A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (30 page)

February 2004 passed, then March, and he was still substitute goalkeeper. Jörg phoned him. ‘This isn’t good, you’ve got to talk to Carrasco. He brought you in as number one!’

Be patient, Robert replied. He would play eventually.

He never said it out loud, because he thought it was unseemly,
but
he thought he was better than the number one, Álvaro Iglesias. There were some objective arguments in his favour: his fine saves, his jumping, his anticipation – the difference was apparent every day in training. But he also saw that Álvaro played blamelessly in the matches. Perhaps Álvaro was so convincing precisely because he had a stronger competitor breathing down his neck. A goalkeeper who played his part without any mistakes deserved, in Robert’s opinion, to stay on stage. That was true even though he himself was the victim of the situation.

But to do his duty, to be able to say to Jörg ‘You see, I’ve done it’, he went to see the sporting director.

The situation was more embarrassing for Carrasco than it was for him. Carrasco had brought him to Tenerife. ‘Robert was my personal bet’, and now the coach wasn’t playing the goalkeeper. At the age of forty-five, Carrasco looked less like a former footballer than an active long-distance runner – slim, tall, ascetic. They both knew what they had to say, and that neither of them could do anything to change the situation.

‘You told me you would take me on as number one.’

‘I know, but I can’t tell the coach which players to play.’

Relieved at having put this behind them, they turned to other subjects.

‘Above all I could tell how much in love he was with Teresa,’ Carrasco says six years later in the Madrid suburb of Aravaca, where he lives today, still slim and elegant, wearing a suit as he takes his morning coffee. Love doesn’t seem like the most obvious of topics when a sporting director and his goalkeeper meet for crisis talks. ‘At the time he was about to become a father. I was in my mid-forties, I was already a father, I knew a bit about this – you notice how much in love someone is.’ Carrasco played for Barça for eleven years, his hair grey already, which was why they called him ‘Lobo’ – the Wolf. He won three European Cups, he reached the European Championship with Spain in 1984, and after that he taught himself journalism. After Barça’s 1–0 in Bruges it was he who wrote in
El Mundo Deportivo
, ‘Enke’s performance was a message to van Gaal.’

What stayed in Carrasco’s memory about the sportsman was ‘the elegance with which Robert endured his difficult situation as a substitute. He was always businesslike with me. He never complained in the press.’

Robert gave Álvaro Iglesias, the goalkeeper he was supposed to be putting pressure on, and whom he had to get out of the way if he was to play again, eight pairs of gloves. He got tailor-made models from his sponsor, gloves that Álvaro, who had long served as a goalkeeper in the lower divisions, couldn’t get hold of ‘Absolutgrip and Aquasoft, the best latex surfaces from Uhlsport,’ Iglesias remembers enthusiastically today, just as other people reel off the names of their children. Robert also gave eight pairs to the third-choice goalkeeper, Adolfo Baines. But Baines didn’t wear them to training. The gloves were so posh, he told Robert, that he would save them for special days.

There were now two Robert Enkes at training in the Heliodoro Rodríguez Stadium, according to the personalised Velcro fasteners of the gloves of both goalkeepers. But the original was always easy to spot.

The coach organised a little game, attack versus defence. The striker was through, alone in front of the goalkeeper, and Robert was waiting, one knee bent inwards so that the attacker couldn’t shoot through his legs, his torso ramrod straight, his arms outstretched to look wider. The striker went for a shot with the inside of his foot, attempting to curve it round the keeper. Robert pushed himself off the ground with a considerable leap, but what was truly magnificent was the explosiveness of his move. He darted to the left at lightning speed. The pensioners on the terraces clapped when he tipped the ball, which seemed to be on the way into the goal, around the post. ‘That was what I missed most,’ he said, ‘that feeling that what you do is important for somebody.’

Of course the questions still troubled him, that afternoon over the best chocolate milk-shake on the island. What if he had never left Benfica? What was someone like him doing on the subs bench in the Spanish Second Division? ‘And then I
thought
to myself: there must be some point to Enke taking a knock.’ And he had already found that meaning: he was enjoying the simple things of life again. ‘Belonging to a team, and knowing there’s training at ten o’ clock. Being needed again.’

It was only another nine and a half hours until the next training session. He sat in the living-room, so full of joy he couldn’t sleep. On the shelves, where books and figurines ought to have been, were two dozen pairs of gloves and shin-guards. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and on each hand he had a different model of glove, one Absolutgrip and one Aquasoft.

He fastened the Velcro. He clenched his fists, stretched his fingers, rubbed the gloves together, and stood in the room, concentrating hard. As if he were listening to the gloves on his fingers.

There is no lovelier feeling for a goalkeeper than slipping into his gloves and fastening the Velcro. Then he feels safe and secure, often invulnerable. For that reason most goalkeepers prefer a solid pair – armour for their soul. Robert, on the other hand, wore unusually light gloves. He wanted to restrict the mobility of his fingers as little as possible; he had to feel the ball when he caught it, not only in the foam of the gloves but all the way to his fingertips.

His sponsor wanted him to play with the latest model every year. ‘With Robert, it always took us about eight attempts until we found the right glove for him,’ says Lothar Bisinger, who looks after professional goalkeepers at Uhlsport. Eight attempts meant that after trying them on for the first time, Robert might say the glove was too tight on the right thumb, and then the glove had to be made again with the thumb a millimetre wider. Then he might notice that with the broad thumb the other fingers now felt too tight. The tailor widened the fingers. ‘So we made our way forward, millimetre by millimetre,’ says Bisinger. In Tenerife, the Velcro seemed too tight for Robert when he bent his wrist.

The seam on his gloves was always on the outside of the
thumb
; on the fingers he insisted on having it inside. Without an outside seam the ball sank better into the foam, while at the thumb he felt the seam on his skin when it was on the inside, and that was irritating. ‘He also had latex inside the glove,’ says José Moreira, who had naturally tried out Robert’s gloves during their time together in Lisbon. ‘It was something I didn’t know before, it didn’t exist in Portugal before him. I immediately ordered some from my manufacturer.’

The foam on Robert’s catching surfaces was seven millimetres thick: four millimetres of foam, three millimetres of lining. You can’t buy gloves like that. The foam layer in mass-produced gloves is six millimetres thick. When Robert put on normal goalkeeping gloves he noticed the single millimetre’s difference straight away.

What exactly the difference was between the natural rubber padding in Absolutgrip and Aquasoft even Bisinger couldn’t tell him. There are only three rubber suppliers for goalkeeping gloves in the whole world. ‘The recipes are as secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola,’ says Bisinger. ‘Only the manufacturers know whether the temperature was changed by three degrees in the baking of the rubber dough, or a new chemical was added to produce a new layer with improved clingability.’

Robert needed to test the differences between Absolutgrip and Aquasoft.

Throughout his career he had always worn Absolutgrip, but now, in his living-room, he was trying out Aquasoft. It was after midnight in Santa Cruz. I threw the ball, he caught it, until he was laughing too much to go on.

He hadn’t yet decided, he said, suddenly serious, which glove he would wear in his first game for Tenerife. His doubtful words rang with an inexplicable but absolute certainty: eventually, soon, he would have his first game.

His quiet joy made Teresa happy, and at the same time reminded her of her own sadness. She was pregnant and alone in Barcelona. One night she woke up, her whole body shivering. She felt nauseous and she was on her way to the bathroom to drink from the tap when she suddenly felt dizzy. She didn’t
dare
go back to the bedroom, downstairs. She lay down on a towel on the bathroom floor and waited for the dizzy spell to pass. While she was there, she had too much time to think.

Normally a pregnancy wasn’t like this. Normally your husband holds your head in such situations.

It was just a few months, such he told her on the phone.

She thought: he’s so relaxed, that’s just lovely; but how sad that we can’t share these moments with each other.

In spite of her pregnancy, she mowed the lawn. She had laid off the gardener during Robert’s depression, less because they were pinched for money than out of a vague feeling that they weren’t going to earn any more. In the evening she sat exhausted in front of the television.

Suddenly something hit the window. She held her breath. When they’d first started living in Sant Cugat there had been a shooting in her street, she remembered. Again a pebble hit the glass.

She went cautiously to the window. Down by the front door stood her husband, beaming and waving. He had come unannounced from Tenerife, a three-and-a-half-hour flight. He had set off at midday after training and had to get back first thing the next morning. She was knocked out after mowing the lawn. It wasn’t even nine in the evening but her eyelids were heavy. She was sorry, but she had to sleep. It doesn’t matter, he said, and really meant it. He watched her sleeping.

Back in Tenerife he began to do things that he hadn’t done since devoting himself to professional sport as a teenager. He went to the cinema on his own. He read a book for hours. He went to a carnival with the team. He put on a hooped T-shirt, stuck a sheet of A4 paper to his chest, drew a number on it and said he was an escaped safe-breaker. When he saw his team-mates, he wanted to sink into the ground. Álvaro Iglesias was a nurse with a real uniform, including red lipstick, Adolfo Baines was Rambo. Everyone but him had taken a lot of trouble with their fancy dress. He was twenty-six and still learning how other people partied.

After midnight, when the hard core moved on from the
restaurant
to a nightclub, he went home tired but happy. He knew more clearly than ever what he wanted to be like. All through his life he had been calm, businesslike, polite to other people, ‘not extrovert, but open’, says Iglesias. And now, for the first time in ages, he felt inwardly how he seemed outwardly; now he was also considerate and sympathetic to himself. The narrow-minded eagerness of youth had made way for a healthy ambition; the hunger that young sportsmen have, their total focus on being the best, had made way for a certain serenity. He had often wondered what it would be like to go through life with blinkers on, absolutely convinced about himself and his work. Perhaps then he would have been a better goalkeeper. But maybe, he said to himself now, it wasn’t that important after all to be the very best goalkeeper.

The ball bounced in the penalty area; the goalkeeper had to come out before any damage was done. And Álvaro Iglesias was already there. He reached resolutely for the ball. Rayo Vallecano’s striker jumped into him, even though it was unlikely he would win back the ball. When they do things like that, strikers are usually already thinking about the next goal-scoring opportunity; they want to frighten the goalkeeper, intimidate him so that he will hesitate a moment too long in the next critical situation. Álvaro’s forehead was bleeding. It was just a cut, said the doctor, who gave him three stitches on the pitch, and on the game went. Álvaro played the remaining forty-eight minutes, and Tenerife scored in injury time to salvage a draw.

The X-ray the next morning showed that Álvaro’s cheekbone had suffered a double fracture near his right eye. The bone was fixed with four pins at one fracture, six at the other. ‘Feel that,’ Álvaro said to Robert when he looked in on the changing-room for the first time after the operation. ‘You can feel the individual pins under the skin with your finger.’ Robert shivered as he felt them.

The goalkeeper’s spot was free.

He thought about Álvaro, about what it was like to lose your place like that. In four months Álvaro would turn
thirty
-two, and he was playing his first proper season in professional football; until then he had spent a decade in the Segunda B and Tercera divisions expending the effort of a professional but drawing the salary of a part-time job. Whenever he saw Álvaro at the stadium he went up to him and asked about his recovery. In the world of football that was unusually cordial. ‘Robert was very close to me in the days after my injury,’ says Álvaro, who would, in spite of this setback, assert himself in the Second Division until the age of thirty-six.

In the ninth year of Robert’s career it still looked as if things were going to go on like this for ever: his teams had high expectations which they never lived up to. Mönchengladbach, Benfica, Barça, Fenerbahçe – wherever he was, his team stumbled. Things were no different in Tenerife. Before the season they had had an eye on the top of the table. Before their game against Elche in mid-April they were on the brink of relegation.

Robert was back where he had started: a half-empty stadium in a second division, like Hannover versus Jena in November 1995. Sporting director Lobo Carrasco didn’t find the comparison at all defamatory. ‘Robert had the enthusiasm of a beginner,’ he says.

He strapped on his gloves – he had decided on Absolutgrip, as always. He hadn’t played for nine months.

The game hadn’t been going for a minute and he hadn’t yet touched the ball when Elche broke through on the flank. The cross came over, high but not too hard. Tenerife’s centre-half Miroslav Djukic´ didn’t go for the ball, he waited for Robert to come out – the ball was easy prey for a goalkeeper. But Robert stayed on his line. He was lucky. The ball flew past both friend and foe and trickled out of play.