On November 10, 2009, 32-year-old Robert Enke, the goalkeeper for the German national soccer team, committed suicide by stepping in front of a train. The news sent shockwaves throughout the sporting world and led colleagues and fans to wonder what could possibly lead Enke, who was due to start for Germany at the 2010 World Cup, to take his own life. Behind the seemingly idyllic life and multimillion-dollar contracts with teams such as F. C. Barcelona and Benfica, however, Enke struggled mightily with depression. In this tremendously moving biography, the journalist Ronald Reng, a friend of the goalkeeper’s, painstakingly reconstructs Enke’s life, elegantly and thoroughly chronicling the tragedy of a devoted husband and father and a promising athlete who had worked so hard to make a name for himself among soccer’s elite, only to see his dreams and those of his family come crashing down as the disease reared its head. More than just an account of the downward spiral of a world-class athlete, this book is the universal story of a man struggling futilely against his inner demons.

Ronald Reng is a German sports journalist and writer. He is an eight-time winner of the prize for the best sports story of the year awarded by the Association of German Sports Writers, and his book The Keeper of Dreams was named the 2004 Sports Book of the Year–Biography in the United Kingdom.