The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (24 page)

Jürgen was an Americanized German . . . but the man was still a German at heart. He managed every action of the players—some even said he micromanaged them.

Jürgen dictated when we woke and when we slept. He insisted
we wear USA track suits during training, and even when we hung around the hotel. Sugary snacks were replaced by leaner, high-protein bars, “Performance nutrition,” he called it. I’d spent my whole life eating PB&Js; somehow, under Jürgen, the sandwich morphed into a natural version of the staple that was practically unrecognizable . . . and to my taste buds, inedible.

We had earlier curfews. Less time to sit around after meals shooting the breeze.

Jürgen was even determined to change our breathing.

Some of our training sessions became two hours of yoga exercises. If there is a less likely sight on this earth than Clint Dempsey, the Texas trailer-park kid, doing downward-facing dog poses, or the stalwart Michael Bradley deep breathing through a tree pose, I have yet to see it.

Jürgen banned cell phones from the locker room. He insisted that the team administrator was on call 24/7. We began bringing our own gym equipment to hotels, to ensure we always used state-of-the-art machines. Each dawn, we took “empty stomach runs,” 30 minutes of sprints designed to pull energy from body fats. He took us on field trips—to Versailles, to the 9/11 Memorial—to inspire us as human beings.

Even as he advocated for a creative game, personal expression on the field, he left nothing to chance when it came to the players. We were his now, and he wanted to mold us, shape us, push us further than we could imagine.

As an OCD guy, I find change difficult. But it’s possible Jürgen’s innovations were easier for me than some of the others. After all, I’d had over a decade of playing in Europe. I recognized Jürgen’s approach. I understood, at least, the context of where he was coming from.

None of the players argued with Jürgen, but you could sense misgivings from their body language, a kind of tension when they were around him. Or I might glimpse one player’s eyes flick to another’s as Jürgen explained the way things were going to look from now on—a tiny moment of “what exactly is happening here?”

It wasn’t an easy transition. Maybe if we were a club, training together daily, week after week, we would have settled in faster.

But Jürgen kept at it. He wasn’t going to modify his system for us. He believed in his methods. He was planning to usher in a new era of American soccer, and he wasn’t afraid to let the world know.

I couldn’t have been more thrilled with one of his changes: he announced he was hiring Chris Woods, my Everton goalkeeping coach, to work with the U.S. keepers.

To me, this was ideal: I’d have Chris’s steady, calm, expertise guiding me both at Everton, and on the national team. And I knew Chris would be a great fit for the other keepers, Brad Guzan and Nick Rimando, too.

B
ack in New Jersey, the New Jersey Center for Tourette Syndrome was becoming increasingly influential. Under Faith Rice’s leadership, the NJCTS educated schools and hospital staffs, counseled families, and organized antibullying programs. Its expanding library had become one of the best resources in the country. They’d teamed up with Rutgers University to establish a first-of-its kind clinic, offering therapy, testing, and skills training for TS kids and their families.

And then there was the Leadership Academy that Faith was planning. If she could pull that off, the lives of people with TS would dramatically change.

During the 2010 season, I’d helped the NJCTS earn $50,000 in grant funding from Pepsi; it was a promotion they’d run as a part of their U.S. Soccer sponsorship. Several players had picked a favorite charity, and fans had voted online for where the money would go. I’d chosen NJCTS, and won. All the money would support the Leadership Academy.

More recently, Faith had created a fund-raiser in the form of a raffle called “Team Up with Tim Howard.” The winners were from Plainsboro, New Jersey: Tim and Leslie Kowalski and their two daughters, 12-year-old Tess and 8-year-old Paige, both of whom had been diagnosed with TS. The four of them would fly to England with my mom, we’d all have lunch together, and they’d be my guests at the upcoming Everton game.

“Just so you know,” Mom said, “Tess in particular has a pretty severe case.”

The lunch took place at a Thai restaurant in Liverpool. I got there first, and when I spotted the Kowalskis I thought,
This family seems really in sync with each other.
I liked how gently Tim nudged the girls forward, encouraging them to shake my hand, and how warm Leslie’s voice was whenever she spoke to one or the other; you could sense that Tess and Paige trusted their parents, and that the trust worked both ways.
Sort of like Mom and me
, I thought.

Mom and I sat on one side of the table, the Kowalskis on the other. Both Leslie and Tim urged the girls to come sit near me, but they shook their heads; they were sticking close to mom and dad.

Tess and Paige were lovely, both with Leslie’s dark hair and sparkling eyes. Did they fidget more than other kids their age, make more noise? Sure. But that didn’t change who they were. Sweet, shy, young girls.

“You know, I really want to thank you for this,” Leslie said to me.

I shrugged, as if to say no big deal.

“No. I mean it,” Leslie said. “It’s been a really tough year for our family. Tess has been dealing with the strongest tics she’s ever had, and it’s been hard for her.”

She turned to Tess. “Okay if I tell him about your TS?” When Tess nodded, her mom added, “Do you want to tell him yourself?” Tess looked alarmed; her eyes said no. Mom and I exchanged a quick glance of recognition.

Leslie explained that Tess’s symptoms had shown up in kindergarten. Grunting and sniffing and throat-clearing and shoulder jerks, all drawing attention in the classroom. After a while, she resisted going to school at all and there were tears every morning. By the end of her kindergarten year, the crying had turned to screaming. The boys in the class were making faces at her, Tess said. She couldn’t stand being there. Her parents were bewildered, but they could see from the pictures Tess had been drawing—sad faces with dark gray shadows—that they needed to know what was going on.

Eventually, they got a diagnosis: Tourette Syndrome.

Her symptoms had hardened since then. She spat or blew in people’s faces.

“And sometimes I poked them in the eye,” Tess suddenly blurted out. Immediately, she clammed up, looking down at the table.

Leslie reached over to rub her daughter’s back. “That’s true,” she said. “But you can’t help it.”

“I know,” Tess said. “But I wish I could.”

My mom reached over to me then and touched my forearm almost unconsciously.

Tess’s next symptom, Leslie said, was muttering curses under her breath.

Tim Kowalski flashed a warm smile at his daughter. “I thought, oh boy,” he said. “What’s coming next?”

Tess didn’t seem to be ashamed by the conversation; she didn’t mind her parents’ comments. These were simply the facts of Kowalski family life. They talked about the trials of TS matter-of-factly, as other families might talk about hiring a math tutor. Their openness and ease seemed really healthy to me.

Tess found a way to mask the curses, sort of. She’d figured out that if she mumbled her words and strung them together as fast as she could—
shittybitchfuck
—people might not understand what she was saying. If she added the word
pie
to the end of a string of curses—
shittybitchfuckPIE
—it obscured the curses even further.

My mom and I were impressed.

“That’s pretty smart, Tess,” Mom said.

Paige had been diagnosed with TS more recently. So far, the disorder manifested as grunting, whistling, and throwing her shoulder so far forward that she often dislocated it. Her symptoms weren’t as severe as her sister’s, but I remembered how I felt when my mom labeled my own symptoms “mild.”

When you’re living inside TS, there’s no such thing as mild. Whatever your symptoms, it’s damn hard to cope.

I told the Kowalskis about my own experience, especially the battle to suppress my tics, and being unable to focus on anything going on in the classroom.

“I don’t try to hide them anymore,” I said. “I just let them pass through me. As you get older, you stop worrying as much about hiding it, you know?”

“And it seems like it’s never held you back,” said Leslie.

“Right,” I responded. “The only thing that ever held me back was attempting to hide it.” And that, I knew now, was the truth.

T
he Kowalskis came to Goodison Park the next day, watching as Everton beat Wolverhampton 2–1. I met them after the game and introduced them around. This is Marouane Fellaini. Leighton Baines. Phil Jagielka. We snapped some photos of the family as they posed with players.

The four of them returned to New Jersey, and to navigating their lives with TS, a process that few people understood. I couldn’t stop thinking about them after they left, remembering what Faith Rice had told me the first time we met.
These kids are going to have to stand up for themselves every day of their lives.

A
few months later, I got a package from the Kowalskis. Each of the girls had written a thank-you note, and there was a hand-knitted scarf, perfect for the bitter Manchester winters, from Leslie, who also included a card of her own:

Funny. I’d spent the last few months wishing that every child with TS could have a family like the Kowalskis surrounding them.

H
ere is what it’s like to arrive at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City.

You’re wheezing, first of all. The Azteca is 7,349 feet above sea level. But it’s hard to tell what makes it harder to breathe: the altitude, or the city’s blanket of smog. Forget about playing a game: simply walking up a flight of stairs makes you feel like you’ve just climbed Kilimanjaro.

It’s the greatest home-field advantage I’ve ever encountered.

The moment the bus pulls off the highway, you can see Azteca in the distance. It’s huge—114,000 seats in steep risers—and it looms like a concrete Colosseum rising over the City of Hope. You have police escorts, sirens flashing all around your bus, because of course, you’re American. On game day, you
need
those escorts. But for the moment, all you can do is look at that stadium in the distance. There’s standstill traffic everywhere, in all directions. Nobody’s going anywhere for a while.

You inch toward it. With each passing minute, the stadium grows bigger and bigger.

When you do finally get there, you head downstairs. Far downstairs; the visitors’ locker room is so deep inside the stadium
it might as well be a dungeon. You change into your warm-up gear and walk through dingy corridors looking for a stairwell. It’s poorly lit down there, dank and cold. And since you’re the away team, your locker room is at the far end of the tunnel. Those corridors go on forever, and you don’t have any idea where you are, or how much distance remains before you get to the stadium entrance.

By the time you jog out to the field to warm up, you’re already out of breath. All around you are stands that climb straight toward the sky.

They’re filled with people who hate you. They hiss and boo and jeer.

All this, and you haven’t even touched the ball yet.

It’s daunting. It’s intimidating. And the more times you go down there without winning, the more ingrained that feeling becomes. After nine games and zero wins in that stadium, you begin to believe you can’t possibly win. Not there.

O
n August 15, 2012, when we arrived at Azteca, our record there was 0–8–1. We were 0–23–1 in all games against Mexico on their soil.

We’d gone down for a “friendly”—a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one. We’re talking about a rivalry so toxic that Mexican fans launch missiles—entire beers, bags of urine, rocks—down onto the field in the middle of the game. In 2004 fans chanted, “Osama! Osama!” at U.S. players. At Azteca, the “away” fans sit protected by barbed wire fences and police in riot gear. Even reporters and commentators require armed escorts to leave the stadium safely.

Jürgen had made me captain for this game. Down in that
locker room, in the bowels of the Azteca, I moved from one player to the next, reminding them of their responsibilities. I watched as Landon laced up his cleats. He looked like he was a gladiator, about to face the lion. I slid on my captain’s armband.

Then the locker room bell rang, signaling that it was time to head up to the tunnel, start lining up.

I held up my hand to the team. “No,” I said. “Hold up.”

No one moved.

I delayed to make the Mexico players wait. I wanted them to stand there, not sure where we were, and not see us coming. I wanted
them
to have to turn around to look at
us
.

We waited just long enough to be confident they would have lined up already. Then I led our team out into the hallway, that long, dark walk beneath the stadium, and up the concrete ramp to where the Mexican players stood.

Our voices in those corridors were deep and loud.

Come on, boys!

This is our night!

We lined up next to El Tri, stared straight ahead.

I held my chin high. Tightened my jaw. Behind me, I knew all the other guys were doing the same.

If any of us felt fear, we weren’t going to show it.

T
he first half was like a tennis match; we sent the ball back and forth, back and forth. Neither side accomplished much. Mexico created some good chances, forced us on our heels a couple of times, but our back line held steady.