At the beginning I miscalculated. Due date in mid-February, that would be fine, the World Cup was in January, that wouldn’t conflict. My friend then shook her head – mid-January! Kim and I then thought back and forth for a long time and received a lot of advice without being asked.
Missing the date of birth or probably the last World Cup was so incredibly difficult to decide. The World Cup was in India, so coming home for two days in between wasn’t possible. But Kim comes from a family of athletes, her father Peter was a national ice hockey player and Olympian, her brother Leon is one of the stars of the NHL.
“It’s about to start now”
We then decided together that I should go to the World Cup. It was clear to me: If I miss the birth of my first child, then the whole thing must have been worth it. I’ve been there for a long time, but we haven’t won anything really big in all these years. And that’s why the world title was all that mattered.
Before the group game against Belgium, when I was warming up, I received the message: ‘Everything is fine, but it’s about to start.’ I gave our team manager the cell phone – he was supposed to signal to me at half-time that everything was still OK. After all, everyone had told us that a first birth sometimes takes a long time once the contractions have started.
So I expected that I would be at the hotel by now and concentrated on the game and even scored a goal. During the half-time break I was blown away – I was handed my cell phone with the first photos of my son. I was in tears, the whole team was very touched.
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But I was able to concentrate again quickly, the most important message was: ‘Everything is healthy.’ But I was finally on a mission and it was the tournament of my life, but that was it anyway because of the birth. Somehow everything came together and the balls basically fell onto my racket. We were down 2-0 in the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final and somehow always turned it around in the last few minutes.
This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
When our goalkeeper Jean-Paul Danneberg, who was only used in the penalty shootout, fended off the Belgians’ last penalty in the final, all the barriers broke. I had the gold medal for my son. It was the craziest three weeks of my life. And when we sat together later with the gold medal around our necks, we agreed. If a screenwriter had thought all of this up, it would have been clear that his imagination was a little lost.
