A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (5 page)

The Bundesliga clubs that had spotted him during his remarkable youth career retained an unbroken interest in him. Some of them had called on his parents, including a gentleman from Bayer Leverkusen who said, ‘Hello, Reiner Calmund here,’ and went on to deliver ten sentences in half a minute without so much as a comma or a full stop. The best impression was left by the envoys from Borussia Mönchengladbach. Because unlike Leverkusen and VfB Stuttgart, Borussia unusually sent not only their manager but also their goalkeeping coach.

Robert wasn’t going to leave before his A-levels, his parents said, but the summer of 1996, the end of his school days, was edging ever closer.

Teresa wondered out loud where they could go to university together. She was thinking of training as a teacher or a vet. ‘What about W
ü
rzburg?’

‘Yeah. Don’t forget I still play football.’

‘Is that so important? Anyway, I’m sure there’s a club in W
ü
rzburg too.’

‘No, I mean professional football. I’ve had a few offers.’

‘And?’

‘They’re not offering bad money. In Mönchengladbach I could be earning twelve thousand marks a month.’

Oh, Teresa thought, maybe she had sounded a little bit naive.

A few days after Robert and his father first met the big hitters
from
Borussia Mönchengladbach, Dirk Enke’s phone rang. Norbert Pflipsen was on the line. He was a football agent, he said, G
ü
nter Netzer, Lothar Matthäus, Stefan Effenberg and Mehmet Scholl had been among his clients. ‘I could help your son,’ he said.

Usually a football agent puts a player under contract and then starts looking for a club. But in those days things were often a bit easier for the handful of agents who ruled the market. Through their informants in the Bundesliga they learned if a club wanted to sign a player who didn’t yet have an adviser, and by return of post the agent would offer himself to the player. That was how it was with Pflipsen and Borussia Mönchengladbach in the eighties and nineties.

Pflipsen – Flippi – had one strength: he was one of the first in the business. So for decades he maintained a reputation for being one of the best.

Flippi visited the Enkes in Jena. A man with fleshy lower arms and shirt-sleeve manners, he wasn’t short on anecdotes about how he had taken G
ü
nter to Real Madrid and Lothar to Inter Milan. It was a time when hardly any youth players had agents, yet here was this man from the highest echelons of football offering himself to Robert. The Enkes felt rather honoured. And in his witty way, Flippi was a likeable guy. They ignored the fact that he could sometimes be a bit crude. ‘When we start doing business,’ Pflipsen roared at Robert’s father, ‘I’ll give you a combined phone and fax. And,’ turning to Robert, ‘you’d get a car from me.’

Just before his geography oral (subject: rocks) in May 1996 Robert Enke signed a three-year contract negotiated by Norbert Pflipsen with the Bundesliga club Borussia Mönchengladbach.

Just before that, on the A2 eastbound from Dortmund, the engine of a small Peugeot had thrown up some sparks. Then smoke had started rising from under the bonnet. Driving in a car like that had been perilous, the breakdown services said; there was no oil and no water, and the outlets were blocked.

There was nothing, Flippi remonstrated, he could do about the fact that the second-hand car he had given Robert was in such a state.

ROBERT WAS LYING
on the ground, his head in the grass, now already brown in places. He looked up, and ten feet away, also level with the grass-stalks, two greyish-blue eyes were waiting for him. Come on, the eyes were saying, rigid with concentration, I’ll show you.

They lay facing each other in the penalty box on the training pitch, throwing the ball to each other with two hands. Their bodies were like bendy seesaws, swinging rhythmically back and forth, the only sound a brief, muffled clapping noise when the ball sank into the soft foam of their gloves.

That’s enough, Robert thought after a few minutes. We’re just warming up – why won’t he stop?

It took Robert a week to work out that Uwe Kamps would never stop. He wanted to see him, the new substitute goalkeeper, his potential rival, give up; to defeat him, even in the most minor warm-up exercise, every day.

Kamps had already played over three hundred Bundesliga games for Borussia Mönchengladbach. He was thirty-two, the darling of the fans, and in fact, after training, quite genial. Robert was nineteen, a boy, the number three keeper in the squad. In the first few years he would learn from Kamps and sooner or later he would be ready to take over as number one, he had been told by Dirk Heyne, the goalkeeping coach. Heyne was one reason he had chosen Borussia over other Bundesliga teams. He’d struck Robert as likeable and competent.

He looked over at Heyne. The coach said nothing. But he’d seen what Kamps was doing.

‘Okay,’ said the coach, ‘now shoot the ball at each other, at chest height.’

Kamps sent in shot after shot, each one getting harder, firmer and faster. He wanted to see Enke drop the ball.

In the evening, with training behind him, Robert laughed at his experiences, and not without a certain sympathy for Kamps. What a guy. The next morning, on the way to training, the matter would strike him as serious again. He wondered whether a Bundesliga goalkeeper had to be like Kamps, above all whether he could be the same.

Applying pressure was the Bundesliga motto in the nineties. Everybody had to be applying pressure at all times: the coach on the players, the substitute player on the coach via the press, the substitute goalie on the number one, the number one on the substitute goalies, and the manager on everyone. Back in Jena, the only person who had ever put Robert under pressure had been Robert himself.

Sometimes after training in Mönchengladbach he went to the gym, because he was told it was important, and because most of his team-mates did. Before then he had hardly ever gone near fitness equipment; it meant nothing to him. He had enough talent not to have to do any additional training. Kamps usually went there with Jörg Neblung, Borussia’s fitness coach. The two of them competed at benchpresses. A long-legged former decathlete, Neblung had no chance of pressing as much weight as the short, bullish Kamps, but the athlete in Neblung was alive and well and he pumped, he pushed, he managed 120 kilos, and Kamps followed suit, wanting to outdo him every time. Robert pretended he wasn’t watching.

‘So, do you want me to get the weights down for you?’ said Kamps when he saw Enke reaching for a dumbbell. ‘You’d be better off using only the bar, so you don’t strain yourself.’ Kamps laughed as if he’d just made a great joke.

That’s what a good relationship between goalkeepers ought to be like, Kamps thought: fair in sport, tough in life.

‘Uwe enjoyed turning everything into a competition,’ says Neblung. ‘He had an extremely professional attitude, always
last
to leave the training-ground. It’s only with that view of his job that a professional can be successful, we were sure of that in those days.’ With his uncompromising take on training, Kamps had overcome his natural disadvantages: he seemed too small to be a goalkeeper, but in spite of being only five foot ten he had been unshakeable in goal for Borussia for a decade.

Neblung tried to persuade the new goalkeeper to do the same kind of weight training as Kamps. Robert was broad-shouldered, but he had the thin arms and legs of an unformed teenager. ‘There was an athlete slumbering in there,’ says Neblung. As a former track athlete, Neblung initially had a hard job with the footballers because everyone knew that you didn’t become a track athlete unless you were useless with the ball at your feet. Gradually more and more players had come to see him – ‘Jörg, we need to stretch’; ‘Hey, Neblung, I want to do something about my speed’. In his third year with Borussia he had only half established himself on the team so he didn’t push it when Robert dug his heels in over the idea of directed athletics training. He was, after all, only the third-choice goalkeeper. ‘I didn’t really notice him much,’ says Neblung.

As a schoolboy he had made contact with others. As number three goalkeeper he became an observer.

The previous season Mönchengladbach had won the German Cup, its first trophy in sixteen years. The cup-winners had been given hero contracts. Financially, their pay-rises were frighteningly risky, but sporting director Rolf R
ü
ssmann thought about possible future successes first and credit repayment models only after that. An expectation had quickly built that this could be the 1970s all over again, when the club was the epitome of the avant-garde. With its long-haired players and free-spirited football, Borussia had won a whole series of championships. Now, with world-class players like Stefan Effenberg, Martin Dahlin and Christian Hochstätter, Mönchengladbach had some serious figures on the team again. And they liked to demonstrate their status.

On the bus from the training-ground in Rönneter back to the showers in the stadium at Bökelberg, Robert had to stand.
There
weren’t enough seats. The youngest stayed in the aisle. They had to prove themselves first, the others thought. When the bus turned sharply from Kaldenkirchener Strasse into Bökelbergstrasse, Robert collided with another of the younger players, Marco Villa. Villa was eighteen and lanky. When coach Bernd Krauss put him up front at the start of the season because the established players weren’t winning anything, Villa scored three goals in his first seven games. That had never happened in thirty-three years of the Bundesliga. Villa smeared soap in the older players’ underpants when they were in the shower. And the older players laughed. Anyone who achieved something, who really applied the pressure, was accepted, even at the age of eighteen Robert understood. Villa didn’t do his pranks out of rebelliousness, he just wanted to have some fun. ‘I didn’t think a lot,’ Marco says. ‘Basically I just wanted to be accepted by the established players on the team like Effenberg and Kalle Pflipsen. I wanted to be like them.’

When Kamps was giving Villa a top-down lesson one day, Villa said, ‘You know, Uwe, there are players who are respected, and others who would like to be respected. You fall into the second category.’

‘Have you heard that!’ cried Christian Hochstätter, who liked to think of himself, at the age of thirty-three, as the team’s tribal elder.

When Villa dared to do what no eighteen-year-old was allowed to do at Borussia, the older players grinned, and Effenberg slapped him on the shoulders. Villa was a goal-scorer. Also, there are people everyone likes straight away without understanding exactly why. Marco Villa is one of those.

Robert never played jokes with soap and underpants. But he felt happy, in a wonderfully weightless way, when other people around him were being silly.

One day Rolf R
ü
ssmann came into the changing-room. ‘Has anyone got any face-cream? My skin’s so dry.’

‘Here,’ said defender Stephan Passlack.

Five minutes later R
ü
ssmann’s face was frozen in a plastic mask. Passlack had given him hair gel.

After training, Robert went straight home. It was only five minutes from Bökelberg to the flat he shared with Teresa in the Loosenweg. He didn’t join in when the other footballers went out for something to eat. He thought he didn’t belong there – the newbie, the third-choice goalkeeper.

Three- and four-storey apartment blocks made of ochre-coloured clinker bricks stand side by side on the Loosenweg, where the city of Mönchengladbach peters out. German flags flap in the gardens now. In those days china geese with ribbons round their necks stood on the grass of the communal garden.

Although Robert was already in a high-income bracket, Teresa’s parents paid half of the rent every month, as they thought only appropriate, given that their daughter was still studying. Every day Teresa travelled the thirty kilometres to university in D
ü
sseldorf – teacher training, sport and German – and after lectures she drove home again. She wanted to be with Robert, and the other students already seemed to have formed solid circles of friends in their student residences. There were posters up announcing a big student union party, and she decided to go along with Robert. They spent most of the evening standing on their own.

She couldn’t help thinking of her old schoolmate Christiane from Bad Windsheim. Sadly, she sent her old girlfriend a text: ‘You remember when we used to sit in the Café Ritter when we were thirteen, and imagined how university life would be, having to ask yourself that daily question: shall we go to a lecture, or just to the café?’ Only her student job reminded her of this first idea of hers of university life. She worked in a shoe shop. ‘Unfortunately I got a thirty per cent discount, so all the money I earned went straight back to the shop,’ she confesses.

Robert was amazed at how easily she spent her money on shoes. He found it hard to buy anything expensive for himself. You should, he figured, be careful with your money.

‘Forgive me,’ said the bank clerk when Teresa withdrew some money from their shared account, ‘but I’m just wondering whether you and your boyfriend mightn’t possibly want to invest your money in shares or some kind of fund at some point?’

Robert’s salary went into his giro account, and he left it there. He had exchanged Flippi’s used Peugeot for a little Audi, and he bought himself clothes twice a year – in the summer and winter sales – but otherwise he didn’t want much that cost money. He liked to lie on the sofa at home with Teresa. When she was studying, he turned the television on or read the paper, sometimes a thriller, but he didn’t go out. He waited for her to finish studying.

The day after her husband’s death, when Teresa moved the public by speaking so openly about Robert’s depression, lots of people will have seen her as the strong woman who stands behind every strong man. In all the years leading up to that, however, her friends had the feeling that the two of them were simply there for each other. In Mönchengladbach, alone together in a strange city for the first time, they developed a total affinity. ‘We’d sometimes go out without our wives,’ says Torsten Ziegner, Robert’s friend from Jena, ‘but Enkus didn’t actually do that. If you’d arranged to see Enkus, you’d arranged to see Enkus and Teresa.’