Robert Enke was one of the finest goalkeepers in Europe. He played for Hanover in the German Bundesliga, won eight caps for the German national team and was among the favourites to get the nod to play for his country in next summer’s World Cup. In short, his star was in the ascendant.
Those of us who watched him were impressed not merely by his athleticism and presence, but by his perceptive reading of the game. Eduardo Chillida, the Basque abstract artist and amateur goalkeeper, might almost have been talking about Enke when he said: “The conditions you need to be a good goalkeeper are exactly the same conditions you need to be a good sculptor. You must have a very good connection, in both professions, with time and space.”
On Tuesday Enke’s body was found on a railway track near Hanover. He had been hit by a train. Police say that he jumped from a railway bridge. Enke was 32 and married with a young child.
Why? That is the question that arises whenever we are confronted with the reality of a human being encompassing their own annihilation. From what impulse, what state of despair, could any healthy person wish to extinguish the flame of his own existence?
It is a question that, for many, is imbued with added urgency when the deceased seemed to have it all: wealth, a loving family, success, the acclaim of his peers and the public. How could any professional sportsman, living a life straight from the pages of Boy’s Own, wish to end it all in a moment of chilling and fearful pain? But this sentiment, while seemingly reasonable, is derived from one of the more pernicious, as well as the more stubborn, contemporary myths.
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It is the idea that sporting success (or any other type) leads inexorably to emotional nirvana. It is the notion that we can avoid the more perilous neuroses of the mind with comic-book prescriptions about what makes us happy or, indeed, sad.
The reality is that depression is as prevalent among top sportsmen as it is among any other diverse group of people, as is a sense of worthlessness, fear, anxiety and low self-esteem. Professional sport, in many ways, demands neurosis. It makes a virtue of the obsessional pursuit of perfection: just ask Jonny Wilkinson who, even now, after months as a Buddhist, finds it difficult to free his mind from the tiny errors he made in his last practice session.
It asks the athlete to elevate his sport above pretty much all other ideals. And it crystallises, with brutal clarity, what it means to succeed and fail. There are no grey areas in sport, only winners and losers.
And while sporting success can be life-affirming, it can also evoke the curious phenomenon of anticlimax. When Harold Abrahams won gold medal in the 100m at the 1924 Olympics, he sat in his dressing room, sullen and confused, refusing to talk to anyone. A friend asked what was wrong. “One of these days you are going to win yourself — and you are going to find that it is pretty difficult to swallow,” came the reply.
James Toseland wept in the privacy of his hotel room after winning his first superbike world title. Martina Navratilova was afflicted with bouts of melancholy at many high points during her career. Marty Reisman, the table tennis hustler from the Lower East Side of New York, bemoaned the futility of sporting achievement after his career-defining triumph at the English Open in 1949.
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The only real surprise today, more than 50 years after the birth of modern psychology and with new insights into the biochemistry of human emotion, is not that many successful people are afflicted with depression and unhappiness but that we are still bemused by this. We continue to labour under the defining misapprehension of capitalism that “success” will provide us not merely with the baubles of materialism, but emotional and spiritual well-being, too.
As early as 1974 Richard Easterlin identified that, despite significant increases in wealth, the rich nations of the world have not become any happier. Neither, as far as I can see, have they become any more philosophically certain. This tells us, among other things, that if we want to unlock the secret of happiness (or, indeed, reduce suicide) we will not find the answers in the pat prescriptions of sport (“It’s all about winning, me lad!”) nor the modern obsession with careerism (“Just get that next promotion and you’ve cracked it!”).
The French author and philosopher Albert Camus, like Enke, was a goalkeeper, but he would not have wished to speculate as to the specific reasons for this suicide (Enke’s wife yesterday revealed that he had long suffered from clinical depression), nor would he have supposed that a man’s status as a sporting hero could inoculate him against existential indifference. Camus embraced a wider conception of human well-being. “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?” he wrote.
Enke’s death is a tragedy, of course, not least for his wife and young daughter. But we make a seminal error if we suppose it to be more (or, indeed, less) surprising than that of any other person who has been led, for whatever reason, to take the step Camus described as the “ultimate irrevocable”.