The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (19 page)

But I knew this: they’d sent that scarf flying down to the
field out of gratitude. I picked it up and raised it high over my head.

Later, in the locker room, I sat down next to Tony Hibbert. I tossed my towel over my head to wipe the sweat from my face. But instead of removing the towel, I left it there. I sat for a moment in the dark, amid all the cheers and whoops of my celebrating teammates.

And before I understood what was happening, I clutched the towel to my face and began sobbing.

I didn’t care that my teammates could see my shoulders shake. Didn’t worry if my cries could be heard over the sounds of their laughter.

Jags noticed. “Hey, Tim? You all right?”

Then Hibbert’s voice. “Yeah. He’s all right.” I felt his hand on my back. “He just needs a minute.”

Hibbo understood. He understood without my telling him. He realized exactly what this game meant for me.

We hadn’t won the final, mind you. In fact, we wouldn’t. We’d lose to Chelsea 2–1, despite taking a 1–0 lead 25 seconds into the game. And that loss would hurt.

But as I sat in the Wembley locker room with that towel pressed against my face, I wasn’t thinking about the game ahead.

Right now all I heard in my head was a single line on endless repeat:
I slayed the dragon.

F
aith Rice called me in England around that time.

“Listen, Tim,” she said. “I’ve got a great idea. I need your help.”

Faith had been working away back in New Jersey. The nonprofit she’d started, now called the New Jersey Center for Tourette Syndrome, NJCTS, was doing everything it could to provide support and education.

“But we need to do more,” she said. She explained that one of the great cruelties of TS is that the symptoms tend to peak in adolescence, precisely when kids are most vulnerable.

“I want to create a leadership academy for teens,” she said. The Academy, as she envisioned it, would teach them the skills they’d need to navigate adult life. It would help them cope with the added social stress of being a kid with TS.

“Most of all,” she added, “we’ll give them the tools to find their own strengths.”

Maybe if I’d had that kind of support, I could have slayed another kind of dragon even sooner: maybe I could have conquered the shame I’d felt about my TS.

I
n 2009, as a result of our Gold Cup victory, we automatically qualified for the Confederations Cup, a tournament contested by the six FIFA Confederations Champions, as well as the most recent World Cup winners and the upcoming World Cup host country.

It was going to be an uphill fight, but also an opportunity to prove ourselves against some formidable opponents—Brazil, Spain, and Italy. As a national team, although we’d been steadily gaining credibility, we weren’t yet peers with the elite squads.

Our first couple of games were . . . well . . . they were pretty much disasters.

First we lost to Italy, 3–1. Then we got pounded 3–0 by Brazil. We were overmatched and outclassed in every way. I made a couple of tough saves in each of those games, but I’d let in six.

It shook me. With two losses behind us, we entered our game against Egypt, with zero points—dead last in the tournament. Even if we could beat them, we’d only get three points,
maximum, and it’s very rare that a team can advance to the next round out of a four-team group with only three points.

We were, for all intents and purposes, out of the tournament.

Since it was likely our last game of the tournament before going home, Bob Bradley decided to give some playing time to a bunch of the players who hadn’t gotten any so far, among them Brad Guzan, another U.S. goalkeeper. Brad played well and we beat Egypt 3–0.

Through some miracle of the scoreboard—a combination of results that I still don’t fully understand—that win advanced us to the semifinal.

Our next opponent was Spain, the world’s top-ranked team. Not only had Spain conquered all of Europe in the UEFA Cup, but they were unbeaten in their last 35 games. Spain hadn’t conceded a goal yet in this tournament. I doubt they lost much sleep over the prospect of playing us in the semis.

I
got word that Bob Bradley was thinking about starting Brad Guzan against Spain.

The very idea of warming the bench during a semifinal of a major tournament against Spain made me absolutely crazy.

There was this voice in my head:
What if we can beat Spain?
The closer we got to the game, the louder that voice became.
What if we can make history, and you’re sitting on the sidelines?

After training one day, I found Bob.

“Look,” I said. “I know you’re thinking about starting Brad. But I need you to hear this from me: I want to play.”

Bob looked at me evenly. “Tim, you’re coming off of a long season, a great season. But we obviously didn’t play well in those first two games.” He paused, then added, “The truth is, I think you might be tired.”

“Bob,” I said, “you know me. You know I compete if I can, and you know I compete hard. And frankly, although we got peppered in those first two games, I can’t think of one mistake I made that should keep me out of the semifinals.”

I didn’t actually believe that I’d sway Bob, because he doesn’t cave to pressure. The man never lets himself get backed into a corner.

“I’ll think about it,” he replied. That’s all he said.

The following day, he announced the starting lineup. I was in goal.

Bob prepared us tirelessly for Spain.

“You need to clog their midfield,” he said. “Force them wide, make sure their attacks come from the flanks.”

He clenched his jaw. “They can move backwards or sideways,” he added, “but you can’t let them move forward,” Bob repeated.

We listened. We practiced. We ran drills. We were ready.

We took the lead in the 27th minute; Dempsey sent the ball to Jozy Altidore, who lashed a powerful shot from 25 yards. Their keeper, Iker Casillas, got a hand on it, but not enough of one. 1–0.

That was the first goal Spain had conceded in 451 minutes of play, and it was a 19-year-old American kid who’d done it.

After that, Spain’s danger men—Fernando Torres, David Villa, and Cesc Fàbregas—attacked nonstop. I was barraged in a way I wouldn’t be again until I was standing on a field in Salvador, Brazil.

But our defense was in lockdown mode. Bob’s strategy had been absolutely perfect: every time they tried to move the ball forward, one of our guys was right there to intercept it. Our back line of Carlos, Jay DeMerit, Oguchi Onyewu, and Jonathan Spector was brave and inexhaustible.

We held on to our lead. Then late in the game we got another breakaway. The ball deflected off one of their defenders. Clint took a single touch, and put that thing away.

At 2–0, we knew the game was over.

We had won.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Few people believed that we were capable of beating these soccer titans, let alone shutting them out. A few days ago, we’d been on the verge of elimination. As recently as 90 minutes ago, the whole world had been waiting for Spain to annihilate us.

Yet somehow, inexplicably, here we were, with a win so big it was jaw-dropping.
Thank God
, I thought.
Thank God I went to Bob Bradley and asked him to put me in the game. Thank God he did so I could be a part of this historic occasion.

And I did thank God. I literally dropped to my knees at the end of that game. I looked up to the heavens and I spoke out loud.

“I don’t know why,” I said. “And I don’t know why me.” I took a deep breath, drank in everything about the moment—the vuvuzelas buzzing in the stands, my giddy teammates at the other end of the field, the floodlights and the understanding that we’d actually done this huge, amazing thing. I kissed my gloves and gazed up again at that night sky.

“But thank you.”

W
e played Brazil in the final. Though we took an early 2–0 lead, Brazil came back with a vengeance. We lost 3–2.

But here was something curious: we’d later learn that the match was the most-watched non–World Cup game in the team’s history. Worldwide, nearly 60 million viewers tuned in. Four million of those were in the U.S.

When I’d started playing this sport professionally, nobody gave a damn about it. The MLS was barely considered a pro league. Soccer was a game kids played; it wasn’t a sport that adults paid attention to.

You had to leave the country to play in any serious way.

But look: we’d beaten the number one team in the world. We’d taken second place in one of the major tournaments. We were playing well, and for the first time in my professional life, people cared.

Could it be that soccer was finally gaining a foothold in the last outpost on earth that had resisted it all these years?

A
round that time Kasey Keller called me.

“Tim,” he said. His voice was funny somehow—he didn’t sound like the Kasey I remembered, the always easy, unflappable guy who’d seen everything before.

“What’s up?”

“Jack Reyna’s not well.” Jack Reyna, son of Claudio and Danielle, Laura and my first friends in Manchester. Laura had slept in Jack’s room during so many of my away games.

Claudio had left England for the U.S. a few years ago; he was playing for my old team, the MetroStars, now renamed the Red Bulls. I hadn’t seen Jack for a while. God, the kid must be ten years old by now.

Not well
, Kasey had said. As I tried to process those words—not well—Kasey spoke again. “He has a brain tumor.”

Oh, God.

My heart sank. I could still picture little Jack pushing his toy cars along the floor in his pajamas as the adults sat around laughing. I could remember Claudio scooping him up and carrying him up to his room when his eyelids grew heavy.

Jack Reyna. Sweet Jack with his dark, cherubic eyes. Ten years old now. With a brain tumor.

“You want to give Claudio a call?” Kasey asked.

“Just pass on my love, okay?” Claudio didn’t need to hear from me. Not right now. He and Danielle had enough going on without having to answer phone calls.

“Yeah,” said Kasey. “I will.”

“And keep me posted.”

That night, I stood in my children’s rooms for a long time. I watched them sleep, and I prayed.

W
ell, this is surreal.

I was standing in the West Wing of the White House. Everything around me was exactly like I’d seen it a hundred times before—in movies, on television, in textbooks, and in news reports. There were the battle flags, the heavily framed portraits of past presidents, the round eagle carpet in the middle of the Oval Office.

But the angles had gone all funny; somehow I was in the middle of the picture, as if I’d unzipped a television screen and walked right onto the set.

It was 2010. Tomorrow we’d be heading to South Africa. Our destination was the World Cup.

We’d spent the last month training at Princeton University, Bob Bradley’s old stomping grounds. We’d worked our butts off, running up and down the field as Bob stood there with his arms folded, giving us simple one-word commands.
Sharp. Punch. Good. Now
.
Play.

Then we’d driven down together to Washington, D.C. And here I was, Timmy Howard, the kid who hadn’t been able sit still in his classroom once upon a time, now an invited guest at the White House.

Our team wasn’t getting any old tour, either. Vice President Joe Biden had given us a full 30 minutes. Former president Bill Clinton had come in and shaken our hands. Clinton would be attending the World Cup as part of the U.S. delegation that was making a bid to host the 2022 World Cup.

Now we were shaking hands with President Obama himself.

“This is incredible,” Carlos whispered to me. On the bus ride down here, Carlos had probably told us 40 times how excited he was to meet Clinton—
my favorite president ever
, he’d say
. I love that guy
.

A crisply dressed woman clapped her hands at us. “We’re going to take a photograph now,” she said. “Please follow us outside to the steps.”

We opened the doors and stepped out into the D.C. summer. It was sweltering out there—93 degrees and humid. We were all dressed alike, in khakis and precisely matched brown leather shoes, dress shirts, and heavy warm-up jackets emblazoned with the U.S. Soccer logo. Clinton and Obama and Biden mingled with the team—
those are some sharp shoes
, said Clinton, when he realized we all were wearing the exact same ones. We wiped sweat off our brows, trying not to look like we were melting in the heat.

Standing there, I kept thinking about my Poppa.

Poppa had passed away last September. Because I was in England, I hadn’t been able to go to the funeral. I wished he were still around so I could share this moment with him.

What would he have thought if someone could have told him, on the night he was fleeing Hungary for his life, that I’d be here someday.
You will escape
, they might have said.
And you will succeed in your new country. And one day, your grandson, the
child of the little girl whom you’re trying so desperately to hush, will stand at the White House flanked by the most important leaders in the world.

President Obama spoke.

“I just wanted to say how incredibly proud we are of the team,” he said. “Everybody’s going to be rooting for you. Although sometimes we don’t remember it here in the United States, this is going to be the biggest world stage there is. You’re going to be representing all of us.”

I’d been 11 years old back in 1990, when the U.S. qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years. I’d watched us play in that tournament on a grainy television in my mother’s living room, no earthly idea what might lie ahead. Since then, I’d marched steadily toward this moment. I’d been in the stands in ’94, with Mulch pointing down to the field saying, “That should be you.” By ’98, I’d been playing side-by-side on the MetroStars with Tony Meola, the U.S. World Cup goalkeeper. By 2002, I was friends with a bunch of guys on the team, and I’d earned a spot as the number four keeper—not enough to attend the tournament, but getting closer. Then in 2006, I’d sat on the bench watching Kasey.