A Yank In Manchester

Back home in New Jersey, fat men didn’t bellow songs in his honor. Back home women didn’t stare while he shopped, kids didn’t knock on his door for his signature, people didn’t, as he says, consider their lives complete if they just got a whiff of his cologne. One day last summer Tim Howard was a 24-year-old from North Brunswick who happened to play soccer for a living; supremely gifted and almost wholly obscure. He could walk through his local mall wearing a jersey with his name stitched in Day-Glo, and no one would know him. Once a boy asked him for an autograph in the lobby of a theater, and Howard stopped to oblige. The rest of the moviegoers brushed past him to get to their seats. Then last July, Howard walked onto a plane, sat for six hours and walked off it a different man. It wasn’t that he had changed so much as that the world around him had: Howard had landed in England — a country in which football coaches get knighted, a smash TV drama is devoted to players’ wives and each game is dissected like the evacuation of Dunkirk. “It’s just enveloping,” says Eddie Lewis, a U.S. midfielder who has played the last four years in England. “There’s no way to escape the football. It’s probably too much.” But unlike the other five Yanks playing in the English Premier League, Howard didn’t join just any side. Having made only nine national-team appearances, the U.S.’s third-string goalkeeper suddenly found himself manning the posts for Manchester United, the most famous club on the globe, an institution despised and worshiped beyond all reason and “built,” according to manager Sir Alex Ferguson, “on bigger foundations and history than any club in the country.” It’s as if a boy grew up outside Paris playing baseball — a boy poor and coping with Tourette’s syndrome besides — and ended up as catcher for the New York Yankees.

Usually, men aren’t the subjects of fairy tales, but that’s what this is now: a male fairy tale, deep into Act III. Howard has stepped from a black-and-white life with the New York/New Jersey MetroStars of Major League Soccer to the Ozlike technicolor of the Premiership. Man U may have been in an unthinkable third place behind Arsenal and Chelsea at the end of the week, but Howard has been the steadiest hand in an uneven Red Devils’ defense. “To come straight into the Premiership and to a club like Man United? Nobody could expect what he’s done,” said United striker Ruud van Nistelrooy after Howard made four spectacular saves in a 4-2 win over Manchester City last month. “I think he’s up there with the best in the world already.” (But when the teams met again a month later, Howard was on the receiving end of a 4-1 hiding that effectively killed off Man U’s hopes of retaining the championship.) Howard isn’t the best goalkeeper in England, but his fairy tale is the sweetest. Because as well as he’s done, as confident as he is, Howard knows what has happened “doesn’t really make sense.” To walk into hallowed 68,174-seat Old Trafford as a member of Man U is to be at the sport’s pinnacle; the players are rock-star famous in England and heroes in their homelands. When a United coach phoned last May to say that the club was interested in him, Howard says, “I could’ve lived on just that for the rest of my life. If you polled as many people as you could and asked, ‘Man U needs a goalkeeper; who do you think?,’ I wouldn’t be on the list,” Howard says. Sitting in a Manchester bistro, he pauses and laughs, and his voice becomes almost a whisper: “I wouldn’t have picked me.”

Goalkeepers are a different breed: they are drawn to, then shaped by, the extreme pressures of the position, and often respond with tricked-out hairstyles, dazzling jerseys and nicknames like El Loco. The job is reactive by definition, highlighted only in moments of ultimate significance. It’s no wonder that, even after saves, they are often in a bug-eyed rage. Howard is the exception, reserved to the point of invisibility. With his jersey an inoffensive gray and his hair cut short (but not to the point of look-at-me baldness), Howard flashes no jewelry and no temper, is flamboyant only in his aggression when a cross rockets into the box. Since making the match-winning save against Arsenal’s Robert Pires in his first big test last August, Howard had given up just 37 goals in 37 Premiership, FA Cup and Champions League matches through Saturday and had 14 shutouts — not the most impressive numbers, but not bad, either, considering the raft of suspensions and injuries to United’s defenders. But mostly, Howard has been notable for consistency, the dullest of words until you realize it’s the last thing anyone expected. “From the first game he looked like he belonged,” says American midfielder Claudio Reyna of crosstown rival Manchester City. “Every goalie makes mistakes, but Tim’s consistency this first season has been incredible.”

Not to anyone who knows him. He carries himself with such equanimity that even his mother, Esther, calls him “an enigma.” It’s not that Howard doesn’t feel stress. Whenever Esther visited Tim and his new wife, Laura, this season, she could see the pressure of playing for Man U causing an increase in his Tourette’s symptoms. The moment Tim got home from practice, he’d start throwing his head back, blinking his eyes faster, doing a stutter step. During games, Howard says, his concentration is so fierce that Tourette’s rarely surfaces. But in the locker room beforehand, his tics — minor compared with many Tourette’s sufferers’ — multiply. He won’t take medicine to control them; he won’t risk even a slight dulling of the reflexes. Instead, Howard does what he’s been doing since his symptoms first surfaced in the fifth grade: tamp down any rogue emotion, any stray impulse, in an endless battle to keep himself in check. His father, Matthew, is black and Esther white (they divorced in 1984), and at 15, Tim came face-to-face with racism for the first time; a girlfriend’s parents refused, for the entire year they were dating, to let him in the house. Tim didn’t confront them or get angry. “I was like: This is someone I’m not going to change. What can I do?” he says.

When, on July 11, Howard finished MetroStars practice knowing that the voice mail on his cell phone contained messages saying whether the British Home Office would allow him to play for Man U, the nervousness had him “jumping out of my skin.” But he didn’t sprint out of the locker room to get a signal. He showered, ate a meal, and then he boarded a bus before allowing himself to know the decision that would change his life. “I’ve always tried to suppress those things,” Howard says. “Having Tourette’s syndrome coming up, I thought: They’ve always got that. If I’m the best guy in the world, if I never put a foot wrong, and they feel like going at me, they can always say: Yeah, but he’s got TS. So I didn’t want to put myself out there too much. I didn’t want it to be a focal point.”

Little did he know — nothing could be more appealing than that to Man U goalkeeper coach Tony Coton, always on the lookout for men who, he says, “keep simple things simple.” When he first saw Howard play at the 1999 Pan Am Games, Coton liked not only his obvious quickness and agility — a basketball-honed athleticism that allowed him to adjust to high and low shots — but also his lack of flourish, his no-nonsense ball distribution. Then last spring, disillusioned with World Cup hero Fabien Barthez and on the prowl, Coton watched a tape of Howard’s recent performances that, by the end, had him perched on the edge of his chair. He found Ferguson and said, “You’ve got to see this.”

Coton didn’t doubt that Howard was physically ready. In fact, he believed that, with the typical goalkeeper peaking in his early 30s, “we could have a big player on our hands for years to come.” Equally appealing was the fact that the U.S. has become soccer’s WalMart: Howard’s $4.1 million transfer fee was tiny compared with the $52.5 million paid out to Leeds in 2002 for defender Rio Ferdinand, now with Man U but suspended for eight months for missing a drug test. The only real unknown for United was how Howard would handle his immersion into the icy, treacherous waters of European soccer.

At the moment, he’s gasping for breath. Its defense in a shambles since Ferdinand’s suspension, Man U is going through its worst spell in nearly a decade. Two weeks ago, the Red Devils were knocked out of the Champions League, costing them some $18 million in revenue, when the defense buckled and Howard surrendered a fatal goal to Porto in the 90th minute. Many, including Ferguson, lay blame on the Man U defenders rather than on the American goalkeeper. But with undefeated Arsenal looming on March 28, no one will forget Howard lying there in Old Trafford, face down in the mud.

Once in a great while Howard lets himself go, loosening his grip on himself because he has no choice, because the pressure and fear and joy of living this fairy tale build and beg for release. The last time came in the 4-2 win over Man City at Old Trafford, when Howard was having one of those games: seeing every ball clearly, reading every move early, laughing to himself after stoning Reyna, his close friend. Then when Van Nistelrooy scored to ice the victory, Howard heard the crowd yell and knew the cameras were focused down at the other end, and he began to scream. At first it was just to himself, head down a bit, but then, gazing up at thousands of faces, he figured the heck with it and screamed back, mouth wide, looking like every other crazy who has played in goal. No one could hear Howard, of course; that’s the best part. His voice rose, loud and unnoticed, into the English air. “I’m yelling back at them!” he recalls. “My whole team’s out there celebrating, so I am too. Why not?” Just describing it makes him giddy — he giggles at the thought, slumps back in his chair, exhales. He looks like a man set free.