The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (17 page)

That’s when we’ll seize our moment. Hit them on the counter.

We’ve won games where the ball barely got out of our end. We’ve done it by grinding down our opponents, then when they least expect it, we come flying up the field to score the goal that sees us through.

It’s how we beat Spain, Algeria. It’s how we beat Mexico at home and Mexico in Azteca.

We’ve won more games than I can count that way. It doesn’t matter who dominates possession if no one can score.

Ninety seconds after I make my second save, Fabien Johnson, our right back, goes down with an injury: it’s his hamstring, the same thing that felled Jozy for the last few games. Jürgen sends on DeAndre Yedlin of the Seattle Sounders. DeAndre’s a kid, 20 years old, one of Klinsmann’s surprise picks for this tournament. He’s a relative rookie on the national team, just seven appearances under his belt. Now he’s going toe-to-toe against Eden Hazard, the star man at Chelsea—one of the most dynamic midfielders in the Premier League.

Get in close,
I holler at DeAndre,
stay tight.

Got it
.

And he does have it. When Hazard makes a blazing run toward goal, DeAndre throws his body in front of him. It’s the kind of fearless play you expect from a veteran, but DeAndre is on a steep learning curve. There’s no time for baby steps.

Good job
, I call out.

I’ve been talking to my defenders throughout the half.
Watch over your left shoulder. A runner behind you.
I want to make sure the defenders are hearing my voice, that my directions are as urgent in the first half as they are in the final minutes. If you suddenly amplify your tone late in the game you can startle your players, which is why I keep the decibels loud from the start.

Just before halftime, DeBruyne finds a pocket of space and lashes a right-footed shot toward the center of the goal. I save it comfortably.

The half ends 0–0.

We head for the locker room. We’ve got strategy to discuss, one or two tactical tweaks that will tighten things up defensively.

We have at least 45 minutes to go, and I intend to hold them back.

J
acob was almost two when his sister, Alivia—Ali—was born in Memphis on May 17, 2007.

So far she has been silent for exactly five seconds of her life: the very first five.

She arrived halfway through my six-day break between the end of the Premier League season and the start of a month’s training for the Gold Cup—the continental championship—with the U.S. Men’s National Team. Bob Bradley, now the national team coach, had already told me I’d definitely be playing, possibly even starting.

So the timing of Ali’s birth could be considered ideal (days after my season ended), or a complete disaster (just days before leaving for another month). Given that I had a maximum of two to three weeks off a year, total, I guess there wouldn’t have been a “right” time.

Like her brother, Ali was delivered by C-section. This time it was less nerve-racking. I was relaxed on the way to the hospital, relaxed as they prepped Laura, and as relaxed as any man can be while watching a doctor slice into his wife’s belly.

Which is to say, I was not completely and utterly terrified.

Newborns tend to emerge screaming, but not Ali. She didn’t make a peep. No sound came out of her at all. I turned to the doctor. It was like being on a plane when you hit strong turbulence and your first instinct is to glance at the flight attendants to see if they seem rattled. But the doctor, nurses, and the rest of the medical staff behaved calmly, normally. The room was eerily silent for what felt like an eternity. It was probably a few seconds, but when you’re waiting to hear your child’s first cry, and your wife is lying on an operating table with fear in her eyes, those seconds might as well be forever.

And then our baby girl let loose with an earsplitting wail, an unmistakably assertive cry of “I’m here and I mean it.” I pressed my forehead against Laura’s as we laughed with relief.

“She’s here,” said Laura. “Listen to her, she’s here.”

That she was for sure. Our second child, every bit as miraculous as the first, already waving her tiny limbs as her face turned beet red from her screaming. After that initial scare, she was making quite the entrance. Within her first minute of life, Ali had convinced us all that she was a force to be reckoned with.

I
really wish you didn’t have to go,” Laura sighed the next day.

“Me, too,” I said, holding Ali in my lap. She was all wrapped up in a flannel blanket like a miniature burrito. Had Jacob ever really been this small? Had his nose ever been this tiny, his fingers this delicate?

“No,” said Laura. “I really,
really
wish you didn’t have to.”

I didn’t expect to see such sadness in her eyes. Laura seemed deflated, hollowed out somehow.

“It won’t be long,” I said.

Laura nodded.

The next day, she said it a few more times.

“I just hate that you’re leaving.”

Or: “I just had this baby. I wish you could stick around.”

Or: “It stinks that you have to go.”

These comments were so unlike Laura. She was always so upbeat, so vivacious.

I reminded her that she wouldn’t be on her own. Laura had arranged for help from an all-star roster—her mother, father, brother, sister-in-law, cousins, and aunts and uncles, neighbors, and friends. She had people to back them up, and even backup for the backup. Armies of people would be on call around the clock, to pitch in with feeding and diapering, to do laundry, cook, and clean.

“You’re going to be great,” I said, and I knew it was true. Laura and Jacob and Ali were going to be surrounded by love.

As the clock ticked off the hours before I’d have to walk out the door, Laura grew increasingly uncomfortable. By the morning of my departure, she was in full-blown panic.

“I can’t do this,” she said. Her eyes darted all over my face, seeking some kind of assurance. But what could I possibly give her? My job didn’t come with paternity leave. You had to go to training and you had to go to the games. You were either on the team, or you were not. It really was that simple.

“Tim,” she said, sounding more shaken than I’d ever heard her. “I’m not going to be able to do this.” Tears spilling out of her eyes, she began shaking her head back and forth.

This wasn’t the Laura I thought I knew, the take-charge Laura who handled our finances and household help, and who scheduled aqua-babies classes and oil changes for the cars. Laura ran our lives. She had everything under control, always.

Yet here she was, anxious and distressed. And here I was, knowing that any minute a taxi driver would pull up and I’d have to get in the car and go to the airport and be gone for the next month.

I felt so helpless. My wife was sobbing, and I wanted so badly to comfort her. I wanted her to know that she’d be okay. I wanted her to know that I’d be thinking of her, and of Ali and Jacob, every moment of every day.

I understood then: this
wasn’t
actually her. Something chemical was happening, some flood of postpartum chemicals. If anyone could understand that, it was me—after all, my job came with a dose of adrenaline every single week.

But if this was truly a shift in hormones, then nothing I could do or say would provide any solace.

At this moment, I felt that my job—a good job, an enviable job, one that I’m blessed to have each and every day—could break me.

It could break
us
.

Week after week, in this job, you kiss your wife on the forehead and walk out the door. Week after week, you’re on the road. Week after week, you have that anxiety, that absolute single-minded focus. You prepare for your games physically, mentally, and emotionally. You give everything you have. You do your best to be there for your family, to spoon mashed bananas into your kid’s mouth, pick up Thomas the Tank Engine toys, feed the dog.

But the games keep coming. Every seven days, you play the most important match you’ve ever had. Every time you do, 50,000 people watch live. Another couple million watch on television. Pundits and commentators criticize. All those guys in the online forums. Drunk guys in bars, and little old ladies who follow you around stores, glaring.

It’s hard to juggle it all week after week. It’s hard to go seamlessly between Family Man and Professional Athlete, back and forth, without missing a beat. Sometimes, you just want to lock yourself up in a room somewhere, get your head into the space that pushes you to win. Or—if you lose—allows you to snap out of your funk.

And that’s hard enough to keep up every week straight for nine months.

Then you get a break. Just a few days off, long enough to fly home in time to watch your wife give birth to your second child and get them both home from the hospital before you walk out the door again. Because you have to. Because your manager might make you the starting keeper. Because you’re pushing 30, and you’ve got five years left—maybe ten if you’re incredibly lucky—before it’s over.

Five to ten years. To accomplish everything I’ve ever wanted. And then—well, frankly, I had no idea what would happen then.

“Laura, I—”

But how could I finish a sentence that had no end? There was no way to do both jobs. To do one, I’d be absent for the other. I wanted to do brilliantly at both, but it didn’t work that way.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and held it in my hand for a while.

I could call Bob Bradley and tell him—what? That I couldn’t make training for personal reasons, even though every one of my teammates surely had similar issues that they were dealing with at this very second?

I needed to go, and I needed to stay. At the same time.

Finally, I said, “I don’t know what to do.”

But Laura’s brother would.

“Laura, can I call Jerry?” He lived next door. He’d know how to make this better. Or he’d tell me how I could.

Laura nodded, not looking at me.

I called Jerry and explained the situation. Laura’s really upset . . . the car’s going to be here soon . . . don’t know what to do.

He was over within minutes, walking through the back door and into the kitchen.

“Hey, sis,” he said. Laura’s face was swollen from crying. She didn’t, or couldn’t, speak.

Jerry knelt on the floor next to her chair. “Listen, Laura,” he said. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. You hear me?”

The phone rang. My mother.

“Mom, this isn’t a great time,” I said, in the understatement of the year. A few feet away, my brother-in-law was on his knees, whispering to my wife. So I took the opportunity to fill my mom in about what was going on.

“Tim,” Mom said, “will you please put Laura on the phone?”

“I don’t know, Mom, she’s really—”

“Tim, if she’ll talk to me, I’d like to speak with Laura.”

I handed the phone to Laura. “Hello?” she sniffled.

I could hear only Laura’s end of the conversation.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m pretty sad.”

There was a pause, then Laura started sobbing again. “Would you?” she said into the phone. “Would you really? Okay.”

She looked at me, then at Jerry. “She’s going to come. She’s getting on the next plane from Jersey.” She sounded so relieved.

“You see there?” Jerry said. “Everybody’s going to take care of you. You’re going to be fine.”

Good ol’ Jerry. So earnest. So good.

My taxi pulled into the driveway.

Jerry turned to me. “It’s okay, Tim,” he said. “We’ve got this.”

I kissed Laura, took her hands in my own. We sat like that for a long time. The taxi sounded its horn.

“Go on,” Jerry said. “Go win for the red, white, and blue,” he said.

So I got into that taxi.

By the time I came home, Ali would be four weeks old. Jacob would have been a big brother for a month. My mom would have come and gone.

And Laura—I believed, deep down, that she’d be okay. But I hated that I couldn’t be by her side.

B
ob had put together an unbelievable team of guts-and-glory guys—hard workers, collegial, not an overstuffed ego in the bunch. It was clear during training that these players would run until they dropped, if that’s what it took.

Shortly after becoming the coach, Bob had selected Carlos Bocanegra—my old buddy from the Youth National Team—to be the captain.

By now Carlos was one of my best friends in the world. He was still the same, steady presence he’d been as a teenager—hard-driving, self-deprecating, and utterly without drama. Bob couldn’t have made a better choice.

Bob also had another piece of good news. He told me that I would be the starting goalkeeper for the U.S., with Kasey Keller as the team’s number two.

This had to have been a hard moment for Kasey. I’d been there with Carroll, and with van der Sar. I knew exactly how much it smarted.

But Kasey was unbelievably classy. He shook my hand and
said he’d do whatever I needed during training; he just hoped he’d be able to get ten or 15 minutes one-on-one with the goalkeeping coach at the end of practice.

“Of course, man,” I said. “Of course.”

I loved how tough the U.S. team was, how inexhaustible the players were during training. Landon Donovan was there—and man that kid was amazing. By this point, he was the all-time leading goal scorer and the leader in career assists. Yet he didn’t care about glory or kudos; Landon simply loved playing the game. Our team had a melting-pot feel. Carlos was of Mexican descent. Clint Dempsey, a down-home Texas guy, grew up in a Nacogdoches trailer park. Benny Feilhaber’s grandfather had been an Austrian Jew who fled Europe and Hitler before it was too late. And me, half black, half Hungarian, married to a Southern girl. We had the sons of oil executives and the sons of military men. We were black and white and every shade in between.

None of our differences mattered one whit.

We played in Group B, achieving the best first-round record in the group. We beat all the teams we played: Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, then El Salvador. We scored seven goals in total, and conceded none.

We made it to the finals, a sold-out match at Chicago’s Soldier Field against our archrivals, Mexico. I’ll be honest: the way I feel about Mexico’s national team borders on hatred, but a hatred born out of respect. I hate that their team is so damn good. I hate that they’ve beaten us so many times, for so many years. I hate that their fans turn out in such huge numbers—once again, the crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Mexico—allowing them to create a hostile environment even on our home turf.