Eloquent and sensitive story does justice to Robert Enke and his illness
Award-winning book looks at a sportsman ravaged by depression and self-doubt
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Robert Enke had to cope with the loss of his first daughter as well as depression. Photograph: John Macdougall/AFP/Getty Images
When the announcement was made on Monday afternoon that Ronald Reng had won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for A Life Too Short – The Tragedy of
Robert Enke, the biography of his friend, the former Benfica, Barcelona, Hannover and Germany goalkeeper who killed himself in 2009, the poignancy that such a distressing, affecting and important work had achieved its due recognition the day after the death of Gary Speed was palpably raw.
Two of the previous three winners of sports publishing's oldest and richest prize, Marcus Trescothick's Coming Back to Me and Brian Moore's Beware of the Dog, were fearless accounts of the ravages that self-doubt and depression can wreak on elite sportsmen. Reng's acutely observed book completes a trilogy of required reading not only for those who have been flippant and unsympathetic to the issue of mental health among well‑rewarded professionals in the past.
Reng had sporadically covered Enke's performances during the early part of the goalkeeper's career with Borussia Mönchengladbach and Benfica but the two developed a friendship when both were living in Barcelona in 2002. Reng had co-written a superb book, The Keeper of Dreams, chronicling the fortunes of another goalkeeper Lars Leese, whose transfer to Barnsley in 1997 catapulted him from German amateur football into the Premier League. It portrays his shock at the prevailing English football culture with candour, wit and a growing sense of incredulity.
Enke admired Reng's work and when the author bashfully tried to deflect his compatriot's praise by saying they should write another together, the goalkeeper latched on to the idea with an unshakeable conviction. "Today I know why the biography was so close to his heart," Reng writes. "When his goalkeeping career was over, he would finally be able to talk about his illness. In our achievement‑orientated society a goalkeeper, the last bastion in defence, can't be a depressive. So Robert summoned up a huge amount of strength to keep his depression secret. He locked himself away in his illness. So I will now have to tell his story without him."
It would be glib to suggest that Enke's treatment by Barcelona was the beginning of his illness – he had suffered from fear and insecurity before – but his experience at the Camp Nou did become a pivotal point in his sense of what was subsequently diagnosed as "alienation".
He made his debut for Barcelona in a Copa del Rey match against third‑division Novelda after a troubling series of training sessions where he found it difficult to adapt to the unfamiliar distance between himself and the remarkably high line adopted by Barça's back-four which was an integral part of Louis van Gaal's coaching philosophy. He had already been unnerved by Van Gaal in a telephone conversation when transfer negotiations over his move from Benfica had hit a hitch and he asked for some reassurance that he was still wanted. "I don't even know you," the manager said, a perception, or lack of it, shared by Barcelona's coaches who seemed baffled by Enke's preference for using his hands instead of his feet.
When Barcelona were defeated 3-2 in the cup game, the club's captain Frank de Boer laid the blame for two of the goals on Enke, later claiming he had been misquoted but he never apologised to the goalkeeper. "He was thrown to the lions," says Victor Valdés, Barça's current No1 whose emergence that season kept Enke on the sidelines.
He played twice more for the first team in meaningless Champions League group ties and found himself gradually ostracised by the Dutch coaching staff. His wife Teresa and agent Jörg Neblung attempted to help him snap out of his "dark mood". "I was so preoccupied with myself that I'd closed myself off to the world," Enke wrote in his notebook and no amount of well-intentioned invitations to play golf or enjoy the company of friends helped. Finally he was persuaded to see a psychotherapist who said Robert was suffering from "a deep melancholy of a kind many people experience after a bereavement, after being fired from a job, or after being bullied".
In traditional sports biographies, indeed sports lives, the way in which Enke rebuilt his career back in the Bundesliga with Hannover and fulfilled his youthful promise by becoming Germany's goalkeeper, would be interpreted as a kind of redemption. Knowing how Enke's life concluded, however, the interior story told so vividly and movingly by his father and wife, his colleagues and, most resonantly of all, his own words provide a stark contrast with the expected consequences of success.
The stress of maintaining his position and a fear of mockery and losing the confidence of his coaches would return intermittently and heighten his anxiety. "Robert had this way of thinking, that if I'm not the best, I must be the worst," his father, Dirk says. "And that's a fundamental aberration."
The friendships he struck had clear boundaries and no one, apart from his family, knew of the turmoil he suffered. The couple had to cope with the loss of their first daughter, Lara, with a heart defect at the age of two in 2006 and though they subsequently and joyously adopted Laila two years later, the account of Lara's life and death and the hope they treasured after seemingly successful operations makes you want to weep for what his soul had to endure. All the while he painted on his brave face in public until that November day in 2009 when he stepped in front of a train and the secret he guarded so gallantly was laid bare by the bereavement of a loving family and the brave determination to comfort other sufferers.
"I admired the author immensely," says John Gaustad, the chairman of the judging panel since the award's inauguration 23 years ago. "It is a brilliant piece of work, understated in a sense. He uses very few adjectives and tells it with great restraint and a sensitivity and dignity for its subject. It could not have been done better."
"It would be too much to hope that the illness will be understood all of a sudden," writes Reng. "But perhaps this book will do something to help depressives find more sympathy and understanding." Consolation must be scant for an author who wishes he had never had to write this story in these circumstances. If solace is to be found, though, it is in that he has done Enke and his illness such justice.
'He had that ability to appear in control'
Extracts from Ronald Reng's book about Robert Enke
"In the autumn of 1998, when Borussia Mönchengladbach couldn't stop making mistakes and had a 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 victories in defeats … 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"
"For the first time in ages, he felt inwardly how he seemed outwardly: now he was also considerate and sympathetic to himself. The narrow‑minded eagerness of youth had made way for a healthy ambition; the hunger young sportsmen have, their total focus on being the best, had made way for a certain serenity. He had often wondered what it would be like to go through life with blinkers on, absolutely convinced about himself and his work. Perhaps then he would have been a better goalkeeper. But maybe, he said to himself now, it wasn't that important after all to be the very best goalkeeper"
"A goalkeeper is trained all his life to give no sign of despair, disappointment or fear. That ability always to appear in control of things helped Robert to live on when depression took hold of him. And that gift became his fate when the illness led him to seek his own death: he concealed his intentions so well that no one could help him any longer"
