A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke Page 9

  Jupp Heynckes introduced himself to the team, and off they went to Camp Número 3, the training-ground. Robert stayed among the new players, so Heynckes had no opportunity to talk to him person to person. Heynckes’s goalkeeping coach Walter Junghans treated Robert as if he knew nothing at all about his panic attack.

  There were four goalkeepers – one too many after the last-minute signing of Carlos Bossio. Junghans was careful to treat all them equally. In his time as a player he himself had experienced all the emotional states of a goalkeeper: as the number one at Bayern Munich, as an unemployed outcast, as captain with Schalke, and during a spell stranded in the Second Bundesliga. ‘The position involves so much euphoria and pain, a goalkeeper has to expect to be the idiot at any moment,’ says Junghans, ‘so the goalkeeping coach must be a sympathetic friend to all his goalkeepers.’ Accordingly, he didn’t like putting Robert in goal first at every training practice, but he found it was the only way. Bossio only spoke Spanish, the third keeper Nuno Santos Portuguese, Sergei Ovchinnikov – who, as fourth choice, had the threat of deportation hanging over his head – Russian and Portuguese. Junghans spoke only German and English. Robert, therefore, always had to demonstrate the exercises so that the others understood. Apart from that they communicated in the language of the voiceless – with smiles and gestures.

  The grass was still gloriously damp – it was freshly watered before every training session – and the ball clung with pleasing firmness to the gloves. Robert studied his rivals. Everything about Bossio was enormous – his upper arms, his hands, and, yes, his chin too; and he could do amazing jumps as well. But the most noticeable thing about the Argentinian was his friendly smile.

  Robert smiled back. He didn’t even think about fear. His urge to be perfect, to rise to every challenge, had instinctively woken up on the training-ground.

  When the other pros left after training, he went to the gym. At first, in Mönchengladbach, he had felt uneasy with the weights, under the eyes of Kamps; now he was the only one who sat down willingly with the equipment. Junghans went with him, in the hope – at the age of forty-one – that the machines might do something about the inevitable paunch of a former professional sportsman.

  Suddenly Heynckes was standing next to him. He waited until Robert had finished his set of leg-press exercises. Then he started talking about his own first impressions of Lisbon, how pleasing the Portuguese were – at least when they weren’t driving – how much clearer the light was down south. Heynckes talked quietly, slowly, convivially, and eventually said, ‘Look, Robert, you’re not alone here. I know how big a step it is for a twenty-one-year-old to go abroad, but you don’t need to be scared. I brought you over here and I’ll help you. Walter, you and me, we’re here together, and we’ll see it through together.’

  Neither Junghans nor Heynckes remembers what Robert said in reply.

  It was time for the next series of exercises on the leg-press. He clamped his feet in the machine, knees bent, mouth clenched in expectation of the coming exertion. And the weights in the contraption flew up as if no exertion was too much for him.

  ‘I liked Robert from the very beginning,’ Heynckes says. ‘I’d met him twice in the spring, in my house on the Spielberg in Mönchengladbach, to get him for Benfica. He was incredibly open, likeable, and very confident, and that impression stayed with me, even though at first I was really pissed off when he suddenly said he didn’t want to go to Lisbon. But from the moment we talked in the gym at Benfica, his panic attack was forgotten as far as I was concerned. I only thought about it again four years later.’

  Robert didn’t find it so easy to forget. As soon as he left the training-ground the feeling of being a stranger slowly, paralysingly returned. He knew he had no reason to be afraid, but the hotel by the airport became his fortress. He entrenched himself there, with Teresa.

  ‘Robbi, head straight!’ she’d shout, and he’d look away with a start from the television and raise his head. A quarter of an hour later the game was repeated.

  One afternoon she received a call from Tina, their mutual friend from Jena. Robert was at training at the time.

  ‘So, what are you up to?’

  ‘Well, nothing, really. I’d like to go out into the old town or something, but Robbi’s not in a good way, he just spends all the time moping in our room.’

  ‘Then go out on your own, even if you just sit with your book in a café. You can’t spend all your time fitting in with Robbi.’

  But Teresa didn’t think she could be all right when he wasn’t.

  Football afforded him a brief respite from the fear. In the middle of Benfica’s training-camp near Salzburg he suddenly had to leave for Mexico for the Confederation Cup. He’d been invited join the national team for the first time. It wasn’t exactly a cause for celebration. The tournament in Mexico was of dubious value in sporting terms, its timing – at the end of July, just before the start of the club season – a crude joke, which was why the established keepers Oliver Kahn and Hans Jörg Butt had pulled out of the expedition. Robert had slipped in as substitute goalkeeper. No one in German football knew about his inner struggles. Many of them saw his selection as a logical consequence: the future would belong to this young goalkeeper.

  Without being played in a single game he spent fourteen shimmeringly hot days in Mexico. He couldn’t sleep at night for heat and jet-lag, and by day he watched a relatively unmotivated German team lose 4–0 to Brazil and 2–0 to the USA. And at the same time he hadn’t exactly improved his position with Benfica, because he had missed two weeks of preparation for the season. But he did not see it this way. He felt he had been at home for two weeks, in the familiar world of German football.

  On his return to Lisbon he could no longer escape the reality that he lived there now. He went house-hunting with Teresa. The estate agent even showed them a palace, the Palácio dos Marqueses de la Fronteira – the former guest-house behind the palace was available to rent. Aha, said Robert, grinning at the idea of living there. But let’s go on, said the estate agent, he had some spectacular houses to show them. It would take them days to make their minds up.

  On 10 August 1999 Benfica played a pre-season friendly against Bayern Munich in the Stadium of Light; the Portuguese often just call the stadium A Luz – Light. The new team, Jupp Heynckes’s Benfica, introduced themselves to the sixty thousand people who filled the arena that night. There’s nothing more tantalising than the promise of a new season: everything will be different, better, now. For the first time the new coach would be playing his starting line-up, with Nuno Gomes as striker, Karel Poborský on the wing, and João Pinto, who stroked the ball with his feet, as midfield maestro. Carlos Bossio was in goal.

  Bayern won 2–1. The glaring light pooled on Bossio. Sixty thousand people angrily booed and whistled him. The two Munich goals had left him looking pretty shoddy.

  It was just a warm-up, though, and the result was insignificant. No one talks about evenings like that when one looks back over seasons or footballing careers, because no one can believe that careers are decided by such matches.

  Ten days later, just before the opening day of the 1999–2000 Portuguese championship, FIFA temporarily withdrew Bossio’s right to play for Benfica. His previous club, Estudiantes de la Plata, had reported Benfica to FIFA. His transfer fee hadn’t been paid.

  The public doesn’t know the whole truth even today, Heynckes says. ‘Bossio suddenly wasn’t good enough for Benfica’s directors after his unhappy game against Bayern. Benfica considerably delayed the payments to Estudiantes.’

  Bossio was suspended, Nuno Santos was injured, Sergei Ovchinnikov had by now been transferred to FC Alverca. The only one who could play was Robert Enke.

  He passed the news on to Teresa casually, the way he always preferred to pass on good news. He took great pleasure in seeing the excitement appear on other people’s faces.

  ‘Oh, by the way, I’m playing on Saturday.’

  They were sitting under palm-t
rees by the pool, looking out over a garden laid out in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with decorative trees carved into geometrical shapes. They had moved into the guest-house of Palácio Fronteira.

  In a town whose name he forgot even when he was there, in a stadium that had grassy mounds behind the goals rather than terraces, Robert had to prove that he could suppress his anxiety. Benfica were starting the Primeira Liga season against FC Rio Ave, a club from the small town of Vila da Conde in the no-man’s-land behind Porto. The stadium only held twelve thousand, which meant there was room for 60 per cent of the inhabitants of the town. The grassy mound behind him was swarming with young people and children; their voices were a constant, unpleasant droning in his ear.

  At home in Germany Jörg Neblung was pacing back and forth in his flat. Flippi had decided that no one from the agency had to attend this game on the edge of Europe. ‘From today’s vantage-point that was simply careless, bearing in mind the state Robert was in,’ says Jörg. On satellite television there were snooker tournaments and darts championships, but in those days no Portuguese football matches. He asked Teresa to keep him informed by text from Lisbon.

  Game over. 1–1. A solid performance by Robert.

  Jörg exhaled.

  A week later, after Benfica’s first home game, the front pages of the sports newspapers were already full of Robert Enke. Voa Enke! (Enke flies!) said Portugal’s best-selling A Bola.

  At one of those moments when a goalkeeper doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he’d jumped up and saved a firm header from six yards. He experienced such moments in ecstatic slow-motion, all of a sudden reaching a higher level of perception; everything looked pin-sharp – the colours of the shirts, the movements of the striker. Other people have such experiences only in traumatic situations, when they suddenly have to brake their car or when they fall off their bike. A goalkeeper can become addicted to these wonderfully terrifying moments in a match. Towards the end of that first home game Robert tipped another ricocheting ball around the post, ensuring Benfica’s 1–0 victory over Salgueiros. A Luz was radiant.

  ‘Enke already darling of the public in Lisbon’ reported the German news agencies, for whom nothing can ever happen quickly enough.

  The sportswriters wanted to know whether the situation at Benfica – only one seasoned professional goalkeeper available – wasn’t detrimental to him; don’t you need rivals to push you in training? Applying pressure and taking pressure clearly seemed to be a popular method in Portugal, too. ‘I like the situation,’ Robert replied. ‘I don’t need any competition.’

  10. Robert’s typical defensive posture, with his knee turned inwards, in a one-on-one situation.

  A seventeen-year-old boy from the B-team, José Moreira, was named substitute goalkeeper and became his new training partner. ‘The first thing that struck me was his face,’ says Moreira. ‘His face during the game was the face of Oliver Kahn! Nothing moved there, not a gesture, not a stirring. Nothing distracted him, nothing broke his concentration.’ Robert noticed that the boy was absorbing his every movement, because Moreira started imitating him. ‘If you look at me,’ Moreira says eleven years later, unable to conceal his pride, ‘you’ll recognise a few things from Robert.’

  In the Cathedral of Beer, as the VIP hospitality area at the Stadium of Light is called, Moreira swings himself down from his bar-stool. In front of him businessmen in suits and ties are eating; Moreira, in loose-fitting jeans and a shabby black T-shirt, ignores the fact that he has an audience. He crouches down, almost doing the splits, his right leg stretched out, left knee bent, torso bolt upright, arms outstretched, all ten fingers spread. ‘That’s how Robert stood in one-against-one situations, when the striker appeared in front of him.’ Moreira’s voice is now high and loud with enthusiasm. ‘He made himself so wide, and he was so quick and agile he could assume this position from nowhere and immediately jump back from the splits again. No other goalkeeper could master that posture.’

  Moreira asked Robert, why do you always do the splits like that? Why don’t you run out of the goal for every cross? You’ve got latex inside your gloves as well – what’s that for? And Robert, who had persuaded himself that he didn’t care what other people thought of him, blossomed since there was no one putting pressure on him, just one inquisitive pupil who admired him.

  On evenings before games they shared a hotel room. They spoke their own brand of Portuguese English together.

  ‘Moreira, in three months I want to be able to speak Portuguese. You’re my teacher now. How do you say this: aipo hortense?’

  ‘Robert, there’s an R in hortense – I can’t hear your R. You say it as if you had a hot potato in your mouth.’

  ‘OK, I’ll learn to do that in three months, Moreira. And you’ve got to learn German, too. BRING MIR WASSER! Bring me water. That’s the most important sentence you’ll have to understand as my substitute goalkeeper, you understand? BRING MIR WASSER!’

  Moreira can still say the phrase today, and a few other things too, as became clear when we first met at the Stadium of Light. ‘Gute Nacht!’ Moreira said. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

  ‘Moreira, let’s take a look at the Bundesliga on German television,’ Robert said one Saturday evening in the hotel room.

  ‘But we can watch the goals on Eurosport with an English commentary, then I’ll understand something.’

  ‘No, it’s better if we watch it in German.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Oh, and Moreira, after that there’s a good Eddie Murphy movie on ZDF.’

  ‘But it doesn’t even have subtitles!’ Moreira moaned once the film had started. ‘Eddie Murphy’s speaking German!’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, Moreira, it’s fine like this.’

  ‘But Robert, we could watch Portuguese television. They have films in English with Portuguese subtitles.’

  ‘He always had his own way,’ Moreira recalls affectionately, ‘and I’ve never slept as well as I did with him in the room, because the German films were so boring.’

  Today, at the age of twenty-eight, Moreira wears his hair down to his shoulder. It frames a soft face, though like almost all goalkeepers it is marked by collisions with strikers. There’s a big graze under his right eye. He’s remained true to Benfica throughout those eleven years, even though the club uses him as an understudy for the more expensive goalkeepers Benfica buy who are wrongly considered more important because of the size of their transfer fee.

  11. Robert with his goalkeeping ‘little brother’ José Moreira.

  ‘Have you seen Moreira play lately?’ Robert would ask every time we fell to talking about great goalkeepers in later years.

  ‘Robbi, I don’t even watch Portuguese television.’

  ‘You’ve got to watch Moreira.’

  His eyes laughed when he talked about Moreira, the goalkeeper who learned from him, who made him feel unexpectedly jaunty in training, who was his accomplice and not his rival.

  In the Palácio Fronteira you could feel like a marquis, even if you were only living in the guest-house. There were more bathrooms than there had been rooms in the flat in Mönchengladbach: six. The garden walls were tiled with blue and white azulejos, with motifs of medieval battles and trumpet-playing monkeys.

  Phone-calls from Germany were always fun.

  ‘Oh no, it’s raining here again.’

  ‘Really? We’re sitting in the garden in our T-shirts.’

  They explored the city, the fortress of San Jorge and the Gulbenkian Museum, the Eleven bar and the Blues Café; they made their first acquaintances among the Benfica professionals. Sometimes they just sat in the garden and looked at the lights of Lisbon, gold in the afternoon, milky at twilight.

  Teresa’s pangs of conscience at giving up her studies faded away. ‘The truth is that I enjoyed not having to work or study.’ When Robert was at training she lay in the garden reading thrillers, irritably skipping over paragraphs with nothing but descriptions of pla
ces. Something had to happen in books.

  One morning she was sticking photographs of their summer holiday in southern Holland into an album. Robert in his floppy hat in the dunes, smiling. ‘We had dark times ahead of us’ she wrote underneath. It wrote itself so easily. It seemed so long ago.

  ‘I don’t think Robert’s going to have any more panic attacks,’ she told his father when he visited them in Lisbon.

  ‘Sadly I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Dirk replied.

  Teresa shivered for a second, then shook the thought gently away.

  For now, Robert went on flying. When Benfica beat FC Gil Vicente 2–0 at the end of October, the team was unbeaten after seven games. Since the 1–1 against Rio Ave at the start of the season Robert hadn’t let in a single goal. ‘Enke is an exorcist’, the Record wrote poetically.

  More and more people came to visit from Germany. Teresa’s mother was the next one. The autumn light made the garden brighter, milder. Callers from home said that they’d turned on the heating for the first time recently; Robert and Teresa were still swimming in their pool in the palace garden.

  ‘It’s wonderful here,’ said Teresa’s mother.

  ‘And I know someone who didn’t even want to go to Lisbon,’ Robert called out from the pool. He turned with a cheeky smile to Teresa. ‘Remind me, why didn’t you want to go to Lisbon?’

  SIX

  Happiness

  AT A TIME of night when the ringing of the phone usually means a call from a lover or bad news, Marco Villa woke with a start. It was 25 November 1999. He looked at the clock: just before midnight. Robert Enke’s name flashed up on the screen of his mobile.

  After Borussia’s relegation, Marco had moved to Austria. The word ‘provinces’ had assumed a new connotation for him. He was playing for the top-flight team SV Ried. The town, hidden in a dip in the foothills of the Alps between Salzburg and Linz, had eleven thousand inhabitants, and the team had won the Austrian Cup in 1998. The stadium in Ried was called Keine Sorgen Arena – ‘No Worries Arena’. Marco could already feel Ried’s carefree attitude having an effect on him; he’d scored eight goals for the club in five months.