Tim Howard
CreditEverton Football Club
If you want to know what it’s like to be a professional goalkeeper, I’ve long suspected, arrange for a line of cannons to fire twisting soccer balls at your head and private bits at speeds approaching 100 m.p.h. A miss can be disastrous.
This is a reality Tim Howard confirms in his new memoir, “The Keeper.” He describes watching his onetime teammate Landon Donovan kick a ball so hard that, had the opposing team’s keeper not ducked at the last second, “his head might have gone into the goal along with the ball.”
You’ve got to be cool and quick to be a high-level goalkeeper, and few are cooler or quicker than Mr. Howard. You remember him. He was the bearded keeper on the United States men’s national team during last summer’s World Cup in Brazil, a man who made so many dramatic saves (and set a tournament record during a game against Belgium) with such a nonchalant affect that he became a hero to millions, this writer included.
Mr. Howard writes about that surreal time: “My assistant, Amber, showed me the ‘Things Tim Howard Could Save’ memes that had been popping up all over the Internet. There I was, saving the Titanic. Saving a swimmer from the shark in ‘Jaws.’ Saving Janet Jackson from her Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.” On the Wikipedia page for secretary of defense, someone briefly substituted Mr. Howard’s name for Chuck Hagel’s.
There were many reasons to root for Mr. Howard. He was raised by a single mother in an apartment complex in North Brunswick, N.J. His father, a long-haul trucker, had moved out before his son could form any memories of him.
Mr. Howard grew up with obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s syndrome. His disorders have manifested themselves, throughout his life, in facial and speech tics, in compulsive behavior and in extreme sensitivity to noise, touch and light.
You root for his book, too. While soccer memoirs are a staple on international best-seller lists, we don’t see many of them in this country. Soccer is a second- or third-tier sport in the United States, and books about it are mostly aimed at the coaches of children’s leagues.
I don’t want to oversell “The Keeper.” It’s a quickie, composed in a few months with the help of a co-writer, Ali Benjamin. To read the book, you will require a certain tolerance for sports clichés. But a good story gets told. My 13-year-old self would have read it straight through three times. My 49-year-old self was happy enough to polish it off in an afternoon, with lumps forming only two or three times in his throat.
Don’t come to “The Keeper” for the gritty and libidinous details about what it’s like to play professional soccer in the English Premier League, where Mr. Howard was a goalkeeper for Manchester United before moving to Everton, his current team.
This isn’t a soccer-world update of “Ball Four.” There are no nightclubs, no drugs and — despite the fact that Mr. Howard gets married and divorced in the course of the book — no WAGs, the British term for the often eye-popping “wives and girlfriends” of players. Mr. Howard’s book is mostly about hard men on a difficult mission, and as such it can be nearly as single-minded as Ernest Shackleton’s diary.
Mr. Howard was 10, and doing poorly in school, when symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s began to appear. He was compelled to clear his throat constantly, to roll his eyes and to jerk. At one stage he had to touch people before he could speak to them.
“With each of them, it was the same pattern: that awful sensation welling up, the one that could only be relieved, inexplicably, by some action,” he writes. “As soon as I did it, I felt normal again. Seconds later, the cycle would repeat itself.”
A doctor tells his mother that there is often “a flip side” to Tourette’s, an unexpected benefit. In Mr. Howard’s case, it was a kind of Zen calm and an ability to see things on the soccer field that others seemingly could not. “I could see the flicker of a striker’s eyes before he pivoted,” he writes. “Sometimes I even saw it in time to warn my defender.”
He was a big, strong kid on the field, and he caught the eye of coaches. His mom drove him everywhere to play, often staying in third-rate hotels and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with store brands because she couldn’t afford anything more.
Mr. Howard played for America’s Youth National Team and skipped college (he was still a poor student) to sign with a low-level professional team, the New Jersey Imperials. He earned $13,000 a year and felt rich.
After a few years, he caught the eye of Manchester United, where his salary leapt to more than $1 million a year. The British news media greeted his arrival with tittering headlines like this one, from The Guardian: “United Want American With Brain Disorder.” He won over Manchester fans, however. In the stands, they began to sing a ditty about him, to the tune of “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from “Mary Poppins”:
“Tim Timminy, Tim Timminy, Tim Tim-eroo We’ve got Tim Howard and ... ”
Well, the rest is unprintable here.
Mr. Howard eventually lost his starting position in Manchester, and he never felt truly at home until he went to play at Everton, a smaller, scrappier Premier League team in Liverpool. He’s gone on to be an importantadvocate for children with Tourette’s syndrome.
He’ll be 39 by the time the next World Cup rolls around, ancient for a soccer player, yet he hopes to be on the field. He remembers a phone call from President Obama after the last one. “I don’t know how you are going to survive the mobs when you come back home, man,” he recalls Mr. Obama saying to him. “You’ll have to shave your beard so they don’t know who you are.” We’d know Tim Howard, either way.
