A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  In the weeks that followed René often wondered whether he should ring Robert or send him a text. He had stored Teresa’s phone number since the European Championship. In his head René was already formulating the words he wanted to write. ‘But I was worried about coming across as hypocritical,’ he says, ‘Because quite honestly I had the feeling of having taken something away from him, of having exploited his suffering. The thought was there: it should have been his game.’

  Ever since his comeback in Tenerife Robert had effortlessly dealt with pressure, putting stress and sadness in perspective. After this double blow, the fracture of the scaphoid bone and the public coronation of René Adler, his view of the world narrowed again. Wherever he turned, everything looked black.

  The autumn days in Lower Saxony started grey and ended grey. ‘This darkness is wearing me out,’ he said to Teresa. He went to rehab training every day, always anxiously wondering whether his hand would ever again be fit for goalkeeping play at the highest level. What if he ended up like his friend the roofer? Once he admitted those questions, more and more came flooding in. Did he have the slightest chance of being Germany’s first-choice keeper again when he was fit? Wasn’t he standing there on his own against René Adler and the media – against the whole country? His anxieties fed on those questions and spiralled into irrationality.

  At the end of November he was being treated by Hannover’s physiotherapist Markus Witkop. He had something to confess to him, Robert said. Then he started crying. He had suffered from depression in the past, and he was afraid it was coming back. He hadn’t had any notable psychological problems for five years, not even after Lara’s death.

  For Witkop, the sight of the team captain weeping was difficult to deal with. Robert had been carrying the flag at the club for four years; now all of a sudden he looked as vulnerable as a child. It was a heavy burden for the physiotherapist to have been let in on the truth. It’s the most difficult job a professional team’s physio has to do: keep all the players’ confidences to himself. ‘So many things work away inside you and eat you up because you can’t on any account let them out,’ says Tommy Westphal.

  Robert saw his depression as a striker attacking him – someone he could still stop if he acted correctly. The overwhelming darkness hadn’t yet come – he had no difficulty getting up in the morning, he wasn’t short of drive – but the dejection, the first harbinger of the illness, had taken hold of him. He thought he could marshal his defence mechanisms, to give the day a structure, get things done. He decided to go for a few weeks to a rehab clinic for professional athletes in Lower Bavaria. There, among like-minded people who were suffering in a similar way to himself, he might overcome his fear of being left behind. When he came back in December he would try to find a psychiatrist for himself in Hanover.

  The plan was fixed. But it didn’t make him optimistic.

  ‘I should have done it the way you did,’ he said despairingly to Marco on the phone. ‘Why on earth didn’t I go on working preventatively with a psychiatrist after my depression in Barcelona?’

  ‘Robbi, it’s not too late. Do what I do, and phone Valentin regularly.’

  ‘Oh, phone-calls are no use.’

  ‘It helped me a lot.’

  For a good year now Marco Villa had been talking to Valentin Markser regularly on the phone. He just felt as if he was talking to a good friend. And then Markser’s bill came in at the end of the month.

  Marco had started to make some key decisions. He lived with his wife and, by now, two children in Roseto degli Abruzzi, a little town on the Adriatic, and he planned to stay there for the time being. He wouldn’t move around Europe for football every six months. He was enjoying life with his family by the sea, and they could live reasonably well on the money he made in amateur football. In the mornings he was doing a correspondence course in business management. He wasn’t wild about the subject, but he did it partly to prove that he could do something other than play football. He actually had professional dreams beyond football for the first time: after business management he wanted to study homeopathy and acupressure. He was fascinated by the way people could ease pain with their hands alone.

  Things hadn’t suddenly got better just because he was no longer letting himself be pushed around by the life of a professional footballer. He trained with L’ Aquila Calcio, a Serie D team, at a sports ground that was more soil than grass. The local players who trained after them once stole his football boots from the changing-room. And in the evenings Serie A football was often on television. Deep inside he still belonged to that world of professional football, and the question still came to him, the question still hurt the way it did before: how come you’ve ended up in the Italian Fifth Division? But he had learned to live with it.

  Sometimes, even at the age of thirty-two, he enjoyed practical joking the way he had in Mönchengladbach. For his birthday he served his team-mates at L’Aquila doughnuts filled not with custard but with shampoo.

  He had found a fundamental contentment in his life.

  ‘Robbi,’ he said on the phone, ‘I know it’s hard, sometimes I can’t do it myself, but try not to get too fixated on football.’

  ‘But I can’t do anything apart from football. I’ve only ever seen myself as a footballer.’

  ‘Then let me tell you that you’re much more than a footballer. You’re a special friend to me.’

  ‘But I’ve always neglected my friends and my family. I even forget my parents’ birthdays all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. What does it matter if you forget a birthday? It doesn’t matter at all! It’s just a formality. What counts is that you’ve also got a life outside football, with friends who value you. You have got to realise that it isn’t the end of the world if you can’t play for three months.’

  ‘Jawohl, Herr Markser,’ said Robert.

  Marco couldn’t help laughing. His friend seemed to be a bit better already.

  In the rehab clinic in Donaustauf Robert discovered a new team spirit. About a dozen footballers were working away in the gym. Vinicius, his team-mate from Hannover 96, was trying to strengthen his back after a slipped disc; Roland Benschneider, a Second Bundesliga player from Augsburg, was working on stamina after a cruciate ligament rupture. At first sight they had nothing in common, they carried out their exercises on their own, but the feeling of working towards the same goal turned them into a community. And Robert was able to see himself as captain of this FC Walking Wounded. He was the international among Bundesliga professionals, Second Bundesliga starlets and Third Liga substitutes; he sensed a certain respect in the tone of their questions, in the way they tried to approach him. This acknowledgement – at last, some kind of acknowledgement – allowed him to relax. The gloom and the inexplicable sadness, the first signs of a depression, dragged him down only for very brief moments.

  ‘You feel like Rocky in a rehab clinic like that,’ says Marco Villa. ‘Weeks in the bone-mill to prepare yourself for a single day: your comeback.’

  Robert was still Rocky when he returned to the club in mid-December: he could barely rein in his ambition. At the winter training-camp in the new year he would be back in goal. He would be playing again at the start of the Bundesliga’s second round of matches on 31 January 2009, he decided as resolutely as if he could compel it to happen.

  He was no longer ruled by fear. But neither did fear quite go away.

  He sat at the kitchen table, stretching his left hand back to see how far he could move it. He did it maybe twenty times during dinner. He no longer even seemed to be aware of doing it. He went to the Pius in Neustadt for a glass of wine and his friends spotted him. What was that thing he was always doing with his hand? A few minutes later everyone else was busy seeing how far back they could stretch their own hands. He could get even further than Jürgen’s wife Ines, with her healthy scaphoid bone.

  The physios bought him a machine. He put his hand in it and the machine stretched his hand back. He was to leave his hand i
n the machine for ten minutes. Afterwards he immediately tried to see if his hand could be stretched further. He was determined to do everything properly. Which is why in January 2009 he went to see Dr Johannes Stroscher, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist recommended by a doctor friend. Even if he was only suffering from a depressive alienation and the worst seemed to have been prevented, he would exhaust all possibilities. He never wanted to let things go as far as they had in Istanbul.

  Dr Stroscher’s practice was in a residential street not far from the zoo. Robert pulled a baseball cap low over his face so that no one would recognise him whenever he went into the doctor’s house. Over the next few weeks he would always have to have the cap ready in the car, he reminded himself.

  What would have done him good at this time was the old solidarity at Hannover 96. But Cabin Two was now the relaxation room, with loungers and massage chairs. After his treatment with the physio Robert walked past the renovated cabin. Sadly it lived up to its new name: there was nothing but relaxation in the relaxation room, and he couldn’t avoid thinking about how much had changed in six months.

  Hannover 96 had ended the 2007–08 season in eighth place – their best position in forty-three years. It had been the day after his selection for the European Championship squad, 17 May, when they beat Cottbus 4–0 in the last game of the campaign and the coach grabbed the microphone and yelled cockily, ‘Dear fans! I promise you, next season we’ll get the five points we lacked this year to qualify for the Uefa Cup!’ Forty-seven thousand people cheered. Robert and his team-mate Hanno Balitsch had looked at each other aghast.

  Eighth in the Bundesliga is the best of the mid-table; ahead of it is the prestige of the top group. But no leap is more difficult than from place eight to seven. The eighth-place team has to be a decent side and will have done all the simple things properly – played solidly in defence and counter-attacked purposefully. But to get to the top group a team must be able to do something special – actively shape a game, let the ball run, vary their attacks.

  In the autumn of 2008 Hannover 96 overtaxed themselves with their ambition to be special. Coach Dieter Hecking now wanted ‘always to play a dominant attacking game’ with two strikers rather than their previous one. And this team that was supposed to attack conceded more goals than ever before.

  The relaxation room became a symbol of the good intentions that just made everything worse. Jens Rasiejweski, the sporting director’s assistant, had visited some of the biggest clubs in the world – Manchester United, Chelsea and the American football team Baltimore Ravens – to see what the very best training facilities looked like. So Hannover 96 got a relaxation room, and no one in management realised that the best thing about the club, shabby old Cabin Two, the cradle of the team’s special solidarity, was being lost. Who went to a relaxation room to laugh with his team-mates?

  Robert certainly suffered from the feeling that the footballers around him were becoming less and less his team. The players he had met up with in Cabin Two to eat bockwurst or shave Mille’s head out of sheer high spirits were growing fewer in number. Frank Juric, Silvio Schröter, Dariusz Zuraw – more than a dozen of his former team-mates had left the club during the previous three years. A club with aspirations, Hannover 96 thought it had to keep buying better players. Players such as Valérien Ismaël and Jan Schlaudraff, who had been thrown out of better clubs and were therefore preoccupied with themselves, were signed. There were also Bulgarians and Danes who had never learned to put down roots because they had been passed on like commodities by their clubs every year or two. Robert and the shrunken clique from Cabin Two thought that these newcomers weren’t integrating themselves. ‘They always said, we’re bringing in new players with individual quality, but in fact all they brought in was individualism,’ says Hanno Balitsch, who had become Robert’s closest confidant in the team. For their part, many of the newcomers thought that the old players had formed a closed circle of power. And there was no longer a Cabin Two where each side could learn that the other lot weren’t that bad.

  The coach tried to build a sense of community. Training finished at 4.30 in the afternoon on Wednesdays. Hecking told them: everyone stays until at least five p.m. A year or two earlier ten or twelve men would have sat together for hours. Now many of the players showered in five minutes, sat down in silence in the outer office, stared at the television and kept looking at their watches until five o’clock finally came round. Robert stayed at the training-ground and practised until five p.m. exactly. All that united them was the opinion that this was an idiotic edict by the coach.

  The pressure the club had foisted on itself with its high ambitions was omnipresent in the autumn of 2008. Many players, such as Robert, Hanno and Steve Cherundolo, were sceptical about the coach’s attacking philosophy. In his first year and a half Hecking had turned them into a team that knew exactly what it was capable of doing: excellent defence, simple attack. Why was he changing something that had worked before? Hecking, in turn, was irritated because he thought the players simply weren’t doing what was being asked of them.

  ‘So, I’m going to draw a rucksack on the black board here,’ Hecking said one afternoon in the changing-room, ‘and we’ll throw into it all the things that have bothered us lately.’

  It was an offer of reconciliation. But by the end of the discussion emotions were stirred up again. Michael Tarnat, one of the old keepers of the team spirit, targeted one of the newcomers. Schlaudraff had repeatedly lost the ball with reckless dribbling and put the team in jeopardy. ‘I’m going to hunt you down and kick you!’ said Tarnat.

  Robert was too preoccupied with his own troubles to be driven mad by the irritable mood in the club. But subconsciously it bothered him – another dark stain, further proof that everyone was conspiring against him. Even he had let himself get carried away by the charged atmosphere, to the point of publicly criticising Schlaudraff for foolishly losing the ball. Afterwards he was startled by what he had done. How could he forget his supreme iron rule – never admonish a colleague in public? He thought what a great team they had been, and found himself thinking about the team in the past tense.

  He was nervous when he felt his second skin on his fingers for the first time in three and a half months. He fastened the Velcro of his goalkeeping gloves and waited for the first shot from the goalkeeping coach. When he caught it, he pressed his fingers into the ball to reassure himself that these were his old hands, that nothing, not even an odd feeling, was left in his wrist. The ball felt exactly the same. He rolled it back to the coach with gusto, and already the next shot was coming at him.

  What seemed to have changed when Robert returned to team training in January 2009 was not his hand, but his sense of territory. He knew exactly where he had to stand in every situation, but he felt as if he was moving on unfamiliar terrain. His distance from the defenders and the strikers on the other side of them seemed sometimes too big, sometimes too small; even the goal behind him seemed to be growing and shrinking. ‘I lack a sense of space’, he said.

  He was still completely preoccupied with regaining his sense of territory when the Bundesliga resumed after the winter break. In the last four months he had had only two weeks of football training.

  Before his comeback he pulled his baseball cap low over his face again and went to see his new psychiatrist. He liked Dr Stroscher, and after each conversation he felt better.

  He went through his rituals before the match against Schalke 04, to regain the feeling that this was just a game like hundreds of others before. He ate his rice pudding with apple puree and cinnamon the evening before the game. He watched the Friday evening Bundesliga match downstairs in the hotel bar with a few of the other players. Before kick-off Tommy Westphal slipped the match report form Robert had to sign as captain under his door, while he was on the toilet.

  The day after the game Teresa was going to go skiing with her friends, he remembered. Then he would be alone. He sent Teresa a text. ‘Sorry for my behaviour over the
past few days. I’m so tense at the moment.’

  Schalke started as if something had thrown the team into a rage. They overran Hannover. After two minutes Jefferson Farfán stood clear in front of Robert. He still felt raw and didn’t notice that his body was already unleashing the old automatic reflexes, making him stand tall, for a long time. Farfán played around him, but he was pushed so far out that his shot hit the post. Robert was still lying on the ground when the rebound came towards him, and went over the goal. Before long another shot whistled just over the goal, and then he stopped a firm header by Heiko Westermann. Not even six minutes had passed.

  The first goal came only two minutes later. Hannover finally got hold of the ball in midfield. Pinto saw that Schalke’s goalkeeper Manuel Neuer was standing far in front of his goal, in line with the radicals’ theory, and punted the ball over him and into the net from nearly thirty yards out.

  Until the final whistle Robert barely had a moment’s peace. Thousands of fists punched the air when he deflected a shot from Halil Altintop over the bar with an incredible reflex, and a minute later he was lucky when the next shot hit the post. Hannover won 1–0. Robert had played one of his best games ever.

  When he collected Teresa in the stadium lounge, she immediately saw the red patches on his face.

  ‘Robbi, is everything all right?’

  ‘I feel really hot.’

  He had a temperature. His body was reacting to the tension.

  ‘Would you rather I didn’t go skiing?’ She only said it to calm him down.

  ‘Would you really do that?’

  That night, even though it was past eleven, he called Sabine Wilke. ‘When things were unpleasant, it was always Robbi who rang, not Teresa,’ says Sabine, ‘even if their hot water wasn’t working and Teresa wanted to ask if she could shower at ours.’ Unfortunately Teresa couldn’t go on the skiing trip, he said. He was ill, flu – who would look after the dogs if Teresa went away?