The quiet keeper

The news of a suicide is shocking - always. Almost involuntarily we ask ourselves: Was there really nothing that might have stopped this person taking his own life? Did he send us any signals of his despair which we failed to notice? Suddenly confronted by a life that ended too soon, we ask ourselves why.

Robert Enke was not one of those footballers who sought out every microphone in order to tell the world how important he was. Also, he was not the typical eccentric between the sticks, forever screaming at his defenders, like so many other goalkeepers. He always seemed reserved and polite, a soft-spoken man.

In fact, his character was often cited as one of his biggest weaknesses as a keeper. Often the German press would call on Enke to put more effort into asserting himself as Germany's number one goalkeeper, to make his own case more passionately and with more vigour in the media. But that just wasn't Robert Enke's style.

Quieter people like Enke are often swamped in the melee that is the soccer circus, where only goals, points, and championships really matter. To the winner, the spoils. The loser is lucky to get a sympathetic grimace. Often the common opinion is that someone who earns millions every year for playing sports has nothing to grumble about.

But for Robert Enke, in both sports and his everyday life, things had not been running smoothly. At some of the larger foreign clubs that hired him earlier in his career, FC Barcelona for example, he spent almost all of his time warming the substitutes' bench. And much more recently, once he had finally seemed to establish himself clearly as Germany's number one goalkeeper, an illness stopped him in his tracks.

However the ebbs and flows of his sporting career seem almost banal when compared to what he had endured off the pitch, more specifically the death of his two-year-old daughter in 2006. We will never know if that was the catalyst for this tragedy, or whether the process began at another moment in time.

Robert Enke, the goalkeeper, has been analyzed in painstaking detail for years, however, it seems the wider world failed to even scratch the surface of Robert Enke, the man. And now he's gone.

Author: Stefan Nestler (msh)
Editor: Trinity Hartman