[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: The podcast. So today we're gonna do something a little different on the podcast. We're gonna present a story that you and I ran into.

ROBERT: In Chicago.

JAD: In Chicago.

ROBERT: Third Coast Audio Festival. It won an award, this story, and it's just quite wonderful.

JAD: It's really cool.

ROBERT: This is about soccer.

JAD: And it happened to remind us about a show that we're putting together for the spring on the topic of symmetry.

ROBERT: Chemistry symmetry, hair-parting symmetry.

JAD: All different kinds.

ROBERT: And by the way ...

JAD: But that's later.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Oh well, I'm sorry, you were about to say the cool part.

ROBERT: It turns out that we get to do this show not only on the radio, but in three fabulous cities in the United States of America.

JAD: Live.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: We have shows in New York. Unfortunately, that one's sold out, but we will be in LA March 23 and Seattle March 30. And it's gonna be really fun and it'll be about symmetry.

ROBERT: Yes. So which takes us back to our subject.

JAD: Soccer. Which ...

ROBERT: At least appears quite symmetrical.

JAD: Yeah. You got two teams.

ROBERT: Eleven people on each side.

JAD: That's right. You got two coaches, two sets of fans.

ROBERT: However, there are two people on that field—the goalkeepers on either side—who are living in a very different psychological universe from the rest of the athletes. And thats the subject.

JAD: The loneliness of the goalkeeper.

ROBERT: And the reporter is Hardeep Singh Kohli, who is—well first of all, he was in his earlier life a goalkeeper himself. He's a book author and a regular presenter on the BBC. And he's talking to a guy named Bob Wilson, who was goalkeeper for a very famous British soccer team.

JAD: Arsenal.

ROBERT: That's right.

JAD: In the '60s and '70s.

ROBERT: That's the golden age.

JAD: And the piece begins with the following question.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Bob, what is it about goalkeepers? Are they a breed apart?

BOB WILSON: They're the only individual in what is a team game. In other words, the other 10 guys can make numerous mistakes in a game. Even the star striker, he can miss five, six, eight chances in a game, and score him a winning goal in the 89th minute of a match and he goes home the hero. And the reverse situation that is the goalkeeper, this lonely individual, the only one who's allowed to use his hands with the purpose of negating the game, with the whole purpose of a game of football is to score goals. And the one villain in the piece is the bloke between the sticks, the goalie. And all the other ten guys around you understand that as well. They do think you're crazy. You are putting yourself in this position where for 89 minutes you do the reverse. You play brilliantly, and in the 90th minute you make a positional error, or the ball moves, swerves and dips and it looks as if it's your fault.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: I've got this image of goalkeepers, mostly because I was that goalkeeper that leapt for that high ball only to see the ball go into the back of the net. And that moment, can you explain to me that moment, Bob, when the rest of the team are walking back to the halfway line as you're picking the ball up out of the net?

BOB WILSON: You're alone. I mean, I can give you a very, very good example of it. Playing in an FA cup final, and five days earlier we've gone to White Hart Lane and we've become champions of England. And so we've got an opportunity to become only the second club that century to win the double. So we go and we're playing Liverpool.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: With everything to play for in the 1971 cup final.]

BOB WILSON: And I've had the best season I've ever had in my career. And then suddenly, Steve Heighway cuts in from the left wing. I probably got it wrong by a yard and a half.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Heighway on the edge of the box. A chance for Liverpool, perhaps! And it's fair!]

BOB WILSON: He strikes the goal and it flew in the back of the net. One-nil down. The double's out the window. And Bob Wilson is suddenly the guy who is likely to cost Arsenal the double.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Steve Heighway makes it one-nil for Liverpool.]

BOB WILSON: And as I spun round on my pants on the floor, Frank McClintock, our captain, put his hands on his hips and actually mouthed, "You stupid ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Charlie George!]

BOB WILSON: It didn't cost us. Charlie George won us the double. I finished up being Arsenal's player of the year in the double season. Fantastic. But to my dying day, when people meet me, they say, "Oh, what did you do with Steve Heighway then?" It always comes up. Not the million good saves I might have made. It's always about, "Oh, you got your near post wrong, didn't you?"

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Now here's a challenge that I've never understood. If you're a goalkeeper in a team that isn't very good, you're constantly vigilant. The ball's always coming at you. If, however, you're Bob Wilson playing behind 10 of the best players in the world at that time, for 89 minutes of a 90 minute game, you don't have a great deal to do. How do you stay focused?

BOB WILSON: Do you remember the bionic man? When the ball was at the other end of the field, I imagined that the guy on the ball, the opponent, was Steve Austin. So he could turn around on any part of the pitch, 60 yards away, 70 yards away, 110 yards away, and strike a ball towards my goal.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscasters: Play by plays.]

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Here we are. Sunday, mid morning, south coast of England. Brighton. And in the background, you can hear some under 16s, 22 of them chasing a ball around a pitch. Well actually, technically speaking, it's 20 of them. There's two goalkeepers either side, on their own, with no one to talk to, the game to watch, the backs of their colleagues and the faces of their opposition. Almost poetic! I'm getting carried away with myself. I'm across the road. I'm here to meet a man called Jem Wall, who is an actor. That was a good wee tackle there. Sorry. Slightly put off by a great wee tackle. Now Jem is acting in a Peter Flannery play called The Boy's Own Story, which is all about a goalkeeper.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Excuse me, are you Jem Wall?

JEM WALL: Yeah.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Hardeep. Hello. All right, so we've just kicked off then?

JEM WALL: We just kicked off. But we're about 10 minutes in, and the Preston Panthers are a goal down, I'm afraid.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Was that a goalkeeping error?

JEM WALL: It was not a goalkeeping error. I'm a fully paid up member of the goalkeepers union, so I think even if I had gone through his hands, I wouldn't have said it's the keeper's fault. No, it was a very good long range—long range shot and a very good midfield pass.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: I don't mean to be cruel, right? But see that goalkeeper there?

JEM WALL: Yeah.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Is that our keeper or their keeper?

JEM WALL: No, that's their keeper. Our keeper's the quality-looking keeper with the yellow top and the gloves.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: See their keeper? That's exactly what I looked like when I was a boy. I don't mean to be cruel.

JEM WALL: How would you describe him though?

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Slightly lardy. Slightly lardy.

JEM WALL: I don't play in goal, but I coach the goalkeepers down here. But I have to say, when I was a kid, the idea of going in goal just baffled me. I thought, why would you want to go in goal? I've never known—I've always been fascinated by the kids who want to go in goal. But later on in my life, when I became an actor, I ended up doing a play about a goalkeeper. So I got to meet goalkeepers. I even did two days training down here with Brighton and Hove Albion. No, no, no.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Is that a goal? Sorry, that's two-nil to the other team. Look at the keeper, he's looking skyward.

JEM WALL: And he won't pick the ball.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: He won't pick the ball up. He's gone actually through the net.

JEM WALL: Nobody—that should have been cleared.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: The cross should never have come in.

JEM WALL: No.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: But the goalkeeper gets the blame for that.

JEM WALL: Yeah. I think goalkeepers get a rough deal. I mean, when we were doing the play, it was a very simple set. It was simply goal post and net, okay? So full size, and set in the penalty area of John McKenna, the greatest goalkeeper never to play for England. So he's asking for the ball, talking, you know, as goalkeepers are supposed to do, to keep—to keep himself mentally alerted. And the thing is, he never gets the ball. They hate him, the team hate him and they will never pass to him.

JEM WALL: "Good tackle, Dave. Lay off, Dave. Come on, Dave, if you need me. All right, don't then. Well played, Dave." See what I mean? They'd rather do without me. I'm the last line of defense. When I'm called into the game, it means they've failed and they don't like that. Do you, lads? Of course, they're glad to have me here, just in case. Glad it's me throwing myself about. Glad it's my head that goes in when the boots are flying. But they'd do without me if they could, wouldn't ya? The object of their game is to score goals. The object of mine is to stop them. I'm here to spoil their game. I can't win a game, I can only lose it. So how can I be one of them? Not that I want to be one of them when to them I'm just a necessary evil. "Go on, kid, have a shot! Let one go! No, no, no, don't tackle it! I could have saved that!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Greg saved the ball, tipped it up in the air, but not enough to put it over the bar. It came down behind him, and as he went for it, so he was charged by center forward Lofthouse into the net. Ball as well.]

MURRAY LACHLAN YOUNG: I was a young goalkeeper. I played for St John's Primary School in the '70s.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Poet and keeper Murray Lachlan Young.

MURRAY LACHLAN YOUNG: Keeper in the loosest sense of the word. We played a local big team, sort of Manchester United of the area, which was Amherst School. And I think they beat us 17-nil.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: The scoring of which goal broke the young Murray Lachlan Young?

MURRAY LACHLAN YOUNG: I think it was probably about five or six nil when I realized that there was probably only about 10 minutes of the game gone. The team had gone from being encouraging to looking the other way.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: How long did it take you before you went back in goal?

MURRAY LACHLAN YOUNG: I think about 32 years.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: It may just be a coincidence that you are a poet and a writer and a performer. Do you think there is a commonality in that experience of the creative?

MURRAY LACHLAN YOUNG: Maybe for people who think they're a bit special? Perhaps—perhaps it seems to be the ideal place, because as a striker you can always be partnered with another striker. But there is only one goalkeeper, and he gets to wear a different strip than the rest of the team and has his own universe to operate in.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: That four-nil.

JEM WALL: Four-nil. It's not even half time. We are getting taken apart here.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: I wonder how much of his confidence has gone?

JEM WALL: A lot, I bet. Unlucky, lads. Heads up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Carrigan heads the ball. It's a mistake by Dudek! Taylor headed the ball back to the Polish goalkeeper. He just didn't pick it up. Extraordinary!]

MURRAY LACHLAN YOUNG: When I think of how I used to feel when I let a goal in. Ridiculous, that feeling of letting everybody down.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Oh, I say. And Toby has let it go right through his body and into the back of the net. That is an appalling goalkeeping mistake!]

MURRAY LACHLAN YOUNG: I used to go home after a match at City and literally shed tears over a goal I'd let in, blaming myself for the one that beat us, going over and over and over in my head. Why didn't I go for the cross? Why didn't I see him coming in on the back stick? Where was my cover? Yeah, where was my cover? Was the full back sitting at home crying his eyes out?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Oh, it's been missed by Robinson! The ball's gone into the net. Symington is going to claim this. Oh, what a howler that is by England!]

SIMON BARNES: Poor old Paul Robinson. The England goalkeeper was undone when a back pass came towards him. He aimed a kick at it, missed. The ball went into the goal. It wasn't his fault. The ball bobbled it. It was a goal. It looked comic. It looked like Robinson's fault. He knows it wasn't, and yet it still destroyed him.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Chief sports writer of the Times, Simon Barnes. Another writer. Another man who spends his time alone, hoping to make a mark on the world. And yes, another former goalkeeper. We're everywhere. See, I think I'm developing a theory here, and Simon's got a roll call of loners and mavericks to support it.

SIMON BARNES: Yes, the Renaissance goalkeepers. It's a fine list, and it begins with Albert Camus, author of The Outsider. All goalkeepers are, by definition, étranger, but Camus famously said that "All that I know most surely about morality and the obligations of man, I know from sport. Others include Julio Iglesias, Che Guevara. Che Guevara was a goalkeeper out of necessity because he loved football, but he had asthma so he couldn't cut it as an outfielder. The late Pope John Paul II was also a goalkeeper. And Vladimir Nabokov, who liked to be seen as sublimely different from the crowd. And this was what Vladimir Nabokov, a goalkeeper and occasional novelist, wrote about the higher of his two arts. "As with folded arms I leant against a left goal post. I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face, and hear in the distance the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as of a fabulous, exotic being in an English footballer's disguise, composing my verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates."

SIMON BARNES: I think that's a beautiful moment of serenity that only a goalkeeper can know in the middle of a game of football, that in the bustle of it all, you have time to yourself, time to reflect, time which many goalkeepers eventually used to destroy themselves, certainly to destroy their sporting nerve.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Now that comment by Simon: Che Guevara played in goal because of severe childhood asthma. Now I've done a bit of research on that list of Renaissance goalies. And do you know, Albert Camus developed TB as a youngster? Yes. Vladimir Nabokov nearly died of pneumonia as a child, and then was traumatized by having to flee revolutionary Russia. Pope John Paul II, mother died when he was nine, brother three years later. Makes you think.

SIMON BARNES: There is a sense in which choosing to play goalkeeper does show understanding that one is not as other people. And certainly grief and trauma can do that, particularly in children. You may accept that your position is to be not the same as the rest.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: And what I consider proof from the BBC archives: childhood goalkeeper and solo violinist—emphasis on the word 'solo.' Itzak Perlman, four years old, polio.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Itzak Perlman: I did football. I was goalie, because I worked with crutches so I could stop balls a little easier. You know, I'd stop them with my feet, with my crutches.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: He shoots himself a terrific one, and Sidlow just bangs it over the crossbar! He just bent like an arc of a bow there and just deflected that one. It was going right for the top corner there all the way. And it was a lovely save by Sidlow. That was a grand shot. and a grand save.]

SIMON BARNES: When I see a great goal, it seems to me an incomplete experience. You should have a great shot followed by a great save to be a full, complete and rounded experience. I don't expect people to understand that. In fact, I hope people don't understand it. Being misunderstood is part of the goalkeeper's stock in trade. You wouldn't be a goalkeeper unless you wanted to be misunderstood.

JEM WALL: How can I not be obsessed with failure? If I succeed, what have I done? What have I created? Nothing. Even the poorest goals go into the record books. Great saves are forgotten.

JEM WALL: This could be a Panthers' goal.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: I love your eternal optimism.

JEM WALL: You have to.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: The Panthers get somewhere near the 18-yard box and Jem's thinking it could be a goal.

JEM WALL: So that's four-nil at half time.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: He's in tears. The Preston Panthers keep us in tears. Poor lad! Gloves are off. He's crying. Poor boy's crying. Under 16s football on a Sunday morning. Can you hear that?

BOB WILSON: I tell you what it is. The great goalkeepers, when all else fails, those guys in front of you, those 10 guys need to look round and say, "The goalie will save us." Now, that's the difference once you acquire greatness, true greatness. And very few goalkeepers really acquire that aura about them.

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: And one of the greatest, Gary Sprague.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: And another great save there by Sprague.]

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: Brilliant keeper. But you know what? And this just about sums it up. It doesn't matter that he kept hundreds of clean sheets, forget the cup and championship successes, never mind that he saved the blushes of countless dodgy defenders. And there are plenty of dodgy defenders. The thing that defines Gary Sprague, the loneliest of all lonely keepers, is the goal he scored against himself in 1967. And he's not even Scottish. Go on yourself, Gary, son!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Sprague: We were playing at Liverpool one game, and three minutes before halftime cross came across. I caught the ball. Terry Cooper was on the left wing and shouted to throw at him. Just as I was going to throw it to him, I seen Ian Calligan run to him. So I changed my mind. I've done it millions of times. Just brought the ball back to my chest. But on this occasion I missed my chest and it went over my shoulder and right in front of the cop. And just as I was walking off, the DJ says, we dedicate this record to Gary. Des O'Connor just made this record. "Careless Hands."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Des O'Connor: [singing] I let my heart fall into careless hands.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: David Dunn gets the return ball from Derbyshire. Lets the shot go, and it's gone through into the net. What a howler from Jens Laven!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Here come Estonia. The shot driven it and Robertson spills it. For goodness sake!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Shot from 25 yards and Carson was nowhere near it. Terrible fumble by the goaltender!]

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI: That's the second half about to start. And that's the Preston Panthers keeper walking back to his goal alone. Alone and four goals down. Do you know what? I wish I could say to you that I didn't know how that felt. I know how that feels. I remember now why I stopped being a goalkeeper.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Des O'Connor: [singing] Careless hands that can hold on to love.]

ROBERT: "Careless Hands" from Elvis Presley.

JAD: Do you think he was a goalie?

ROBERT: He had to have been a goalie. No one could have captured the tenderness, the loss and the shame as well as Elvis.

JAD: There's a lot of shame in his music.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: It could have been forged between those two goalposts. Oh, wait, I'm now being told that was not Elvis. Okay, forget it.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Thanks to producer Adam Fowler, and the presenter of that piece, Hardeep Singh Kohli.

ROBERT: And it was a Ladbroke Radio production. It was originally broadcast on BBC Radio Four.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We hope to see you at those live shows.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Or at least at the next podcast.

[LISTENER: Hi, Radiolab. My name is Melanie McCarty. I'm from Washington, DC. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Okay, I guess that's it. Thanks, guys.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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