A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (14 page)

‘Uenk! Uenk!’

After six months in Lisbon Robert knew who they meant. Enke – O Enke. Pronounced by the Portuguese, it sounded like
Uenk
.

‘What’s going on, are they mixing you up with someone famous or something?’ asked Marco.

Marco recalled that Robert laughed with pride at this. ‘It was paradoxical: Robbi was reticent, but he liked all that star stuff.’

For the Portuguese, Robert Enke was more than a good goalkeeper. A country that often thinks sadly of its lost greatness as a colonial power precisely records the small gestures foreigners make. While businessmen and other sportsmen who had moved to the country still expected to be understood when they spoke English or Spanish, after just four months Robert had given his first press conference in Portuguese. ‘Of course, not after three months, as you’d planned,’ Moreira teased him.

It was Robert’s second press conference that became national news.
Fodes!
read the newspaper headlines the following day. The television news bulletins repeated the scene over and over again: Robert on the podium behind the microphones, when he couldn’t remember a particular word, putting his forehead in his hands and hissing, ‘
Fodes!
’ – ‘Shit!’

People laughed with delight. It was clear-cut for the Portuguese: anyone who could curse as they did was one of them.

Benfica didn’t fully process that 7–0 defeat in Vigo; the memory of it held the club prisoner. The public reacted with increasing rage to each new mistake a player made, and naturally the footballers started making more mistakes. The club president, still feeling insulted, made those players who made too many mistakes wait weeks for their wages, and of course that didn’t make the footballers play any better either. Dynamics, sometimes the footballer’s ally, sometimes his foe, dragged Benfica down. A team that had been flying high for several months won only one out of the five Liga matches they played between December 1999 and January 2000, a wobbly 3–2 against União Leiria. Benfica dropped to third place behind Porto and Sporting Lisbon.

Heynckes found himself under siege. On 3 January, Portuguese journalists lay in wait outside his house in Mönchengladbach and tried to peer through his windows with binoculars. They wanted to check whether he was actually in bed.

Heynckes had been invited to spend New Year’s Eve with Bayern Munich’s manager Uli Hoeness, but he suddenly went
down
with a fever and spent that night in a hotel. Then, instead of returning to Lisbon he’d gone home to recuperate. On 4 January Benfica were scheduled to play an eagerly awaited derby against Sporting. The Portuguese media suspected the coach of inventing his flu so that he could spend a bit more time at home. Anyone familiar with Heynckes’s work ethic would have been amused by the idea of the coach bunking off work. But things at Benfica weren’t all that funny anymore after this episode.

Heynckes flew feverishly back to Lisbon, but on his doctor’s advice he didn’t go to the stadium, instead watching the match on television. It ended goalless, with Robert as Benfica’s man of the match. A coach, however ill, has to be with his team, insisted the outraged sports press. ‘Portuguese journalism is even worse than Portuguese football,’ Heynckes explained, unasked, as soon as he was better. Benfica’s president flew into a rage. He publicly confronted the coach – and stopped paying him his wages.

For months Benfica had been messing around in a similar way with Bossio, the goalkeeper who had fallen into disfavour after that pre-season match. He wasn’t needed any more, so they made him wait for his wages. Benfica only sorted out the transfer fee and the paperwork necessary for a playing permit six months after the start of the season. Given how badly he was being mucked about, Bossio remained admirably relaxed. He carried on training with Robert and Moreira without a word of complaint. The public had already forgotten Bossio; he was in the shadow of Robert Enke, who was ‘on the way to being an internationally great goalkeeper’ in Walter Junghans’s estimation. First- and third-choice goalkeeper – that sounded like a definitive, unambiguous qualitative difference. But without Bossio’s one bad day in the run-up to the season Robert’s and Bossio’s roles could have easily been swapped.

There were things that Robert, the public’s hero, learned from the outcast Bossio. He noticed how the other keepers at Benfica – Moreira, Bossio and Nuno Santos – positioned themselves further forward, further than Köpke, Kahn and Kamps
in
Germany. That helped them to cut out more through-passes and crosses. ‘I’d rather have a goalkeeper who only goes out for six simple crosses and takes them all than a goalkeeper who runs out for ten crosses and the two hardest ones fly past him,’ Robert insisted to Moreira. He really believed that: the best goalkeeper wasn’t the one who coped with the most difficult situations, but the one who made the fewest mistakes. Privately, though, he took his bearings from Moreira and Bossio. When a member of the opposing team entered Benfica’s half of the pitch, Robert now stood up to eight yards in front of the goal.

Rather than just being a few strides forward, for Robert this represented an expedition into the unknown. The most important thing for a keeper is a feeling of security, and Robert was now standing where he had never stood before. He was giving up the security that he had built up over the years, of knowing exactly how many paces it was back to the goal, and the angles between him and the posts. He kept instinctively retreating to the old conservative position, closer to the goal. Every time he did so he felt impelled to move forward again.

‘You didn’t need to push Robert, he was self-critical, and he always wanted to learn by himself,’ says Jupp Heynckes. ‘I’ve trained loads of players in my career, and as a coach you always get on particularly well with this team member or that one. But if somebody asks me after thirty years in the job who I think my ideal professional is, I always say Fernando Redondo and Robert Enke. Both of them weren’t just special footballers, but special people – respectful, sociable, intelligent.’

Every time the team left the stadium after training, freshly showered and damp-haired, Heynckes went to the gym. As usual, Robert and Walter Junghans were there, though now Robert was dragging his ‘little brother’ Moreira along as well. ‘Those were the best times,’ says Heynckes. He could shed the tension of work in that gym. After the effort of making himself understood in a foreign language all the time, it was simply wonderful to be able to speak German again. They talked ‘about
football
, politics, everyday stuff’, says Heynckes, and then on to subjects like movies, food, dogs. ‘These conversations alone in the gym, three Germans abroad,’ Heynckes says. ‘It was like a prayer.’

12. Robert and Teresa’s wedding photograph in 2000
.

In their ice-palace, Teresa and Robert dreamed about the summer. In the autumn they would move out of the Palácio Fronteira, they promised themselves; they couldn’t bear another winter there. But for now they were willing to put up with it, so that they could enjoy another summer by the pool.

On 18 February 2000 Teresa unwrapped Robert’s present for her twenty-fourth birthday. She’d felt the material through the wrapping-paper.

‘Aha, a football shirt,’ she said, and struggled to sound pleased rather than confused.

‘Try it on,’ he said, touchingly on edge, as he so often was off the pitch when things didn’t go as planned.

Teresa pulled on the black and yellow Benfica goalkeeper’s top.

‘OK?’ she asked.

The jersey came down to her knees.

‘Yes. Stand with your back to the mirror before you complain.’

That meant going to the bathroom – a mini polar expedition.

In the mirror Teresa looked at her back. TERESA ENKE
was
printed on the shoulders. Underneath, where the goalkeeper’s number was usually displayed, Robert had taped a white question mark.

It didn’t take Teresa more than a second to understand what the present meant.

They were married in the summer holidays at a castle near Mönchengladbach. Teresa’s friend Christiane, shaking her head, took pictures of her turquoise bridal shoes.

Teresa had found a new pal. With a heavy heart, she had left one of her two dogs in Germany with her parents. Now, whenever she could, she had the palace housekeeper’s dog over, so that it could be let off the chain.

‘Moreira,’ Robert said in the hotel room, ‘how come animals are so badly treated here? Everywhere I go I see dogs roaming around, or on chains.’

‘I’ve told you loads of times: you’re in Portugal.’

‘We’ve got to help those dogs.’

But he and Teresa were the only ones who thought so.

That autumn they moved out of Palácio Fronteira to a one-storey house with a garden and central heating in Sassoeiros, near the beach, where there were no rules to stop them keeping dogs. Teresa bought the housekeeper’s dog from her. In the park she picked up a scrawny mongrel. Word got round that the goalkeeper and his wife liked animals. A dog was thrown over their garden fence, a poodle left tied to a lamp-post outside their front door. A woman who worked in the Benfica office called Robert in after training. A Dobermann that had outgrown its collar which now cut badly into its neck had been dropped off for him.

‘My darling, sometimes I hate you for the fact that I can’t walk past a needy animal,’ Robert said to Teresa.

All of a sudden they had seven dogs.

Joker, however, didn’t get on with Alamo. They put Joker in the garden shed. Teresa went in with her mobile phone. When Robert had Alamo under control in the house, he phoned her: ‘You can come out with Joker now.’

Eventually, for all their love of animals, it struck them as ridiculous. They put Joker in a dogs’ home in Sintra. Robert had sometimes become irritated with Teresa’s commitment to animal welfare; after all, she couldn’t save every dog in Portugal. But he went to the dogs’ home every day to take Joker for a half-hour walk.

‘Even I thought, does it have to be every day?’ Teresa says.

Robert Enke’s second season at Benfica started with a farewell. In September 2000 Jupp Heynckes gave up only four days into the campaign. ‘I can’t stand this any more,’ he said. Benfica had ended its first year with Heynckes and Robert third in the Primeira Liga. With fifteen points more than the previous year, Heynckes stressed; two places behind Sporting and ineligible for the Champions League, the media and fans grumbled. Heynckes hadn’t been paid for nine months.

For Robert, his sponsor’s step-down didn’t seem a watershed moment. In the course of a year in Lisbon he had become more independent, not least as a goalkeeper.

A new coach arrived, and most things at Benfica went on as before. The cheques came in two weeks late, the club president João Vale e Azevedo was arrested on suspicion of embezzlement, the Portuguese parliament debated the club’s situation, and the finance minister told MPs about £50 million in debts and ‘criminal intrigues’. The public, however, measured Benfica not against these reports but against their glorious past.

After Benfica had lost 1–0 to Boavista, immediately after Heynckes’s departure, and then drawn 2–2 with Braga, he sat at home barely capable of conducting a normal conversation with his wife. His thoughts kept taking him back to the goals he wasn’t to blame for.

‘OK, that’s enough, let’s go out,’ Teresa said, suddenly firmly resolved. ‘You can’t only ever enjoy life when you’ve played well.’

They drove to Belém. He went along unenthusiastically.

People stopped him in the street there. ‘Uenk, what’s up with
Benfica
?’ ‘Uenk, why have you stopped winning?’ He smiled, he gave a few vacuous answers, they went for a walk. After that he was more relaxed.

Was he learning to shrug things off? Was it possible to shrug things off?

The new coach was thirty-seven and had never before been responsible for a professional team. His name was José Mourinho. Years later, when he became ‘The Special One’ at Chelsea and Inter Milan, sports journalists wrote about his fascinating arrogance and his big words. At that time, with Benfica, Robert merely noted – enthusiastically – the tactical precision, the infectious euphoria and his affection for the players. ‘He was the best coach in my career.’ After less than four months he had gone. Insulted by the club’s refusal to extend his contract beyond next summer, even after five wins in a row, including a 3–0 victory in a derby against Sporting, Mourinho handed in his notice. When he said goodbye to the players, his eyes filled up.

It was time to turn the heating on again in Lisbon. Cosy and warm was something else, but with a bit of imagination the stoves in Sassoeiros made them feel it was pleasant enough in the house. When they were invited to dinner by Robert’s team-mate Paulo Madeira, they felt better straight away: other people in Lisbon were shivering in badly insulated houses too.

In the changing-room, Robert had found a little group of work-mates: Madeira and Moreira, and Pierre van Hooijdonk and Fernando Meira, too. ‘What I remember about Robert is this,’ Moreira says. ‘He said a friendly
Bom dia!
to all the players, but he only really had contact with a very small group, even when he was made team captain.’