A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (42 page)

They showed the agent the nursery. Lara’s name was still on the wooden door in magnetic letters. Teresa and Robert wanted to put their adopted child’s name up next to it. They wanted their second child to learn in the most natural way possible that it had a dead sister.

In October they received confirmation that their application for adoption had been accepted. Now they had to wait, and they didn’t know whether it would be four weeks or fourteen months until they got their child.

Time flew, it seemed to Robert. His newfound status as Germany’s goalkeeper had given his life a new pace. Everything seemed faster, more sudden, particularly his excitement. He travelled to training with the national team in D
ü
sseldorf as the climax of the World Cup qualifiers was imminent – the game against European Championship semi-finalists Russia. Since Lehmann’s departure he had been in goal for all the internationals, and his performance had been faultless. But four days before the game against Russia, Germany’s biggest selling tabloid
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carried a headline about him and Joachim Löw that sounded like a threat: ‘Enke: Jogi’s number one – until the first mistake’.

He tried not to take it personally. He knew that what looked like a campaign against him was basically only a personal prejudice: the
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correspondent covering the national team usually reported on René Adler and Bayer Leverkusen, and he
liked
René so much that he fought for the lad in every headline. But his fury didn’t subside. Why did the
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man have to attack him just because he was René’s competitor? Hannover had lost 2–0 in Leverkusen once – an everyday result in the Bundesliga. In
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the man had as his headline ‘Enke in the shooting-range’.

It’s not important, Robert tried to reassure himself.

In other media, too, he and René were turned into great rivals in the days leading up to the Russia game. Lehmann v. Kahn was yesterday; now the battle of the goalkeepers was between Enke and Adler. In fact they were becoming increasingly close. There was an awkward awareness that they were fighting for the same place but they didn’t talk about it. They were cordial rivals. ‘Robert and René tended to need harmony,’ says Köpke. ‘They were different from Olli Kahn and Jens Lehmann. They didn’t need that kick to wind each other up, to turn each other into enemies. Those days are over anyway. These days life in a football team is more about companionship.’

‘I always had the feeling that there was no competition between us,’ says René. ‘And I think that did us both good. It helps if you don’t have that pressure in training – if he saves that ball, I have to save a better one.’

In D
ü
sseldorf, three days before the big match, the coach organised a four-a-side practice game on a small pitch. At one point Philipp Lahm shot from a short distance away. Robert threw his fists up and deflected the ball. In the other goal René was concentrating on the game because the next shot could come straight at him. The game was going back and forth on the little playing-field, the players learning to make the right decisions in the tightest space in the shortest time.

At the next drinks break Robert went up to Andy Köpke and said, ‘I’ve pulled my wrist back punching, something’s gone. I might have dislocated my hand.’

‘Put some ice on it and go and see the doctor straight away.’

René was standing a few feet away, his thoughts still on the
practice
game, which resumed within minutes. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Robert wasn’t coming back on to the pitch, and that Tim Wiese was coming on in his place.

The doctor carefully moved Robert’s left hand. Then he said, ‘We’ve got to go to hospital.’

HIS SCAPHOID BONE
was fractured. While the national team were having one last practice at corners in D
ü
sseldorf, Robert was in the hand surgery department in a Hamburg hospital.

Dr Klaus-Dieter Rudolf had put a screw in Robert’s wrist – a ‘Herbert screw’ – to stabilise the carpal bones at the spot where the hand was broken. The operation had been successful, Rudolf told him, which suggested that the break was going to heal smoothly; the method had been applied successfully many times before. But the doctor wanted to be honest with him. Robert Enke was a goalkeeper. His wrist was subject to extreme movements and strains. The healing process was a complicated one and there was a risk that he would never be able to stretch his hand out fully again.

Teresa collected him. His hand was in a red plaster-cast with Velcro fastenings as he was supposed to take it off for a few hours every day and keep the wrist moving. In three months he could expect to be back in goal. But it wasn’t so easy for Robert to look forward to that day. Why did things like that always have to happen to him? ‘It was a normal shot, the kind of shot I’d saved a thousand times.’

He called on his neighbour Uli. Did he want his two tickets for the game against Russia in Dortmund? Uli told him his brother-in-law J
ü
rgen had once fractured his scaphoid bone, in both hands. He had fallen while doing his job as a roofer.

‘Can you stretch your hands all the way out?’ Robert asked J
ü
rgen when he met him.

‘I can hardly stretch them out at all,’ said J
ü
rgen, and showed him.

Robert stared at him.

He watched the match that was supposed to have been his on television. Teresa sat down with him. Germany played energetically, they were quick on their feet, and after half an hour they were leading 2–0 with goals from Lukas Podolski and Michael Ballack. Shortly before half-time Philipp Lahm on the left wing lost the ball to Aleksandr Anyukov who immediately cut into the German penalty area. René Adler came out a long way towards him, following the theory of the ‘radicals’, dashing out of his six-yard box to keep Anyukov’s angle of fire as small as possible. René’s feeling was that the Russian, so close to the byline, would pass back into space. So when Anyukov made a move to put in a low cross the keeper sidestepped to the right. But René was out of luck. Anyukov knocked the ball straight through his legs. In the six-yard box Andrei Arshavin connected with it and made it 2–1. It hadn’t been a goalkeeping error; it was a situation in which there was hardly anything a goalkeeper could have done. Robert alone was thinking, ‘There was a different way of resolving that.’ He was sure that with his technique of bending his right knee inwards he could have prevented that pass between the legs.

There was still half a match left, and that goal changed the game’s dynamic. The Russians suddenly charged. René tipped a lovely header over the bar, then successfully threw himself at Sergei Semak at the last moment, and, surrounded by seven players, took a fabulous catch off a cross Robert wouldn’t have gone for. Robert sat in his living-room and heard the television commentator shouting: ‘Great stuff from Adler! … I repeat my compliment: that is truly great stuff from Adler … and Adler again!’ It was twenty past ten in the evening, with ten minutes still to go in Dortmund. The excitement was palpable. Could the Germans hold on for victory?

Robert got up and said to Teresa, ‘I’m going to bed.’

He didn’t want to read the papers over the next few days. But his colleagues talked to him during rehab training at the Hannover stadium. ‘That’s just impossible. Have you seen what the papers are saying, even the supposedly serious ones? “The age of Adler has begun, the battle of the goalies is decided.” Are they all bonkers?’ His colleagues meant well. They were trying to say these were absurd celebrations, he shouldn’t let himself be put off by all this media hubbub. But by referring to the headlines they had really disconcerted him.

Two days after the game against Russia he called me. He didn’t give me time to ask about his scaphoid bone. He wanted to get to the point: ‘You’re a journalist.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think about what your colleagues did with René’s game?’

‘You mustn’t forget that it was René’s first international. Considering this he did really well. And unfortunately sportswriters always tend to predict a brilliant career for young footballers when they’ve had a good game. You were just as hyped as a nineteen-year-old in Gladbach. Try to ignore it.’

‘Sure. I don’t even care. I just wanted to know how you saw things.’

In November 2008 Robert agreed to speak to the magazine
11 Freunde
. It turned out to be his most open interview, although the readers couldn’t have known it. He said of his time after Istanbul, ‘It wasn’t the kind of crisis that any goalkeeper experiences when he misses the ball five or six times in the Bundesliga. There was something existential about it.’ But one passage was never published. Robert had it deleted because it struck him as too honest and bitter in retrospect. He was asked what he thought about the fact that the media had declared René Adler to be number one after a single international, and he replied, ‘This hype about René didn’t just start over the past few weeks. The subject has been being stirred up for ages. I sometimes wonder what’s going on. It was a completely normal game that he played against Russia, nothing sensational. It’s not easy for me to deal with it … In the public
perception
I’ve been left standing by the Adler and Neuer generation, and I’ve got to accept that that’s the case.’

One man in Germany shared Robert’s opinion that he unfairly came off worst in comparison with René Adler: René himself. ‘I could understand Robbi being disturbed by the reports after the Russia game. It was a good match of mine, but it wasn’t a stunner. What the media made of it was pretty extreme. I found it embarrassing.’

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.