooms the evening before to get them in the mood for the game. After a year they also knew Löhr’s catch-phrases.

  5. Robert in the shirt of the Under-21 national side.

  Tomorrow we really have to win. It’s a very important game.

  ‘I don’t feel like it today,’ said Robert. Marco had an idea. They pushed the television right up against the bedroom door.

  As expected, at about half-past eight there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘The coach.’

  ‘Oh, Coach. Just a moment, it’s not a good time right now. Careful! Oh no – Coach, please, wait a moment!’

  ‘What’s going on with you two?’

  ‘The television’s right up against the door, we’ve got to move it, I don’t know if we can, damn that’s heavy!’ shouted Marco, who was sitting contentedly on a chair.

  ‘OK, guys, leave it for now, it was nothing important.’ And Löhr went away.

  To the players, it looked as if Marco was messing around and Robert just happened to be there. Robert felt that he and Marco were playing pranks together.

  ‘Teresa often said, you two together are unbearably silly,’ Marco says. ‘But the times when we were laughing – that was Robbi at his happiest.’

  For a professional footballer who was used to everything in life being secondary to sport, in the summer of 1997 Robert received a piece of bad news. He had to do his military service.

  He had wanted to do civilian service. But his realism, and to a certain extent his sense of comfort, were stronger than his conviction that he never wanted to serve with the armed forces. Civilian service would have lasted thirteen months; in the army, as a professional sportsman he would have to go through the three-month basic training programme during the summer break but would then be exempted de facto from the remaining seven months of military service, as a member of the Bundeswehr sports promotion section.

  Marco Villa was called up at the same time. They ended up in the Köln-Longerich barracks between the A1 Autobahn and the industrial estate of Bilderstöckchen. Radio Operator Enke and Radio Operator Villa.

  By way of greeting, the drill sergeant marched up to Robert and hissed, nose to nose, ‘Well then, Mr Super-sportsman.’

  ‘What do you earn, what do I earn, what do you earn, what do I earn,’ murmured Robert once the sergeant was out of earshot again. Marco burst out laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ roared the sergeant.

  The tone was set.

  ‘Radio Operator Enke!’ a voice roared across the parade ground. The drill sergeant was standing at the window. ‘Dress code, Radio Operator Enke!’

  ‘Yes, dress code,’ Robert muttered down in the parade ground, on his way to the cafeteria. ‘Look at yourself!’ He had forgotten his glengarry and his Sam Browne belt. He had to write a four-page essay on the purpose of the dress code in the Bundeswehr.

  A few days later his shirt slipped out of his trousers when he was doing sit-ups.

  ‘Radio Operator Enke, dress code!’

  ‘What about it?’ he hissed back.

  By way of punishment, he had to sprint once around the block. He jogged instead of sprinting.

  ‘Sprint, I said, Radio Operator Enke!’

  The drill sergeant made him run one more lap, but Robert went on jogging. This time he would be like Uwe Kamps. He would never give up. He was hot with fury. If there was something he couldn’t bear, it was the feeling of being treated unfairly.

  After eleven laps the sergeant gave up. ‘Off you go, Radio Operator Enke.’

  Marco Villa had long thought it was inevitable that Robert was prone to mishaps. Once, when they were in a hotel with the Borussia squad, Marco deliberately headed off in the wrong direction to breakfast. Robert toddled politely after him until they found themselves in the storeroom rather than the lift. ‘He had the worst sense of direction in the world,’ Marco says, ‘and he kept making me laugh every time he cried out in panic, “Where have you got me to this time?”’ Of course, says Marco, he knows that everyone has some kind of Bundeswehr or football story to tell whose charms are hard for outsiders to understand. But for him and Robert, those three months in Köln-Longerich were a treasure-trove. There Robert found a friend who would stay his friend for ever.

  Today Marco lives with his wife and two children as a professional footballer in Italy, his father’s homeland. The Italian influence is unmistakable: the tidy Mönchengladbach schoolboy haircut has turned into a fashionably long hairdo. He sits over his breakfast coffee in the Pasticceria Ferretti in Roseto on the Adriatic and talks about the lyrics of the singer Vasco Rossi. ‘You’re more interested in school,’ Rossi sings, ‘but who knows how good you are at the rest of life.’ There’s something in that, Marco says. And he recognises himself, if you replace school with football. When Marco talks, everyone likes to listen. What Robert wanted most from him was the feeling of being understood.

  Back in Mönchengladbach after their basic military training for the start of the 1997–98 season, Marco was particularly eager to lob balls over Uwe Kamps in training. He loved the way Kamps got furious every time he did it. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Uwe was basically a really nice guy,’ Marco says. But even though they never talked about it specifically, Marco sensed that Robert was inwardly amused by the raging Kamps, and the idea spurred Marco on. It made him happy.

  During that season, his second in the Bundesliga, Robert made the smallest jump possible in a football team, from third- to second-choice goalkeep
er. The number two goalkeeper never played either, but for him, this personal promotion meant the world. He was finally a real part of the squad; the second-choice goalkeeper travelled to all the games as a substitute.

  Until now his only experience of first-team football had come from Marco’s stories – like when the team had travelled by coach to Freiburg the previous year. As usual, Effenberg and Hochstätter sat in the second row right behind the coach, while Marco made himself comfortable at the back, playing cards with Pflipsen and a few others. They started to feel hot.

  ‘Turn on the air-conditioning,’ Marco called out to the coach driver.

  Just past Karlsruhe the heat became unbearable. By the time they arrived in Freiburg for their game, the card-players were sitting on the back seat wearing only their underpants.

  Later they found out what had happened. With the noise of the engine, the coach driver couldn’t hear what Marco was shouting from the back seat.

  ‘What do they want?’ the driver asked Effenberg.

  ‘They’re cold,’ said Effenberg, straight-faced.

  ‘What? I’ve set the air-conditioning back there to twenty-six degrees.’

  ‘Turn it up, then,’ said Effenberg.

  Now Robert was joining them. He was even cracking jokes with Kamps. Now that he had been recognised by the team as their talented number-two goalkeeper, Kamps’s extreme competitiveness was no longer so hard to bear.

  Before games he and Marco shared a hotel room. Stefan Effenberg knocked on their door. He wanted to race Marco on his Playstation. In a few minutes Marco had won a thousand marks. Effenberg challenged him to go on playing, even though it must have been clear to him that he would never win.

  Robert sat in the background and watched quietly whenever Effenberg was in the room.

  At home, Teresa wanted a new tenant. Robert reacted defensively. A dog?

  When Teresa had imagined, as a child, what adulthood might be like, she had always pictured a house in the country with a lot of animals. She had asked Robert about his vision of the future. He had always limited his dreams to football.

  ‘A dog would be nice, you know.’

  He hesitated. He didn’t really want an animal in the house. But neither did he have anything specific against it. What made him happy was making other people happy, Teresa above all. OK, then, a dog.

  They called him Bo. On Bo’s first day they had to go shopping. The dog was sleeping peacefully. Teresa didn’t want to wake him up. ‘Come on, we’ll just creep out for a minute and he won’t even notice,’ she said. They would be back in a few minutes, after all.

  ‘When we got back, of course he was traumatised.’ Teresa laughs at herself softly. ‘We did everything wrong that you can do wrong. After a few weeks we were like concerned parents with their first child. We only went to the cinema separately, so that Bo wouldn’t feel alone and bark.’

  The dog was another opportunity for the neighbours to get worked up. ‘He is always running up the freshly cleaned stairs!’ cried Corinna.

  For Teresa and Robert, Bo was a further excuse finally to move out. Borussia’s coach driver, Markus Breuer, lived fifteen kilometres south of Mönchengladbach. His attic flat was vacant, he told them. So late in 1997, Teresa took one last photograph of Loosenweg, with the china geese in the garden, and they carried their furniture out of the flat. Corinna called out, by way of farewell, ‘So much noise at ten o’clock at night, it’s outrageous!’ Robert shouted back, for the first time. ‘Now, give us a break, Corinna, we’re moving out. In a few minutes you’ll never see us again, so at least leave us in peace right now!’

  Drive along the old rural road from Mönchengladbach by way of Wey, through turnip and wheat fields, and in some places the road almost becomes a country lane. After Hoppers you get to Gierath. Over the past thirty years Gierath has changed enormously. The newly built area looms over the heart of the village. It still has only 1,500 inhabitants.

  Robert and Teresa Enke were quickly integrated by Markus Breuer and his wife Erika.

  On the ground floor of his house on Schulstrasse, Breuer runs a sports shop. One day he had to go out for a while. His wife had taken the child to the doctor, so he rang the bell of the attic flat. ‘Robert, could you take over the shop for half an hour?’

  Not long after that a customer came in and asked for some goalkeeping gloves. ‘Do you know anything about them?’

  ‘A bit,’ replied Robert.

  He told the local league goalie all about the difference between five- and six-millimetre foam stuffing, titanium foam and natural latex. When Breuer got back, the customer, who was about to leave, asked him, ‘Who’s that new salesman you’ve got there? He’s really nice. And he even knows what he’s talking about.’

  Breuer introduced them to Hubert Rosskamp who liked to hunt and who took the dogs off their hands from time to time – they had two of them by now. In the afternoon after training, Robert often went walking through the fields with Hubert and the dogs. ‘You couldn’t tell what he was, he was dressed so normally,’ Hubert recalls.

  6. Robert with Hubert Rosskamp in front of Rosskamp’s house in Gierath.

  Hubert worked as an industrial buyer at Rheinmetall in Düsseldorf. He has turned his living-room into a personal museum; Robert’s football shirts hang all over the place, bearing the inscription ‘For my friend Hubert’. On the shelf in Hubert’s kitchen Robert and Teresa’s wedding photograph is right at the front; the photographs of his family have been placed behind it.

  In the afternoons in the fields, Hubert asked Robert questions. Tell me, how do you actually dive as a goalkeeper? Aren’t you scared when the strikers come at you? When he dives for a ball a goalkeeper stretches his lower hand out slightly further than his upper hand, and tries to keep both hands parallel, Robert explained. And as for being scared, no, he certainly didn’t get scared. A healthy degree of nerves is important, but nothing more than that.

  When he celebrated his twenty-first birthday late, a few days after 24 August 1998, Hubert was invited, and neighbours came along too, like Markus and Erike Breuer, and Teresa’s friend Christiane, who worked as a bouncer at a disco. The only people there from Borussia were Marco Villa and Jörg Neblung, the athletics coach whose individual training Robert had assiduously avoided in his first year. In July 1998 Borussia hadn’t extended Neblung’s contract, after four years. He had gone to work for the agency of Robert’s adviser, Norbert Pflipsen. There was sparkling wine, Christiane made pizza, and Hubert brought Robert strawberry tart, as usual. At the time Marco didn’t notice that apart from him there was no one there the same age as Robert, no close friends. ‘It was a pleasant enough party with just sweet, nice people,’ says Marco, ‘and Robbi was happy.’ Not least because of football.

  Just before his twenty-first birthday, Robert Enke had suddenly become a man in the eyes of the public. On 7 August, Borussia were training on the football pitch beside the Bökelberg Stadium. The goalkeepers practised separately from the rest of the team. Dirk Heyne fired in crosses, Robert jumped and Kamps jumped, taking turns. Even the players at the other end of the pitch heard the noise. When an Achilles tendon ruptures, it sounds like the lash of a whip. Kamps was left lying on the ground. At first it was more shock at the sound of the snap that laid him low than the pain in his left heel.

  That same day he was operated on at the accident and emergency department in Duisburg. He would be out of the game for four months, the surgeon predicted. The new Bundesliga season began in eight days.

  In Jena the following morning, Andy Meyer took a quick glance at the newspaper. Alone in his room, he couldn’t help laughing. ‘The unchallenged regular goalkeeper had been seriously injured right before the start of the Bundesliga,’ recalls Andy, ‘and of course our child of fortune took advantage of that.’

  For Teresa those eight days passed quickly, and at the same time went on for ever. Over and over again during that time she happily thought, ‘At last!’ And at the same time, ‘What if he l
ets in a goal?’

  Borussia Mönchengladbach had lost a goalkeeper who had 389 Bundesliga games under his belt; only one footballer, Berti Vogts, had played for the club more often than Kamps. In his place there was now a goalkeeper who had never been tested in a Bundesliga game, and who would be the youngest in the league. ‘Robert has our complete trust,’ announced Friedel Rausch, the fourth coach Borussia had had in Robert’s time at the club.

  ‘What else was Rausch supposed to say?’ says Jörg Neblung. ‘My bet is that the coach felt uneasy. His most experienced player gets injured, and now he’s got this greenhorn.’

  Marco Villa saw it differently. ‘A lot of people on the team thought Robbi was already stronger than Kamps – our sweeper Patrik Andersson, for example. That was why we didn’t worry. We really didn’t.’

  Probably everyone involved shared Jörg’s and Marco’s thoughts. Like Teresa, they vacillated between confidence and unease.

  Robert himself was quite calm. He had developed a mechan ism for turning inner nerves into outward peace. Only very rarely did the mechanism break down. When it did he’d be gripped with anxiety, as he had been three years earlier in the Second Bundesliga game for Carl Zeiss Jena in Leipzig, and in his first winter in Mönchengladbach. But almost always, unease or excitement was the drug that made him concentrated and calm.

  The day before the start of the 1998–99 Bundesliga season the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, ‘This 20-year-old already seems so incredibly mature, so balanced.’ He told the newspaper, ‘I have no models, or at least not any more.’

  His father travelled in from Jena, one of Teresa’s brothers from Würzburg. Gisela was on holiday in Slovakia. ‘We’ll go to Robert’s first Bundesliga game together,’ she and Dirk had promised each other after their separation. That wasn’t going to happen now. Schalke 04 were the opponents at the Bökelberg. ‘We drove each other nuts with our nerves up there in the terraces,’ recalls Teresa.