A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  He felt numb and at the same time profoundly torn up.

  Teresa wrote in her diary – still the Portuguese one, still the same year when she had punctuated her notes with so many euphoric exclamation marks:

  12.09: The game made big waves. The press is in full chase, spurred on by attacks from Frank de Arse. Both nervous wrecks.

  13.09: Somehow got through the day. Still completely whacked.

  For a few days Toni Madrigal read about what his three goals against Barcelona had started. But he had never bought the sports papers and he soon lost interest in the daily tittle-tattle of the elite of professional football. For most people he will always be the man who knocked Barça out of the cup. He never watched the game on video. ‘Why should I watch a football match when I know the outcome?’

  He’s thirty-four now, his hair all silver-grey. Given that he works in professional football, the job that gives you premature wrinkles, he has a surprisingly smooth, youthful face. He wears his trainers with their laces untied, his khaki shirt hangs casually out of his jeans. He looks very slight for a striker. He is sitting at a pavement café in Elche, where he now lives. There are palm-trees in the plaza. He orders his coffee extra strong.

  Since eight that morning he’s been studying at home – he’s training to be a fitness coach. He’s always enjoyed studying. Professional footballers are so lucky to have so much time to study, he feels. Madrigal’s career has taken him to teams like Levante B, Sabadell and Villajoyosa, all Segunda B, but now he’s back with FC Novelda, who have slipped down to the Tercera División. ‘There were rumours that after my three goals against Barça, Elche, in the Segunda División A, wanted me.’ He smiles. ‘There are always rumours in football.’

  Toni Madrigal doesn’t believe that one game can transform a football career. But, he adds, thinking about Robert Enke, one evening can mark a life.

  TEN

  Thoughts by the Pool

  HE WOULD HAVE loved to destroy his career. The idea became increasingly intense, increasingly enticing: what if I just stopped going to training? Tore up my contract, said goodbye, and gave up football?

  But what would he do then? At twenty-five he couldn’t just start studying – and what subject would he choose? When he had read the book 100 Jobs with a Future six years earlier in Mönchengladbach, there was no other profession that had grabbed him. When reporters had asked him during his youth-team days what job he wanted to do if football didn’t work out, he had answered, ‘Sports journalism.’ But now he couldn’t be a football reporter either. It would only mean facing up to his failure.

  ‘It was just a game that went wrong. Everyone else on the team was bad. And Valdés has missed the ball a few times too.’

  ‘That’s different. The coaches love Victor. I just had that one chance. And I blew it.’

  ‘But you’re brilliant as a goalkeeper. Sooner or later things will work out. I firmly believe in you.’

  ‘It’s over, Terri. There’s no point any more. What I really want to do is tell Parera to tear up my contract.’

  Teresa felt he wouldn’t do that. But she was still startled. His sadness sounded so definitive.

  They were sitting by the pool in their garden, and didn’t feel like jumping in. The defeat at Novelda was four days old.

  For the other players, everyday life had returned. Just the day before, Barça had won a league game in Bilbao 2–0, with Valdés in goal and Frank de Boer in central defence. On the way home van Gaal sat in a traffic-jam in the Garraf Tunnel – ‘two and a half hours’, he said – and the drivers of the other cars gave him the thumbs up. FC Novelda had scored their first point of the season thanks to a 2–2 draw in Palamós, with a goal from Madrigal. Robert alone was left behind. A week later, at the derby with Espanyol Barcelona, he wasn’t on the Barça teamsheet.

  During those hours of brooding with Teresa he had stuck his feet in the pool and caught a cold.

  ‘Slept late, dogs too,’ Teresa wrote in her diary. ‘Robbi has depression again.’ Today, after having accompanied him through two clinical depressions, she would rather have written: He was in a dark mood again.

  The rescue parties arrived. Jörg Neblung hurried to Barcelona; later Dirk Enke did the same. Marco called, and Robert’s mother with her unshakeable optimism. Why couldn’t he be like her? When Jörg arrived in Sant Cugat, Teresa was ill as well. She had caught the infection from him.

  ‘There was a big difference in Robert’s relationship with me and Marco,’ says Jörg ‘With Marco, it was simple friendship. But I was also his adviser. So there were conflicts. We often rubbed each other up the wrong way, and there were times when I was overbearing.’

  ‘Go to training,’ said Jörg. You can also publicly hit back at de Boer, Jörg added when Robert got back from the training-ground.

  Robert said, ‘What would be the point of that?’ He didn’t like conflict, and he wanted to be reminded of Novelda even less. ‘I simply felt run down. I was so preoccupied with myself that I’d closed myself off to the world.’

  Neither Jörg nor Teresa had had any psychological training. They only had their common sense.

  Sad people should get busy and cheer up, they thought.

  From the Enkes’ bedroom you could see Sant Cugat golf course. ‘Come on, let’s play golf,’ said Jörg.

  ‘Golf?’ Robert looked at him as if he’d just been invited to fly to the moon.

  They weren’t sure if they always chose the correct iron from their borrowed golfing bag, and judging by the sceptical looks from the other golfers they were making fools of themselves. So much the better. Jörg didn’t have to force himself to be funny, the comedy was there already.

  15. Robert with his agent and friend Jörg Neblung.

  They also went with Teresa to the riding-stables. Dickens was jumping and running around again now; the gleam had returned to his coat, and, she thought, to his eyes. But for half an hour the horse reverted one last time to its terrible old state, with a swaying freight on its back. Robert sat on Dickens like a robot. When he got off, he laughed quite freely.

  When people who knew him are asked how they remember him, most of them say without thinking, like the national goalkeeping coach Andreas Köpke, ‘How he laughed.’

  Minutes later Robert’s eyes again had the flat, glassy look of someone who’s not really there.

  ‘You’ve got to go and see a psychologist,’ was Jörg’s parting shot before he flew back to Cologne.

  He found a German specialist in Barcelona, Dr Heinrich Geldschläger, a certified psychologist and psychotherapist.

  ‘Go,’ said Jörg.

  The practice was in Eixample, where the modernist buildings highlight Barcelona’s old beauty, and the masses of cars turn the city into a modern hell. Dr Geldschläger told Robert he’d been thinking about him. After he’d heard about Novelda.

  With his steady gaze, his moustache and his combed-back black hair, Geldschläger looked a bit like the England goalkeeper David Seaman, who was at that time developing a reputation for unreliability.

  The doctor diagnosed alienation, a deep melancholy of a kind many people experience after a bereavement, after being fired from a job, or after being bullied. They had to try to work through the panic situations Robert had experienced in football. And perhaps some Jacobson muscle relaxation would help, said Geldschläger, because muscle tension often went hand in hand with psychological tension. Robert watched as the doctor showed him the exercises. Clench your fist for five seconds with your eyes closed, then quickly open the fist and concentrate on the change in tension …

  Robert was sceptical, but he continued to go regularly to Dr Geldschläger for weeks. He didn’t dare not to. He felt he had to do something.

  When his father came to Barcelona, Robert took him to training. FC Barcelona trained at a football ground most local players would have complained about, distinctly narrower and shorter than the usual size. They couldn’t practise corners there. The ground, La Masía, was
Barça’s trademark. This team didn’t need to train for corners.

  After the warm-up, the press had to leave the ground so that the players could work undisturbed. ‘I was allowed to stay,’ his father says proudly. He was fascinated to watch the endless rounds of passing. Like everyone who watches Barça for the first time, his father was overwhelmed by the feeling that he had never experienced anything like it. ‘The way they played – chop-chop, boom-boom – and still the coach was shouting away at everybody. I thought van Gaal was awful.’

  During a break, the coach called the team together to explain the next exercise. Robert stood outside the circle of players, a few metres behind his colleagues.

  ‘Why don’t you join the group, when you’re part of it?’ his father asked him on the way home.

  Robert didn’t reply.

  ‘It only makes things harder. The coach will see that and think: he’s not integrated, he’s not involved.’

  Robert didn’t take up the subject.

  Something tightened inside him when the team stood close together. It was only a vague feeling, but he wanted to show that he felt rejected. He wanted someone in the club to recognise how ill he was. At the same time, he didn’t want to show openly how despondent he was.

  ‘He went on joking during training,’ says Roberto Bonano.

  ‘Robert was very special,’ says Victor Valdés. ‘It was hard to tell if he was cheerful or sad. He always looked the same.’

  If training went well, he became defiant. He’d show them.

  At La Masía, where no one was allowed to watch, there were big holes in the green nylon tarps set up as a privacy shield. The journalists and fans peered through the holes, always ready to run away when the security men came. They watched the centre-forward Patrick Kluivert shoot on the turn, moving sublimely; his shot, as planned landed seven yards in front of the goal and bounced out of the goalkeeper’s reach. Robert was already diving, and tensed his body once more. Just before the ball flew into the corner of the net he got to it, no one could really tell how. Afterwards, still on the grass, he was filled once more with the pure joy that only a spectacular save can produce. The fans cheered, his team-mates cheered. And a moment later almost everyone forgot what they had seen.

  Barça had concerns that outweighed a substitute goalkeeper’s state of mind. After six games the club was eleventh in the championship – an unbearable ranking. The team had been bought in a hurry and it lacked balance: it lacked an outstanding defensive midfield player in particular. Highly regarded internationals like Frank de Boer and Gaizka Mendieta were out of shape, and van Gaal had demoted Riquelme, the saviour, to the status of a bench-warmer. For this team with too many problems, van Gaal’s ruthless approach was exactly what they didn’t need. ‘Things got ugly,’ says Bonano. ‘The atmosphere was crazy, something different every day. Sometimes the coach was furious and he would insult a player, or else a member of the board would tear into us. Every day I tried to be happy when I went to work. But it was hard.’

  In the hope of finally repairing something, at the end of October the coach switched goalkeepers. Valdés had never quite been able to shake off his youthful nervousness. Van Gaal put Roberto Bonano in his place.

  Until then Bonano had been third-choice keeper at Barcelona.

  ‘Just three months had passed since Robert’s euphoric arrival in Barcelona,’ said Jörg Neblung, ‘and already people started writing as if it were perfectly natural that Barça would sell him at the next possible opportunity.’

  After training Robert would walk the twenty metres from La Masía to the changing-rooms, his studs clicking on the tarmac. That short stretch was usually enough to make him collapse inwardly after the enormous commitment he had put into his training. The fact that he trained so well only reminded him how hopeless his situation was.

  Frans Hoek, the goalkeeping coach, sometimes accompanied him. Whenever Hoek said something to him Robert always replied politely, often with a smile. But he no longer spoke first to Hoek. The coach didn’t notice. ‘After training Hoek always went straight to his computer and worked on his share transactions, or something,’ said Robert, almost shouting with rage. It took me a moment to understand what was so bad about that. Hoek couldn’t see how much he craved a word of praise, to be asked: how’s it going, Robert?

  ‘A goalkeeper has so much pressure, from inside, from outside. The goalkeeping coach should always be the friend of the goalkeeper,’ says Walter Junghans, Robert’s mentor in Lisbon.

  ‘Robert Enke was a loveable person with good manners,’ Hoek says. ‘Sometimes, with a goalkeeper like that, you must – figuratively speaking – throw a bucket of cold water over his head so that he wakes up and faces the hard reality of football.’

  Esto no! was Hoek’s battle-cry. Victor Valdés does a good imitation of his loud Dutch accent: Esto nooo! Not that! Still today Hoek is seen as one of the most competent and innovative goalkeeping coaches, but in his school you apparently don’t notice if one of your goalkeepers is suffering. ‘I sometimes said to Enke and Bonano, “You’re too nice,”’ says Hoek. ‘Football’s a hard world. As a player you sometimes have to be brutal. Victor was the only one who had a bit of mala leche, as they say in Spain – bad milk in his veins. A bit of the Oliver Kahn mentality, they might say in Germany. I could have wished for more rivalry between the three of them.’

  Robert longed for understanding, Hoek shouted Esto no! Robert took it personally: Hoek didn’t like him, Hoek was treating him unfairly, Hoek bore a grudge against him because he had failed in Novelda. He no longer noticed that Hoek was just as cruelly honest with the other two keepers. ‘Hoek often came down on me too, you can be sure of that,’ Bonano says.

  Hoek remains convinced that his relationship with Robert was impeccably professional. The odd tense moment of course, but it wasn’t meant personally.

  Robert often rang Walter Junghans during his time in Barcelona.

  Jörg, Teresa, Robert’s father and Marco complained about Hoek. They moaned about van Gaal, too, wasn’t he watching properly during training? For brief moments their fury felt good. But the truth, as Robert saw it, came back all too quickly. He, and he alone, was to blame. He had failed in Novelda. He had blundered, he was sure of it.

  Just as Teresa regularly scribbled a few notes in her diary, he once wrote down, bluntly and without further explanation, this quote in his appointments diary: ‘It doesn’t matter whether what you believe is true. What matters is whether it helps you.’

  Why couldn’t he bend reality so that it looked nicer to him? Victor Valdés had made mistakes, against Atlético, Betis, Osasuna. But Victor stayed so cool. He had a face like a mask. Nothing seemed to trouble him. Why couldn’t he be like that?

  ‘You’re playing in Bruges,’ Hoek suddenly told him.

  After four out of six Champions League group matches Barcelona had qualified for the next stage, so the fifth game against the Belgian champions on 29 October was insignificant.

  You have nothing to lose, Robert.

  He tried to believe it.

  A few hours before kick-off he called Teresa, as usual. ‘You could have recorded our conversation on a cassette and then just wiped it again – it was always the same,’ she says.

  How are you, we went for a walk, now we’re having a coffee, right then, okay, see you tonight.

  But this time he added, ‘Please wish me luck.’

  Her stomach did a somersault. He had never let her wish him luck before. That only brought bad luck.

  She had never felt more clearly how tormented he was by the fear of failure. And she couldn’t do anything more for him than say those few words, which she found she could barely utter. ‘I wish you a lot of luck,’ she said. She felt as if she weren’t saying the words, but spitting them out.

  ‘After that I felt ill.’

  In Bruges, FC Barcelona wore jogging pants and tops rather than the custom-made Grisby suits customary on Champions League trips. Given the irrelevance o
f the game, the coach had left seven established players at home and instead taken along six young men from the B-team, who had no club suits. ‘Baby Barça’ was the name the press gave to the team. ‘It would be a shame if we couldn’t win against a team like that,’ said Bruges’s captain Gert Verheyen. Bruges were still fighting to make it through to the next stage.

  Novelda was two months in the past. Robert Enke hadn’t played in public for seven weeks.

  The Jan Breydes Stadium is the jewel in Belgian football’s crown, rectangular, narrow, the most beautiful stadium in the country. Here France and Spain contested one of the greatest games of the decade, in the European Championship in 2000. When the terraces are full, they pressurise the playing-field. The game was sold out. The fans were wrapped in winter coats and scarves. Most of the Bruges players wore shirts with short sleeves.

  The game couldn’t find its direction. Baby Barça had the ball, led by an eighteen-year-old beginner with the porcelain skin of an angel and a heavenly touch – what’s his name, the fans asked one another; Andrés Iniesta or something. Bruges worked busily and with great concentration to make sure that Barça had no room to manoeuvre. The ball hardly left midfield. Robert had more than enough time to think; to remember. The game was like the one in Novelda.

  Then, all of a sudden – and professional football is all about suddenness – Bruges’s Sandy Martens had sight of goal. He was still a good distance away from Robert, more than twenty yards, but Bruges wouldn’t easily get any closer, Martens felt, and he shot. Before Robert took off, just as the striker was preparing to shoot he did a little hop on the spot, with arms outstretched, as if summoning up some momentum; in truth it was just a nervous reaction, but it helped him to concentrate, to fill his body with tension before discharging it. He leapt and parried Martens’s powerful shot. After fifty-eight minutes of play he kept out a similar attempt by Verheyen, aimed at the back corner. For saves like that, goalkeepers are remembered.