A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (9 page)

In Hamburg, once again, Borussia were 2–0 down after half an hour. Hamburg’s striker Anthony Yeboah was in the zone – that place where movement happens at an incredible pace, with a higher level of coordination – and he was half a step faster than his Mönchengladbach marker Thomas Eichin. Robert was left stranded and Yeboah’s shot flew in, between his legs. Such shots are unstoppable – when a goalkeeper has to stand with his legs spread, waiting to dive towards either side, he can’t snap his legs shut like that. But a nutmeg always makes a goalkeeper look ridiculous; after an impossible task he lands clumsily on his backside. The only thing he can rely on is the mockery of the fans. When he got back to his feet, rage was pounding through Robert. He felt abandoned, humiliated; it had been Eichin’s mistake, and now people were laughing at him. He wanted to start yelling. But he thought a goalkeeper who lost his composure was lost himself. He wrestled with his fury, and he was helped by the knowledge that so many people had praised his serenity. He was the cool guy, so he would stay cool. Seconds after Yeboah’s goal the agitation had left his face.

Over the weeks that followed he learned how to turn off the internal film that constantly tried to tell him all about the
most
recent goals and crosses. In the evenings he and Teresa often went to see Grandma Frida in Rheydt – the fourth grandma in his life. The old farmer’s wife had had her farm converted into rented apartments, and Jörg Neblung lived there with his girlfriend Dörthe. The four of them sat together talking easily about God and the world. It was only when a football match was shown on television that he got up to watch it.

Jörg would sit on the sofa next to him. Whenever Jörg perkily commented on some aspect of the game, Robert would reply concisely and analytically. After that he’d fall silent again. When he watched football on television he became withdrawn, studying his colleagues with great concentration, a goalkeeping engineer in search of the mechanisms of the game – on the one hand. On the other, football on television was a most effective anaesthetic. Watching football helped him to forget about playing football.

Sometimes the others wanted to do something else.

‘We could always go out,’ Teresa said.

‘But we could always stay at home,’ he countered.

How often had they had that exchange?

But when they visited Dörthe and Jörg, Robert had three people against him, and he went along with it. When they played Bon Jovi at the disco, he even danced. But he didn’t want to go out all the time so he soon developed tactics.

‘Come on, let’s go to the Gebläsehalle,’ said Jörg one evening.

‘Can’t,’ said Robert, trying to keep the triumph off his face.

‘Why not?’

‘Stupidly, I’m wearing tracksuit trousers. The doorman won’t let me in.’

Jörg was supposed to be looking after him. ‘Can’t you do something about that boy? He has no social circle,’ Norbert Pflipsen had said to Jörg during Robert’s second year with Mönchengladbach, when Jörg was still the team’s athletics coach. ‘Worrying’ can also be a job, Jörg learned when Borussia declined to extend his contract in the summer of 1998. Flippi took him on as a ‘worrier’, or
K
ü
mmerer
– the slang name given to the staff of an agency that’s supposed to look after
professional
sportspeople in everyday life. ‘Fridge-filler is another term,’ says Jörg.

He’d really wanted to be an industrial designer. During the entrance exam for technical college in Hanover he had looked out of the window in search of inspiration. He saw the bile-green trams driving past the gardens of the town-houses, drew his next sketches in that colour, and was rejected. After that he wanted to do something completely different. He studied sports science. One of his professors, Karl-Heinz Drygalsky, became chairman of Borussia Mönchengladbach. When Drygalsky took him on as fitness coach in 1994, Bayern Munich was the only team in the Bundesliga with such a post.

Jörg thought professional football would be pretty much the same as athletics. He assumed a Bundesliga team’s medical staff would work hand in hand, and the head coach would take an interest in individual training plans. Then he saw his first head coach, Bernd Krauss, forcing the players to run excessively hard endurance races, contrary to all training theory, supposedly as a way of schooling their will. He experienced Borussia’s physiotherapist denigrating him to the coaching staff to make sure that injured players came to him first. ‘All backroom staff in a Bundesliga side are constantly courting the favour of the coach and the players,’ Jörg says. ‘And in order to please them, if necessary they sometimes worked against their better judgement.’

A bell rings in the corridor outside his airy office on the third floor of an old factory building. It’s a woman with a basket full of sandwiches. She does her rounds every day because the multimedia designers and communication advisers in offices like this on Lichtstrasse in Cologne have no time for lunch. Jörg Neblung, northern German and blond, still looking like a decathlete at the age of forty-three, now runs his own football agency. During our interview he sometimes turns round as if talking to his shelf, where he has set up some goalkeeping gloves and photographs of Robert, and a candle.

There are hundreds of kinds of friendship, and of the one formed in 1998 between Robert Enke and Jörg Neblung the fact will always remain that Jörg was supposed to worry about
him
. But the will to strive together for goals is more of a bond than most emotions.

Jörg could understand that in his difficult moments Robert wanted to sort things out all by himself. ‘I’m like that too,’ he says.

In the autumn of 1998, when Borussia Mönchengladbach couldn’t stop making mistakes and had a six-week, seven-game run of losses, Robert turned himself into an individual sportsman. The loneliness of the goalkeeper has often been exaggerated and lamented in literature, but for the goalkeeper in a declining team, loneliness is a blessing. He plays his own game and finds his victories in defeat. He conceded two goals to Bayern Munich but thought about the five fine saves he had shown. At least he’s still making saves, the experts said. ‘While chaos rages, he stays calmly in Gladbach,’ wrote the
D
ü
sseldorfer Express
.

8. Robert in 1998 during his time with Mönchengladbach
.

‘Calm, serenity, equilibrium, class’ – those were the qualities attributed to him by the distinguished coach Jupp Heynckes, who had led Real Madrid to their Champions League victory six months earlier and who now, on a
sabbatical
in his home town of Mönchengladbach, often attended Borussia’s games. ‘He had always been more advanced than the rest of us, in his ideas, in his behaviour, in his speech,’ said Borussia’s midfielder Marcel Ketelaer, who had played with Robert in the national youth team. ‘He was always more grown up than we were.’

‘Mental strength’ was a fashionable expression of the newly psychologised sport. Everyone saw the Borussia goalkeeper as a model of the new sportsman. They gallantly overlooked the fact that he sometimes didn’t hurry out of the goal to catch a cross, or allowed Hertha BSC to score a goal when he let a shot ricochet. There is little that moves the football-going public as much as a rookie goalkeeper among hard men; he’s celebrated for saves that experienced goalkeepers barely notice. Robert would only fully understand this years later when he was an older international goalkeeper among young rivals.

In Mönchengladbach the players tried to deceive themselves about their unparalleled bad run. They kept making jokes in the changing-room. In all the laughter they couldn’t hear that some players talked over each other rather than to each other. Jörgen Pettersson used up all his energy in a mute conflict with his fellow striker Toni Polster. No one had anything against Robert. He adopted a listening role during tactical discussions in various corners of the changing-room, he was friendly to almost everyone, he laughed when others railed against the coach – and no one apart from Marco Villa got to know him any better.

The coach had provided an opportunity for mirth when ‘Friedel Rausch went off on one’, as Jörg Neblung put it. ‘If I played Martin Schneider in defence in the form he’s in, people would think, is Rausch gay and sleeping with Schneider or what?’ the coach teased at a press conference. Then, in September, Rausch was dismissed. Head of the board of directors Michael Viehof said, ‘This time it’s going to take more than the firing of a coach.’ So the club also dismissed its sporting director, Rolf R
ü
ssmann.

In its first twenty-two years in the Bundesliga, Borussia
M
önchengladbach had managed with a total of three coaches. In 1998, Robert experienced four changes of coach in a year.

During the Christmas holiday, Robert and Teresa went to see her family in Bad Windsheim. Robert’s father was hurt. Did his son like being with his in-laws more than he liked being with him? He didn’t dare talk to Robert about it.

Family gatherings were very important to Dirk Enke. At Christmas, on birthdays, during holidays, he stressed his belief that a divided family belonged together. Robert often forgot birthdays. Sometimes his mother came to his rescue. She would phone him solicitously: it’s your father’s birthday today, or your niece’s. ‘I thought it was a real shame that communication between us was so limited,’ his father says. He waited constantly for an invitation to Mönchengladbach. When none came, he tried to find excuses to visit his son. He’d like to see the Bayern game, he’d be about to go see his brother in Detmold – so he could just pop in and see Robert, if he did not mind.

Robert didn’t think you had to invite your parents or your brothers and sisters. If they wanted to come, they’d come. At Christmas he went to Teresa’s parents’ for the simple reason that their celebrations were more traditional.

Bad Windsheim is surrounded by fields and woods. On the last day of 1998 Robert wanted to go for a jog.

‘I’ll come with you and take the dogs for a walk,’ Teresa said.

‘No, you don’t need to, stay with your parents.’

Of course, she went with him.

They drove into the fields behind the Galgenbuck hill, a remote area and ideal for letting the dogs run about. Have fun, she said, before he set off.

Ten minutes later he was back. His eyes were swollen and he kept sneezing. And there was a wheezing noise in his throat.

‘I can’t breathe!’

They dashed home. In the bathroom Teresa found an old asthma inhaler. Robert pumped away at it like a man possessed.
But
the active ingredient wasn’t getting into his lungs; his windpipe was too swollen.

Teresa’s father took him to the hospital. The wheezing in Robert’s throat was the loudest sound in the car. Her father ran ahead and threw the door to the emergency department open. There was no one at reception. Half a minute passed, then three minutes, and at last two nurses appeared. They rolled Robert into the intensive care unit on a gurney. His eyes were shut and he was concentrating hard on breathing in and out through his constricted windpipe, but he heard one nurse saying to the other, ‘Isn’t that Gladbach’s goalie, the one who always packs them in?’

His condition stabilised. He spent the afternoon in bed with an oxygen pipe in his nose, unable to open his swollen eyelids. At one point a nurse asked him, ‘Herr Enke, do you want to read something?’ At least that made him chuckle.

He celebrated New Year with Teresa in the general ward. It seemed he was allergic to apples and celery, the doctors told him after they’d examined him. He could probably digest each foodstuff on its own without any problems, but he had had celery soup in the evening and an apple tart the next morning, and this had brought on an attack. If Teresa hadn’t been there when he went jogging, he would almost certainly have died.

A few weeks later the event had become an anecdote that he liked to tell: guess what the nurse said when my eyes were closed and I was gasping for air! Other than that, Teresa and Robert didn’t give any more thought to the kind of chance events that determine whether someone lives or dies.

At the training-camp in January 1999, Marco Villa prepared himself for Robert’s usual explosions of fury. By the third day his friend was suddenly bothered by everything. Marco called these phases ‘Robbi’s days’.

‘How loud is that television!’

‘Say the word, Robbi, and I’ll turn it down.’

Without replying, Robert went to the bathroom.

‘You’ve used my towel!’ he called into the room.

‘I just used any old towel. There’s a fresh one in the drawer.’

‘And why’s the toilet seat dirty again? I’ve told you a million times not to pee standing up!’

‘Fine, Robbi,’ said Marco, still watching the television, waiting for Robbi’s days to pass.

News arrived at the training-camp: Uwe Kamps had had another operation on his Achilles heel; he wouldn’t be coming back that season. Robert had no competition in the Borussia goal until the summer. But what would happen after that? His contract was due to run out in July. The club management seemed to have forgotten that. Ever since R
ü
ssmann had been fired no one seemed to be worried about the future. The present was already too much for the people in charge. President Wilfried Jacobs summed up his time in office with Borussia with self-righteous concision: ‘In twenty months I had the misfortune not to have a single nice hour.’