The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (29 page)

B
ack in November 2008, when I was still a fresh face at Everton, we played a game against West Ham. We’d trailed by a goal until the 83rd minute. Then, Everton’s Louis Saha crossed to Joleon Lescott, who headed in an equalizer. Two minutes later, Saha drove the ball into the lower corner of the net. In the 87th minute, Saha scored again. Three goals in four minutes.

Games can turn around fast, especially when teams get nervous.

So I knew that if we could score one—take it from a comfortable lead to an uncomfortable lead—Belgium was going to feel the pressure.

Could we do it? Absolutely.

During the extra-time break that’s all anyone talked about: one goal. One. Jürgen remained upbeat, full of positive energy. We were going to get one, and then we were going to keep fighting.

After all, if there’s one defining characteristic of the U.S. team, it’s that we don’t know when to give up.

T
wo minutes after the restart, all that belief resulted in an incredible moment.

Julian Green, our German American teenaged sub, had come on the field as Jürgen’s final roll of the dice. Michael Bradley dinked a ball over the top of the Belgian defense, and Julian took his first-ever World Cup touch.

Whoa baby! He scored on a gorgeous volley.

All we needed was one more.

I
remember looking at Michael Bradley during those final minutes of the game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone battling harder. Michael’s engine never stops. Not even when the gears have been stripped and ground down to shavings. He’s Bob Bradley’s son, through and through. Somehow, he’ll open up into a sprint even when he’s cramping. He’ll push from one end of the field to the other, even when everyone around him is gasping for breath. In the group stage, Michael had logged more miles than any other player: nearly 24 miles in 3 games.

Now I saw him running, emptied out, yet still going, and I believed—not hoped, not prayed,
believed
—we were going to nail the equalizer.

When we did, this game was going to go to penalty kicks.

And when it went to PKs, I was going to do what I’ve done so many times before. I was going to save some. And we were going to win this thing.

W
e had two final chances. In the 114th minute, we won a free kick just outside Belgium’s penalty area. In training, we’d worked on a clever set piece that could surprise a defense expecting one of our guys to curl the ball over or around the wall. To pull out that play now, with just a few minutes left in the game, required massive guts.

Michael ran up to the free kick as if he was going for glory but suddenly drew back his leg and passed the ball on the ground to Wondo, standing with his back to the goal on the edge of the area. As the Belgium defense converged on him, Wondo flicked the ball to his left and onto the foot of Clint, who never broke stride as he busted through the logjam of players in the box. At that moment, I started thinking about penalty kicks. But Thibaut Courtois, Belgium’s towering keeper, reacted with world-class anticipation and threw his long body over the ball.

What a beautiful “almost” that was.

A minute later, we made our last charge up the field and DeAndre had a decent look at goal. How amazing would it have been if a kid who was only in his second year in MLS had tied the game in the final seconds? But we were flat out of miracles. Yedlin’s shot was saved by Courtois.

And that was it. All around me, my teammates dropped to the turf, as if they’d been powered by hope alone. Now that the hope was gone, they had nothing left.

T
he first person to come up to me was Romelu. He hugged me. I’ve had a lot of bittersweet hugs in my life. This one topped them all.

A
s I left the field, a FIFA official told me that I’d been selected randomly for drug testing. He handed me a bottle of water and said I’d better start drinking.

Then another official approached me. He told me something that I couldn’t quite make sense of in that moment.

He informed me I’d just made World Cup history. I was the first keeper to have made 15 saves in a single game.

Fifteen saves.

The number was meaningless, divorced completely from this hollowed-out moment in time.

History?

I’d have given up that history in a nanosecond if we could have made it through to the quarterfinals.

W
hen I walked into the doping room, Romelu was sitting there, too, his own bottle of water in hand.

“Hey, man,” I said.

I was so tired, I could barely speak.

I sat down. Rom and I’d already said everything we needed to say in that hug we’d shared on the field. We sat for a few moments in comfortable silence.

“Tim,” Rom said, “how’s the family?”

“Good, Rom. Thanks. They’re great.”

“Did the kids get down for any games?”

“Yeah, they did,” I said. “Jacob’s got World Cup fever big time.”

We each took huge gulps of water, as much as we could possibly swallow. The sooner I could produce my urine sample, the sooner I could get home.

“You get any word about next season?” I asked. I knew he wanted to come back to Everton, but he still belonged to Chelsea, who had loaned him to us last season.

“Nothing for sure,” he said. “I hope I can come back. It’s a good club.”

“It is,” I said. “It’s the best club in the league.”

“There aren’t a lot of . . .” He paused.

“Egos,” I said.

“That’s right, not a lot of egos or drama.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope you come back. You fit in well.”

Our eyes met, and we smiled. Then we each knocked back a bunch more water.

I
called the kids after leaving Salvador.

“Daddy?” Ali asked. “Are you sad?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

She thought about that for a bit, then responded, with more assurance than you’d think a child could have, “I’m proud of you, Daddy. And I’m really happy. Because now you’re coming home.”

Ali’s words soothed the sting of the Belgium loss. Sometimes all it takes is the perspective of a 7-year-old.

O
ver the next few days, I received hundreds of texts, emails, and phone calls from all over the world.

From Steve Senior, my high school buddy:
OMG!!!! You were AMAZING!!!!!!!

From Mulch:
You inspired a hell of a lot of kids out there today.

I got texts from Landon and Carlos. From Kasey and Tony Meola. From my Everton teammates and friends.

I was too drained, and too down, to respond to more than a handful.

Steve got a two-word text:
thx man.

For Mulch, there was only one:
Gutted
.

T
hat night I slept for 16 hours straight. In the morning, I met up with Clint. We were told President Obama would be calling.

“You guys did us proud,” Obama said. Then he said to me, specifically, “I don’t know how you are going to survive the mobs when you come back home, man. You’ll have to shave your beard so they don’t know who you are.”

Even before I left Brazil—and then for weeks after—I started getting media requests:
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
,
The Tonight Show
Starring Jimmy Fallon
, the
Today
show,
Dr. Oz
,
Access Hollywood
, the
Late Show with David Letterman
, the
Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Sports Awards
,
Good Morning America
, and the ESPYS, just to name a few.

Disney wanted to fly my family and me to Orlando. Nickelodeon was willing to send a private jet. Other companies offered staggering amounts of money for me to show up, sign autographs, and pose for photos.

“Nah,” I told Dan.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I just want to go home and be with my kids.”

M
y assistant, Amber, showed me the “Things Tim Howard Could Save” memes that had been popping up all over the internet. There I was, saving the
Titanic
. Saving a swimmer from the shark in
Jaws
. Saving Janet Jackson from her Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.

She also showed me a screen grab for the secretary of defense’s Wikipedia page: some prankster had briefly substituted my name for the real one, Chuck Hagel. Then Chuck Hagel himself actually called to congratulate me.

It all seemed so surreal; I couldn’t process what was going on.

Only when I saw a
New York Times
graphic showing all 15 saves superimposed onto a single image did the number itself make sense. I studied them in turn.

Oh yeah
, I’d think.
I remember that one. And that one, too.

M
y flight from Brazil back to the U.S. landed just as the summer sun began its rise above the horizon.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that maybe President Obama
had been right and I should have shaved off my beard when I had the chance. As soon as I arrived at the terminal, I was immediately swarmed by people of every age, every background, every shape and size.

They gave me high-fives. They crowded in for selfies—too many for me to count. They asked for my autograph on their boarding passes and coffee-shop receipts.

“Captain America!” shouted one middle-aged woman.

“I’m gonna grow a beard just like you!” shouted a college-aged kid, dressed in jeans and flip-flops. “You’re the man!”

“Tim Howard!”

“Great game!”

“We’re so proud of you!”

“Game of your life!”

I
heard that phrase again and again: game of your life.

Was it?

What I did against Belgium is the same thing I’ve tried to do throughout my career: keep the ball from going into the net.

That’s just my job. Some games, I barely touch the ball. I’ll focus for 90 intense minutes, only to make one big save.

Other days, like when we played Belgium, I’m asked to deliver 15 of them.

Okay, so I made history on that field in Salvador. But it didn’t feel like beating Mexico in Azteca, or defeating Spain in the Confederations Cup. It’s not as if there were last-minute heroics like Landon’s winner in South Africa.

Slowly, it dawned on me. Over the following days I began to understand that, somehow, people saw something that mattered to them in this game even more than winning.

They’d seen us fight. We’d been knocked down and battered and depleted. Yet we kept at it. Not just me but every one of my teammates. And every day all over America, people were fighting with similar intensity against their own opponents, internal and external, in their own way.

But our fight had been seen on TV by tens of millions, in the U.S. alone. And because I was the keeper—the last line of defense—I became the face of that battle.

That’s when I understood: maybe, it really was the game of my life. Maybe “the game of your life” is simply the one that means the most to others.

I
went to Destin, Florida, with Trey and Laura and the kids . . . and 50 members of Laura’s extended family.

Laura and Trey got a bottom-floor condo, and so did I, so the kids moved back and forth easily between the two. We set our beach chairs next to one another and relaxed in the sun. At night, Trey and the kids came over to my condo, and we all watched baseball.

We ate all our meals together. Laura rolled her eyes as people surrounded our table asking for photographs and autographs. I caught her winking at Trey, as if to say,
See? What did I tell you?

But I said no to requests when I was with my family. Soon after I’d gotten home, Ali had said, “I wish people didn’t always have to come up to you, Daddy.”

“Not while I’m with my family,” I told people. “Sorry, but I’m with my family now.”

I
t was a busy summer. I visited Carlos Bocanegra, my old teammate and friend, in Los Angeles for the baptism of his baby boy. I was his son’s godfather.

I was so honored to have been asked, first of all, that I had been rendered speechless. The godfathers to my children were my brother and Steve Senior—two people who I knew would be in my life forever.

And I was thrilled that I could be there for the baptism. I’d missed so many meaningful moments during the years—weddings and funerals and births and baptisms. But this one: this one I could attend.

The night before the baptism, Carlos and I split a bottle of wine from our birth year—1979. We smoked cigars. He told me that he was nearing the end of his MLS career; a few months later, he would announce his retirement. Carlos had been retired from the national team for over a year now. Already, he was staring at life beyond the soccer field. For a few days, I got a glimpse into what that life might look like.

M
y face was suddenly everywhere—newspapers, magazines, TV, and gossip-entertainment web sites. When I went on a date, or so much as talked to a woman, it was shown online for the whole world to see.

My mom called me.

“Tim,” she said. “Who are these women, and why don’t I know anything about them?”

I laughed.

“Mom, I promise you. When there’s somebody in my life in a significant way, you’ll know it.”

W
eeks after Belgium, I opened the door to Laura and Trey’s house.

“Hey, is anybody here?”

My greeting committee—the four huge dogs that live with Laura and Trey and the kids—gave me a rousing reception. Clayton was among them, that old hound, wagging his tail in circles. The years were slowing him down and his muzzle was now covered in gray fur, but he was still unmistakably the creature who’d wreaked havoc all over that beautiful Man U house so many years ago.

“Okay, guys,” I said, pushing my way through them. “Come on, let me through.”

Trey’s daughter, Savannah, hugged me first. “Hey, Tim,” she said. “Dad’s in the garage. Laura’s in the kitchen.”

Then Ali came charging into the room. She leapt into my arms.
God, she’s getting so tall now
.

I carried her into the kitchen. Laura was loading dishes in the dishwasher—four hungry kids make an awful lot of dishes. “Hey, Tim.”