My highlights of 2012- Part II

Continuing with my highlights for the year.

2. Coming to America

In the movie Coming to America, Eddie Murphy, in his role as Prince Akeem, sets out to find a wife and therefore moves to Queens, New York. While I am not the crown prince of a fictional African Kingdom, I decided to go to Queens too. 

But let's go to the start first. While booking my summer holidays, I found out that it was somehow cheaper to fly to Boston through Amsterdam than to fly direct. I can't even start to imagine how this would work, but it is apparently cheaper for Aer Lingus to fly me to Amsterdam first, then offload me to Delta Airlines and then fly me to Boston from there, interesting flying over Dublin about 5 hours after I left it, and then on to Boston. In any case, I arrived in Boston on Friday afternoon and had a couple of things on the agenda. I set aside 4 days in Boston at the start of my trip, and then 2 at the end of it. Inbetween, I would do some more travelling around the East Coast. One of the interesting thing about Boston, apart from the Irish connection that is very obviously there, is that nearly every bartender in town is very absent minded. In nearly every pub I visited, they would serve me 2 drinks and only charge me for 1, serve me beer and chicken wings and only charge for the food, or not charge me at all. It was pretty cool. Besides the free beer, Boston is in fact a really cool city. You see, I'm a bit of a sucker for American history. I just love to read about it and see things like the Declaration of Independence, the site of the deciding battle against the British government and the Lincoln Memorial. You can keep me entertained until infinity with American history. Boston is a great spot for this. I did the Freedom Trail, a walking tour across Boston that takes in some of the most important sites and happenings in the American struggle for freedom. I saw Paul Revere's house, from where he started his famous midnight ride, I walked across the battlefield of Bunker Hill, had a beer in the Warren Tavern, the pub where the generals of the American army went to discuss strategy, and I did a whole lot else. It was fantastic.

Ofcourse, I went to Cheers!. Cheers! is my favorite tv show ever, and I have watched every episode at least half a dozen times. It's the show of my life. The show is, as you may know, based on the Bull&Finch pub on Beacon Street in Boston. I wanted Cheers! to be pub number 800 on my list, so I decided to wait until Saturday before visiting it. On Friday night, I went on a pub crawl around Boston, taking in, amongst others, a corner pub called The Corner Pub in Chinatown, an Irish pub called Foley's where, believe it or not, you could buy a pint for $2, and a bar in a parking garage called The Bukowski Tavern, which was awesome. But Cheers! was the main thing I wanted to visit, pub-wise.

I was sort of anxious, something that never happens when I go to the pub, as I was making my approach. I had taken a detour through the Back Bay area in order to walk up to Cheers! from the same angle as you first see the bar in the opening credits of the tv show. When I walked around the corner, onto Beacon Street from Arlington Street, I stood still in my tracks. There it was, in front of me to the right. Cheers! It felt like coming home. 

I stood transfixed, on the street corner, for about a minute, taking in the scene that I had seen a thousand times on tv, and a huge smile spread across my face. I walked up, touched the Cheers! sign, had someone take a picture of me in front of it, and then, with butterflies in my stomach, walked down the stairs.

It was brilliant. I loved every second of it, and even though the pub doesn't look exactly like the one in the tv show, it felt incredibly familiar. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a beer. It was served to me in a dimple mug, just like the ones Norm drinks from on the show. I had a ball. I loved every second of it and made friends with the girl behind the bar. Do you ever get the feeling that you belong somewhere, even when you have never been there? I had that feeling in Cheers! I spent a couple of hours there and decided that I would come back at the end of my trip.

I walked out of the pub in the early evening and, while the sun was setting behind the buildings, I had another look at Cheers! I loved it. I had come home.

And so to Queens.

I took a Chinatown bus from Boston's South station. Why a Chinatown bus? First of all because they're cheap, and second of all because everyone I knew said they were horrible and full of weirdos, so I had to try it out.

As it turned out, it wasn't horrible at all. It was actually quite cool to travel across Connecticut by road and to see the scenery. It sure beats the sight of clouds from a plane. I didn't meet any weirdos though, which was a bit of a let down.

Arriving in New York is always a pleasure. New York, as you all know, is the most exciting place in the universe. Somehow, we managed to drive into Manhattan across the Brooklyn bridge. I have been working on it with Google Maps for about half an hour now, and I can not really see how this would have worked, but there you are. The only possible route that I can see would involve driving down passed Scarsdale (no, I did not see Ross and Rachel) and then down through the Bronx and in to Queens on Long Island. In any case, the driver dropped us off in Chinatown and so I found myself standing by the side of the road on a swelteringly hot Monday afternoon. New York never fails to impress you. The city always goes on at a breakneck pace and that's why it is so awesome. I got a week long subway pass (24 of the best dollars you will ever spend in your life) and set off to find my hostel. The hostel I had stayed in the previous time had closed down unfortunately, which meant I had to find alternative lodgings. I found a hostel in Queens, just across the East River, only 1 subway stop from Midtown Manhattan. As you may have guessed by now, I am sort of a fan of the Ramones. The Ramones are from Queens, so I felt a ping of pride when I realised that, like the Ramones, I would be resident of Queens for a couple of days. I got off the subway and looked at the address of the hostel. I then proceeded to circumvent Queens Plaza in the wrong direction, as I always do. After 20 minutes of walking around, I found that the hostel was about 50 yards from the subway station I had earlier come out of, but then in the other direction. The hostel was great. It was in an old bank building and the common room was downstairs in what used to be the central safe. 

Having unpacked, I set out for my favorite neighbourhood, the East Village. I had stayed in the East Village the last time I was in New York and had instantly fallen in love with the neighbourhood. It is so vibrant and happening and has all amenities that you could ever wish for. It has loads of bars, hundreds of restaurants, is very well connected to the subway and has a great mix of people. It is, in my opinion, perfect. I spent most of my nights in New York in this neighbourhood and had a great time on every occasion.

The Continental, my new favorite bar in New York

If you want to read details about  all my whereabouts, you'll have to wait until the complete story of my trip is finished. I did some more Ramones sightseeing in New York, and eventually I went to Rockaway Beach. No matter what they sing in the song, Rockaway Beach IS far and it IS hard to reach. It took me an hour and a half to get there, on 3 different trains, but it was worth it. 

It is a really nice beach that looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. The weather was great, the sand white and it had a bar called The Sand Bar. Like all American beach side bars that I ever went to, it was a great place for meeting Class A weirdos. First I ran into 3 guys with matching Almand Brothers Band tie-dye t-shirts. As it turned out, they had nothing to do with each other. Then I met a guy with Fighting Irish tattoos on both arms, who said he was a cop but, judging from his tan, he had been spending more time sitting in the sun on the bar’s terrace than in a squad car. I had a great time in New York. One of the great things about New York is that you can just get off the subway somewhere and wonder around waiting for something to happen. And something always does happen. 

I also walked through the scariest neighbourhood I’ve ever been in. I was planning to visit a bar that had been mentioned in The Road to McCarthy, one of my favorite books, and it was mentioned as being situated in Red Hook in South West Brooklyn. I set out on Saturday afternoon and planned to make some stops on the way over. As I was getting closer, it started to dawn on me that the neighbourhood wasn’t exactly prosperous. I have been in the South Bronx, The Mission in San Francisco, where I was witness to a stand off between the  police and a Mexican gang, and in Redfern in Sydney, but that was all child’s play compared to Red Hook. The moment I crossed under a highway overpass, I could see that this wasn’t exactly a place where you’d want to walk around alone at night. I was alone and it was starting to get dark. Nearly all windows had bars covering them. Burnt out cars were a regular feature. Groups of black teenagers sat in doorways drinking beer from paper bags. It looked like a scene from Boyz in the Hood, and the soundtrack matched, I heard angry hiphop from every car. When I finally got to the bar, and told the bar man about  my walk, he strongly advised me to take a taxi back to Manhattan at the end of the night. I followed his advise, and I’m glad that I spent 10$ on a cab back to the subway. I really didn’t want to walk those streets again.

I also visited Katz’ deli, one of New York’s most famous eateries. It was a circus. There was a queue halfway around the block. When you finally gained entry to the deli, you had to queue for food, then for a drink and then for a table. But boy, was it worth it. I had a pastrami sandwich and it was easily the best sandwich I ever ate. Just thinking about it now makes me drool. I also went out to dinner with my friend Jessica from New Jersey and ended up on a wild pubcrawl through the Lower East Side that included a couple of Japanese bars (one of them wouldn’t serve us) an Italian wine bar, where we got a free drink, and the Double Down saloon, home of the bacon Martini. (Yes, I had one). I also went to visit my friend Robert on Long Island, who moved there around the same time that I moved to Ireland. As I hadn’t seen him in 4 years, we had a lot to catch up on, we had a lot of beers and we had a barbecue and I was still in time for the last train home.

As with everything, my stay in New York had to end at some point, and after 6 days of happily enjoying my favorite city, I went to Philadelphia. This is where I first got word of an enterprise called Megabus. The Apple Hostel suggested this as the cheapest way to get to the hostel and, in general, to get around America. I checked the Megabus website and found, to my surprise, that they were even cheaper than Chinatown buses. For 6 dollars I could travel from New York to Philadelphia. I was amazed.  I arrived in a Philadelphia that was even warmer than New York. My hostel was great, the staff fantastic and there was a great bar next door called Rotten Ralph’s. I set up shop there, after spending an afternoon happily entertaining myself again with American history. I stood on the spot where the Declaration of Independence was first read out, walked through George Washington’s house and saw the Liberty Bell, amongst much other stuff. Philadelphia is literally packed with it. I loved Philadelphia.

On  my second night there, I made 2 new friends (Hi Kristin and Dana!) in a bar around the corner and I had a Philly cheese steak at the famous Reading Terminal market. I also did a daytrip to Washington DC for some more American history. It is only when you travel overland in America that it starts to dawn on you what a vast country it is. I had taken a bus from Bostons to New York, that had taken 5 hours. New York to Philly was 3 ½ hours. And Philly to Washington DC was another 3 hours. That’s 11 ½ hours, nearly half a day of non-stop travel, yet looking at a map of America the size of my computer screen, I had only moved about an inch and a half. I wasn’t even near halfway down the East Coast. So you can imagine that people sometimes think that they can drive from New York to Los Angeles in a week and stop off in Texas for a couple of days, only to find out that you will reach LA by road only if you drive more or less non-stop for 7 days. It’s a big country.

My view from the Lincoln Memorial

Washington DC is a city with 2 faces. The central bit is lovely. All the memorials and interesting buildings are located in the same area, making it easy to see all of them, even if you don’t have too much time. They all sit there next to each other, the White House, The Lincoln Memorial, The World War II memorial and so on. I spent a happy couple of hours checking them out and then took the subway to the Pentagon. As I found out later, the Pentagon is about 400 yards from the Lincoln Memorial, if you know where to go. I also visited Arlington Cemetary, where JFK is burried. It was really impressive.

Other than that, and the areas where the diplomats live, Washington DC is basically a run-down gritty ghetto. I wanted to visit Ben’s Chili Bowl, a place known for having excellent chili, so I set off on the subway. Once outside the city centre, I was the only white person on the train. I got off the train at my stop and walked across the street to the restaurant. Winos where everywhere, asking for change or sleeping on the sidewalk. A guy was standing at the door of the restaurant, offering to help me open the door in exchange for some coins. I went inside and had a big bowl of chili, served with crackers. I must say, it was really good, worth the trip on the subway. After that I went to the city centre and took the bus back to Philly, where I had another good night of fun in the hostel and the bars in the neigbourhood. On my last day in Philly, I saw the last of the sites I wanted to see, saw another couple of pubs and booked an overnight bus back to Boston. As it was the middle of summer, I had trouble booking a hostel, and finally found one on the northern outskirts of Boston. It was a shithole. You can read my Yelp review here:

Shitty Hostel

I stayed there for one night and I will never return. The next night I slept on a bench outside Dunkin’ Donuts at the airport, which was both cheaper and more comfortable.

Other than that, my last 2 days in Boston were great.  I re-visited Cheers! Where I ate the most insane plate of nachos I ever laid my eyes on.  I found that starters were half price on weekdays which meant they were only $6. I ordered them and 10 minutes later found a plate of chili nachos in front of me that was so gigantic that it can not possibly be qualified as a starter. A starter for 10 people, maybe. As I was very hungry, I dug in with gusto and ate non-stop for half an hour. It looked as if I hadn’t touched the food. I ate for a further 10 minutes and couldn’t have taken another bite if someone had put a gun to my head. The plate still looked as if I had barely touched it. I gave up and returned to drinking. A guy and his girlfriend who were sitting next to me at the bar looked on in amazement and then decided to try the nachos too. They, too, had to give up about half an hour later and even between the two of them the plate looked as if only a tiny bit had been eaten. In any case, Cheers! Was great again and I went back a last time the next day to say goodbye. 

On my last day, I also took a second trip to the Sam Adams brewery. It is a great tour, it's free and at the end, this is the best part, all the beer is free too. And they have a really cool gift shop. 

At the Sam Adams Brewery

I also re-visited The Tam, arguably my favorite bar in Boston. It was next to the hostel I sayed in early on in the trip and the place was great. It had a grey-haired bartender who was missing teeth, but still had a lot of interesting stories to tell, toilets with doors missing, christmas lights in the middle of summer, and all walls were completely covered in old pictures, beer signs, police badges, trinkets and even a full sized Pinada. It was a great place, and a pint was only $3, so I really enjoyed it. I stayed at The Tam until midnight on Saturday and then took the last subway to the airport to stay overnight. I flew back to Dublin, again via Amsterdam the next day. It was a great trip. I met old friends and made a bunch of new ones. I saw lots of very interesting historical sites, buildings and monuments and had some awesome food. 

It was an awesome trip and I love America. I will be back many times in the future.

I talked a bit more about my America trip than I intended so I'll leave my last highlight for the next post.

Cheers

Lennard

My Highlights of 2012- Part I

Hi everyone,

We are nearing the end of the year, and many people take that time to draw up lists of their favorite albums, movies, or songs of the year. I used to do this as well, but the last couple of years I haven't really bought an awful lot of music, which would necessitate a list. In fact, these days, I can't come up with 5 new CDs a year, and the ones that I do buy are mostly obscure Ramones bootlegs, so that does not require a list either.

No, what I decided to do instead is make a list of the 5 things I liked most about this year.

This, for me, is more interesting than telling you which movies I liked (Rock of Ages was really good though) because that is all rather subjective and wouldn't amount to much.

So, without further delay, let's have a look at what made me tick in 2012.

5. The London Olympics.

London is one of those places that, as an avid traveller, you get to, for some reason or other, about once a year. Sometimes for a couple of days, maybe to watch a match, or maybe you're just passing through an airport on your way somewhere else.  This year, however, I did not set foot on London soil, if I remember correctly. And this year, more than any recent years, there was a very good reason for going to London: the Olympics were in town. The first summer Olympics that I really followed were the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. I had seen the Sarajevo Winter Olympics earlier in the year, which is also why it was so special for me to visit the Sarajevo Olympic stadium when I was there last year.  I have intently watched every Olympic Games ever since. I just love it. There's sport on TV every day, all day, everybody follows it, even people who don't normally care too much about sports, and I even find myself watching sports that I wouldn't normally even consider watching, like rhythmic gymnastics or rowing.

The Olympics are always a happy time for me, and it starts right at the opening ceremony, where I can play my favorite game: Guess the Flag. If you are obsessed with maps and geography like me, this will keep you happily occupied for a couple of hours. During the 2008 Bejing Olympics, I spent half an afternoon in a local pub near my dad's house, where I played Guess the Flag with one of the locals, a guy by the name of Henny, who used to drink there with my dad when they were growing up and, well, he probably thought that if it ain't broke, he shouldn't fix it, so when my dad set off to get a career, a family and a mortgage, Henny stayed.

When I relayed this story to my dad, he looked at me with a look that said "I can not even start to imagine how you could possibly have fun doing something as trivial as that"

There are 2 things that stood out for me in the London Olympics: They were very happy games, without any major incidents. There were no kidnappings, no bomb attacks, no security issues, nobody boycotted the games and they were very well organised. What also contributed to this feeling is the fact that, for the first time as far as I can remember, the organising committee had actually thought through what they were going to do with the facilities after the games had ended. Most Olympic facilities, you see, are basically left to rot. There is a website that has pictures of abandoned Olympic facilities around the world and it is not a pretty sight. The Barcelona Olympic stadium has no present use. Nothing happens there. The one in Sydney gets 1 or 2 games a year thrown in their direction by the Australian Rugby Union, but that's about it. The Sarajevo stadium sat idle for years and then were lucky to find out that a local team (FK Sarajevo) needed a new ground so they moved the team there. The one in Amsterdam was used for football games for about 2 decades but has now been redevelopped as a business centre. The pitch is now  a park, with a fountain in the middle of it. The only Olympic Stadium that I know of that is being used in any meaningful sense, is the one in Atlanta. After the games they tore down half of it, and it is now in use as a baseball park. So in that way the new London stadium is quite unique in that it was already known that it would be used every week after all the paperwork had been done, as the new home ground for West Ham United. In fact, 3 teams were in the running for the ground, but it appears that West Ham has won the race, much to the detriment of local team Leyton Orient who now fear that having their big brother around the corner, they will loose support as people will go visit West Ham in the Olympic stadium instead.

What was also  a novel experience for me, is that I watched pretty much the entire games in the USA, which gave the whole enterprise an entirely different feeling to watching it in Europe.  As you will know, American news focuses mainly on American issues. You can watch CNN for 3 hours in the safe knowledge that probably not once, you will encounter a news item that is set outside of the US, or is not connected to American interests elsewhere.  This more or less works for sports coverage as well, and I don't just mean that they call their national championships World Championships, even though there are never any none-American teams involved (The only exceptions being 1 Canadian team in the NBA, and about half a dozen Canadian teams in the National Hockey League)

Don't get me wrong- I love American sports broadcasting. It is always accurate, exciting, up to date and stuffed full with statistics, an area of expertise I am especially fond of. American sports on tv are always a party. However, as I said, it always focusses on Americans first and foremost, and the rest of the world later. If you watch an Olympic event on, say, British television, they will try to get an interview with the winner first. Later on they will focus on British athletes. In America, it is the other way around. The first thing you will see is the American athlete that came in 5th or 6th and after that they will focus on periferral characters like Usain Bolt or Jessica Ennis.

And that brings me, in a roundabout way, to my personal favorites of the London Olympics: Jessica Ennis and Katie Taylor. Katie Taylor, a girl-next-door from the Irish town of Bray, just South of Dublin, took part in the boxing competition and was, realistically, Ireland's only real chance of a Gold Medal. Fortunately, she delivered, a feat which sent the entire nation into frenzy. Streets, parks and even a brand of beer were named after her in the aftermath of the games.

My personal favorite, however, was Jessica Ennis. A bright and sparkling girl from Sheffield, who was a pleasure to watch during the heptathlon and was justly rewarded with a Gold medal after winning 6 of the 7 events. I have never seen an athlete who looked so happy and the fact that she stayed really down to earth when every paper and tv show in Britain wanted to see her makes her all the more special.

4. 

I was going to write something about the demise of a certain football club in South Glasgow, but as I want to end the year on a positive note, I have decided to focus on a different football matter.

WE BEAT BARCELONA

WE BEAT BARCELONA

WE BEAT BARCELONA.

It sounds really good, doesn't it? 

Okay, one more time:

WE BEAT BARCELONA!

3. The Irish came home.

American Football is getting ever more popular in Ireland. More and more pubs are picking up on the interest and start advertising that they're showing all the games. The thing is, other than the Woolshed, they only show the games on Sky, which means that if you really want to see a good selection of games, The Woolshed is where you want to go.

This story, however, has nothing to do with pro football as such, but with the news I picked up early in the year that a big NCAA football game was to be held in Dublin. What made it even more interesting was that it involved the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, a team with strong Irish links and massive support among Irish Americans.

For those of you unfamiliar with the NCAA, it is the governing body for college sports in the USA.

And college sports in the USA, are BIG Business. Really Big.

Let me give you some figures about how big it is. During the half time break of the game in Dublin, they held an on-field interview with the General Manager of Notre Dame and, when asked if he was impressed with the sell-out, 53.000 crowd, he said the crowd was amazing but they were used to big crowds as Notre Dame Football ground has a capacity of 81.000 and has sold out EVERY GAME SINCE 1964. 81.000. That is a bigger stadium than all but 4 stadiums in the whole of Europe, and that is just for 1 college team. Teams in the Southern states often have considerably bigger stadiums. The Michigan State Wolverines, up North, I was astonished to find out, have a stadium that holds a whopping 108,000 people. That is 2 Aviva Stadiums put together and then some. It is also the largest sporting venue, capacity-wise, in the world that is not used for racing.  And it's not just spectators. American Universities regularly publish annual merchandise turn-over figures that have teams like Manchester United and Real Madrid scratching their heads, wondering what the hell they are doing wrong. As you will understand by now, college sports are Big Business. 

So it was with some excitement (A lot of excitement, really) that we learned that the Fighting Irish would be playing Navy in Dublin in the first weekend of September. Getting tickets would be a nervy and tricky business. The stadium holds 53.000 but due to the Irish-American connection, many Fighting Irish fans from the States would be eager to make a holiday out of it and see Ireland, perhaps even trace their ancestral roots. So when the date came around that the tickets would go on sale, I was wired and, 10 minutes before the on-sale time, I unplugged my  phone at work and picked a bunch of papers from my desk that I had especially put aside to look busy while I was getting my hands on tickets. After 10 minutes of nervously refreshing my browser window, I finally got to the covetted 'On Sale' screen and, having pre-entered all my details, managed to get 2 great tickets right behind the press-section. Filled with joy, I walked into the hallway to inform Renae that we were in, and when I returned 2 minutes later, I refreshed my browser again, only to find SOLD OUT on the screen. We were very happy indeed.

In the run-up to the game, I regularly checked the Notre Dame websites to see if there was any news to report, such as the awesome notion that Notre Dame would be wearing boots in the colors of the Irish flag during the game. It was then that it started to dawn on me how massive an occasion this was. I checked the website of the Official Notre Dame travelling agency. The notion that a school has their own travel agency would come across as preposterous here in Europe, but in the USA it is apparently quite normal. Their website proudly stated that they alone had sold over 9000 tickets for the game in Ireland, 3600 miles away. 9000 people, to give you an understanding of the size of the operation, is 20 transatlantic Boeing 747s filled to capacity.

That's impressive.

Apart from the online stats, Dublin itself transformed completely in the weeks before the match. As many Americans had made a holiday out of it, and spent 1 or 2 weeks in Dublin or Ireland at large, everybody wanted a piece of the action. Pubs started showing baseball at night and ESPN during the day. Menus were hastily modelled after the Hardrock Cafe and TGI Friday's. There were American flags literally EVERYWHERE. At times I wondered if I was walking through Temple Bar or Gatlinburg. The atmosphere was great. I was lucky enough at the time to have some time off work, so I spent many a happy afternoon taking in the scenes of American tourists tracing their Irish roots, drinking Guinness and taking pictures of the banners that said 'WELCOME HOME TO THE FIGHTING IRISH' that were all around town. It really was quite awesome. With game day only days away. excitement reached fever pitch. All pubs were packed with Americans and American Football enthousiasts like me, and we all had a great time. I walked into a bar in Temple Bar(not something I do that often) on the Friday afternoon before the game, wearing a New York Mets hoody. I ordered a beer and within 5 seconds an American down the bar asked me how life in New York was. When I explained that I was not from there, he found it so amusing that locals followed American Sports that he bought me my next beer, and the one after that. To milk the situation, I then showed him my tattoo of the flag of California, which triggered another couple of free pints. But other than the free beer, the whole atmosphere in town was great. Everybody was having fun and all was well in the world.

The author at the game

When game day finally came around, it got even better. Merchandise for the teams was sold everywhere, Temple Bar, the official tailgate venue for the match was one big street party and every pub in town was packed to the rafters. It looked like St. Patrick's Day. When we got to the stadium, we found that we had the best seats in the house, directly behind the press section. We had a brilliant view of the pitch and all the action. The pre-game show was amazing, the band alone must have been consisted of over 100 people. The game was great, the halftime show was amazing, especially a choreographed move from the band, where they first filtered out in the shape of a Shamrock and then in a map of Ireland, which sent everybody into a frenzy. The weather was perfect and oh yeah, Notre Dame thrashed Navy by 50-10. It was a brilliant day and a very special occasion to be part of. I will remember it for the rest of my life and wouldn't have missed it for anything.

So that was part I. I will reveal my other highlights of the year next week.

Cheers,

Lennard

The greatest sporting moments

Hi everyone,

As we enter December and get ready for the holiday season, a lot of people start making lists of their favorite movies, albums or happenings of the year.

I will get to that a little bit later this month, but before I get to that, I want to share with you what I think are 5 of the greatest sporting moments in history. I have been thinking about this for a long time and, obviously, if, like me,you spend about 30 hours a week watching sport, there are many great sporting moments that I could not include, but the ones listed in this story hold particularly fond memories for me.

So here we go, for a run down of 5 of the greatest sporting moments in my life.

5. Joop Zoetemelk wins the World Cycling Championship.

In 1985, Dutch cyclist Joop Zoetemelk took part in the road race of the world cycling championships. As he was in the autumn of his career, nobody expected him to make any impact and, as it was the last official race he would ever take part in, he was on the team more to make up the numbers and be a mentor to younger racers than to actually compete for the top price. After a race that had involved numerous escape attempts, a group of about a dozen racers escaped from the peloton and built up a decent lead which would eventually prove enough to decide the winner.

As the leading group was far enough ahead to fend off any charges from the chasing pack, the Dutch tv commentators sort of lapsed into that absent minded state that you regularly encounter in cricket commentators, when there is not too much to report on the current state of the game and they wonder off to subjects like the weather, the upcoming Christmas holidays or the state of Australian beaches. This same thing happened to the cycling commentators who, seeing that the lead group, containing amongst others the Italian favorite Moreno Argentin and American Greg Lemond, who would go on to win the Tour de France 3 times in the next 5 years, decided that not much was happening for now. What the commentators, now busy in their assessment of the upcoming football season, hadn't noticed, was that there was a Dutchman in the leading group. With about a mile to go, and Argentin and Lemond both stalling the race and looking at each other, afraid to set up the sprint lest the other rider would follow in their slip stream and jump over them in the final 100 yards or so, Zoetemelk decided that he'd had enough of this and, while the lead group turned a bend in the road, decided to jump the pack and have a go at it.

Apart from it being rather rare that a rider would jump out of the pack this far from the finishing line, it also triggered the commentators to get their minds back to the job at hand, commenting on the race, all of a sudden surprised to see an orange jersey at the head of the pack. Much like the commentators, the other racers in the pack were very surprised by this. The commentators put down their cups of tea and cheered on the 38 year old Zoetemelk to the finishing line, becoming the oldest World Champion in the history of organised cycling.  A truely remarkable race, with a remarkable champion.

4. Hein Vergeer wins the World Speed Skating Championship.

The name Hein Vergeer might not ring a lot of bells to anyone outside of Holland, but he is a local hero where I'm from. I grew up in a town just outside Rotterdam, in the west of Holland and Hein Vergeer, it may be interesting to note, lived across the street from me.

In the 70s and 80s, speed skating titles were generally cut up between the Dutch, the Germans and assorted Scandinavians. Holland, I am proud to note here, holds the all-time record with 43 champions up untill now. 

In 1985, the World Speed Skating Championship took place in Hamar, Norway.

After finishing 8^th on the opening distance of 500 meters, and winning the 5000 meters after that, our man finished second on the 1500 meters, often a crucial distance in these championships, and we could start to prepare for the final distance, the traditional marathon ending to an allround speedskating championship, for which only the top 16 riders in the table qualify. This is mostly so because the 10.000 meters isn’t normally the most exciting race to watch and because they have to get the zamboni out after every second race, it takes up the entire afternoon as it is. I won’t bore you with the scoring system that is used for these tournaments, but it basically comes down to the fact that the skating federation uses a very complicated turnover table to calculate all distances back to 500 meter and giving out points based on that. The rider with the lowest number of points at the end wins. In short, what it came down to was that our local boy needed to finish within about 5 seconds of Oleg Bozhyev from the Soviet Union.

Tension mounted. The whole town was collectively holding their breath. Could our local hero win the World Title? The race was a roller coaster and everybody was too stressed to speak. After 25 laps, our boy crossed the finishing line well in time to fend off the competition and the town exploded. I was only 11 years old at the time, but I can remember it as if it were yesterday. Everybody ran out into the streets jumping for joy. The local church minister (or whatever title the local church executive held in his branch of worship) rang the church bells for hours. All pubs were open 24 hours a day for the next 4 days as everyone toasted to our local hero in an ocean of beer. Nobody went to work the next day. The following Wednesday, Hein Vergeer was flown in to the local football ground in a helicopter, to cheers from every single person in town. It was a Hollywood style reception that would have made David Beckham jealous. Hein won the World Title again in 1986 and still lives in town to this day, running a sports marketing agency. In honour of his achievements, a statue of a skater has been placed next to town hall. It was the greatest moment in the history of the town.

3. Skippy scores.

I have never liked AC Milan. I don't know where it comes from, but I simply do not like the team. To be honest, I am not a fan of Italian football in general, and the only Italian football team I can muster some sympathy for is Inter Milan, which may go some way to explain why I do not like their arch rivals. Perhaps it's the fact that they stole the 3 best Dutch players of the 80s, Gullit, Van Basten and Rijkaard away from Holland. Or maybe it's just because they're a bunch of whining wankers who fall over as soon as someone looks at them.  To cut a long story short.. I don't like AC Milan.

I had moved to Ireland in January of 2007, halfway through the football season, and left behind the Rotterdam Celtic supporters club with some pain in my heart. However, as a sending off gift, apart from a couple of gallons of beer, my friends had entrusted me with the addresses of every serious Celtic pub in Dublin, knowledge I was very happy to use. And so it was that I found myself starting the new year as a Celtic supporter in Dublin, and with the task of making friends with the Celtic supporters club at Frazer's Pub. The pub has since been rebranded as Murray's but the place is basically still the same and is still a hotbed of fanatic Celtic support. To their credit, the local Celtic fans took me in as if I was a long lost son. Everybody was friendly and, as often happens when you show up in a Celtic jersey somewhere, I was greeted with handshakes and beer. One of the most astonishing examples of this came in, of all places, Sarajevo in Bosnia, where the staff of the local Celtic supporters bar were so happy to see a real Celtic supporter, from Ireland no less, that they supplied me with free beer the entire night. As I have said before, the Celtic jersey is worth its weight in gold.

After conveniently winning the league again in 2007, we were set up for another year of Champions League football and we were drawn in a somewhat tricky group with Shaktar Donetsk, our old rivals Benfica (who clearly are still not happy with the fact that we picked up the European Cup in their ground in 1967) and AC Milan. As was normal at the time (and still mostly is, to be honest) we lost all our away games, which left us with the need to get decent results in all the home games. And we certainly did. The first home game was against the dreaded AC Milan and, having lost to Shaktar Donetsk in the first game, we really needed to win. AC Milan were the defending champions, having beaten Liverpool by 2-1 in the final in May,albeit with a fair amount of luck, including a goal that occurred after a Milan player had clearly played a hand ball. Celtic took the lead after about an hour of play, a goal from our substitute captain Stephen McManus, who later, like pretty much the entire Celtic team of that year, moved to Middlesbrough and now earns a living playing in the Hollywood-like surroundings of Bristol City. Milan was quick to respond, and the equaliser, inevitably from the penalty spot, was scored by Kaka (tip: never trust a player whose name sounds like the sound an exotic bird might make).

It was looking like we would be getting another draw, which would leave us at the bottom of the group table with one point from 2 games. This is where Scott McDonald comes in. Scott McDonald is an Australian player of Scottish descent, who was born in Melbourne. He was at one point the most hated man in East Glasgow, after he scored twice in injury time for Motherwell, in the final game of the 2004-2005 season, which handed the Scottish title to a club from South Glasgow that no longer exists. Scott was not the most popular man in Glasgow then. This all changed when Celtic did what most rich and profitable clubs do: buying the player that scored against them. Scott McDonald became a Celtic player and soon after, everybody forgot about that Black Sunday in 2005 and Scott became one of the most popular Celtic players of the decade, mainly because of his incredible ability to score goals from every angle, and because he was just a really nice guy. The reason for his inclusion in this story though, came in the final minute of that match against AC Milan. While the whole of Glasgow, and Celtic supporters the world over were resigned to the 1-1 draw that was on the board, Celtic got the ball in midfield. Milan, as Italian teams are wont to do, pulled back their entire team around the goal so as to obstruct a way through for Celtic. What they hadn't taken into account was that Scott McDonald, due to being a lot shorter than the average Scottish football player, situated himself near the back post, and when a shot at goal was deflected in the direction of the right side corner flag, McDonald stepped out from behind 2 big Italian defenders, tapped the ball into the goal and became part of Celtic legend.

To say that the pub exploded would be an understatement more or less matching the notion that somebody set off a firecracker in Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. Everybody went completely ape shit and was totally out of their minds for minutes. When the heat of the moment finally died down, minutes after the final whistle had gone, we took note of the surroundings. Not a table or stool was left standing. A young guy who had been standing in front of the big screen and had been at the centre of the celebrations, was bleeding from his face and had an ear ring snapped out of his ear. There was broken glass everywhere and my hair was soaking wet with cider. When I took a shower the next morning, my hair, and pretty much everything else, was still smelling of apples. I didn't care too much, I had a hangover the size of the Grand Canyon, but it had all been worth it. We beat Milan and eventually progressed from the group stages, slightly ahead, again, of Benfica. We went out in the next round to the Barcelona team that went on to become the greatest team of their generation, winning the Champions League in 2006, 2009 and 2011. AC Milan, interestingly, also went out in the second round to Arsenal.  Scott McDonald went on to become a sensation for Celtic, scoring 31 goals in the season and becoming the SPL's top scorer that year.

2. Van Basten beats the Germans.

The greatest frustration in Dutch history is not found in defeat in wars, the failure to get recognised in the world as anything other than a nation of pot heads, or the fact that we managed to collapse 6 governments in the space of a decade. No, fukc all that. The one thing that stands out in Dutch history as The Big Issue is the 1974 World Cup Final.  Let me give you some background here, for those of you that are unfamiliar with the subject. Holland had the best team in the world in the early 70s. Led by Johan Cruyff, the greatest player ever to play the game, Holland played a free flowing, all out attacking style of football that made even Brazil look like a bunch of clumsy hicks from the 3rd division in Scotland. Holland was supreme in every facet of the game and, on the back of Cruyff leading Ajax Amsterdam to a hattrick of European cup wins in the previous 3 years, making it 4 in a row for Holland after Feyenoord had won the cup in 1970, breezed through the World Cup as if it were a string of practice matches against pub league teams. We brushed aside Uruguay, 2 time winners themselves, and Bulgaria as if they weren't there and then settled for a draw against Sweden. In the second round, we thrashed Argentina 4-0, then beat East Germany and set ourselves up for our moment in the spotlight with a 2-0 semi-final win over Brazil. It may be interesting to note, for those of you who are equally obsessed with statistics, like me, that Holland is still the only team in the world that managed to score 2 goals against Brazil in World Cup finals matches on 3 different occasions. 

And so to the Final. The Final took place on the 7th of July and, if everything had gone as planned, I would have been born on that day. As it happened, I was born 10 days late, this to the elation of my father (who was now free to watch the football) and the agony of my mother (who now still had a baby inside her, in the hottest summer on record) as Holland took the field against the hated Germans. Within a minute, we were ahead. Johan Neeskens converted a penalty after 48 seconds. The first German player to touch the ball was their goalkeeper when he picked it out of the net. Surely, things couldn't go wrong from here?

Ofcourse they could. In the 26th minute, the Germans got a penalty themselves and in the 43rd minute, Muller scored a goal that was so ugly that it does not deserve a description here. We lost the final and we would not get back there until 2010 when we, again, lost, to Spain this time.

We would get our revenge though. In 1988, the European Championships were staged in West Germany, in what turned out to be the last tournament in which the German football team was divided in East and West. As you will all recall, about a year and a half later the citizens of East Germany decided that they had had enough of state oppression, walked up to the Berlin Wall and demanded passage to the West, where they were greeted by fellow Germans with flowers and champagne and started what was arguably the greatest party in history. But I digress, let's get back to football.

The group stages weren't very promising. Holland lost to the Soviet Union (in what, again, proved to be the final appearance of the country before it dissolved) by 1-0, then beat England by 3-1, courtesy of a Van Basten hattrick and then needed to beat Ireland to advance to the semi finals. The winning goal came in the 81st minute and was the biggest fluke I'd seen in my life up until then. The ball went in the general direction of the Irish penalty area, and fell to our star long-distance kicker Ronald Koeman, a player known for his ferocious 100-miles-an-hour free kicks which he normally directed at the faces of defenders so as to scare them off and make them duck out of the way the next time he gained possession of the ball.

Rather than pounding the ball into the net, or even in the direction of it, he sliced the ball, sending it to the left side of the pitch with an amount of top spin on it that would make the average Chinese table tennis player dizzy, where it was met by Willem Kieft, a striker who was making a living playing for Italian relegation side Pisa at the time, who tried to head it in the direction of the goal, and also sort of half missed it. In the biggest miracle ever to occur on a football pitch, the ball took on so much spin that it bounced around the Irish goalkeeper and curled its way into the goal. Holland won the game by 1-0 and progressed to the semis, leaving the Irish heartbroken again. Guess who were waiting in the semi final...

Yes, you're right. West Germany.

The game was on a Wednesday. I remember this well, because my mother went off to play table tennis, as she always did on Wednesday, leaving me and my dad to watch the football. This was our little thing together. My dad would always let me stay up late on Wednesdays to watch the European football with him, even when I was only 7 years old. European football in those days, you must understand, was on only 4 or 5 times a year, rather than 3 nights a week, every week, as it is now, so it was sort of a special treat for me. For both of us, but especially my dad, the tension was unbearable. My father, never one for displaying too much excitement about anything, had been tense all day, scanning the papers  and tv channels for news about the game. The whole choice of tv in Holland in the mid 80s consisted of 6 channels, 3 of them German which rendered them instantly unusable for the purposes of reliable news coverage in my father's opinion. And so the game started. It was tight and nervous, neither team wanting to let the opposite side in. Just before the hour mark, Germany took the lead through a penalty, converted by Lothar Matthaus. Lothar Matthaus, it is worth noting, is the 3rd most hated man in Dutch history, ranking just after Franz Beckenbauer and Adolf Hitler. (I would guess that Jan-Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister who managed to be in charge of 4 collapsed governments in the space of 6 years in the first decade of the 21st century, ranks 4th on this list, giving him the notable distinctions that he is both the only non-German on this list as well as the most incompetent politician since Richard Nixon.) With the Germans ahead, and the knowledge that Germans are excellent at protecting a 1 goal lead, if not entirely at playing exciting football, Holland pushed for an equaliser and, oh sweet revenge, it came in the form of another penalty. Van Basten, the greatest forward in the history of football, was brought down in the penalty area and Ronald Koeman once again delivered by converting the penalty. With the scores tied at 1-1 and the game heading for extra time, it seemed as if time stood still. Losing to the Germans yet again was unthinkable. We simply could not live with that idea. Winning the game in Germany would be the ultimate revenge, but surely, we wouldn't be that lucky? The whole country went either very quiet or totally insane as the match went in the inevitable direction of extra time. My dad had gone really quiet. Let me tell you now that my dad is not the most noisy man in the world at the best of times, but even for his standards he became eerily silent.

And then it happened.

With only 2 minutes left on the clock, Dutch midfielder Jan Wouters, a vicious player, noted more for his ability of placing elbows in opponents' faces and generally kicking the shit out of anybody not on his team, rather than his technical abilities, took possession in midfield, moved up the pitch and on the right side of the pitch we could see San Marco, our hero and saviour, move towards the penalty box. Wouters passed the ball towards Van Basten, slightly out of his reach and, while the German defender assigned with the unenviable task of preventing Van Basten from getting to the ball made a desparate lunge towards the ball, Van Basten got his foot in first, made a slide, and managed to hit the ball with the tip of his right foot.

The next 2 seconds, in our experience, lasted forever. The image is still burned on my eyeballs to this day. The ball rolled, agonisingly slow, towards the German goal, where their goalkeeper dived towards it in a desperate attempt to prevent the inevitable. I saw my dad tense up, wanting to scream but unable to do so out of sheer astonishment. The German goalie was late, the ball bounced past him and landed in the sidenet near the far post. For half a second, the entire country was silent. And then erupted. My dad jumped out of his chair, shouted GOAL!! at the top of his lungs and punched the air. I had not seen my dad get this worked up, over anything, ever before. Neither have I seen him getting so excited ever since.

We'd done it. We'd beaten Germany on their own turf and reached the final.

The final was a formality. We played the Soviet Union, or Russian Federation, or whatever the name of the country was that week, and beat them 2-0 through goals by Gullit (one of the most powerful headers ever seen) and, again, Van Basten who scored the 2-0 from an impossible angle at the far side of the goal. The day after the final, Holland's leading newspaper replaced the front page, including the header, with a full page picture of Van Basten lifting the trophy.

Winning the European Championship was great, especially since it is still the only mayor trophy we won in football, but what makes this moment especially great is that my dad, and with him the whole country, had finally gotten their revenge for that lost 1974 final. I saw 14 years of frustration leave my dad's face in a matter of seconds and that made it all the more special.

And now..  

1.

It had been a tense championship. As it always was. The matches were tight but they had all been won. On the day of the final, the atmosphere was electric. Me and my best friend Vincent were in a pub whose owner was also a big fan. I still smoked at the time, and was halfway through my second pack of cigarettes before the final even started. Vincent had smoked more than me and together we had run up a bar tab that ran into 3 figures. Well into 3 figures. We had been trying to ease the tension by drinking steins of lager and shots of Apfelkorn, a weird, schnapps-like liquor that smells of cider, tastes like apple juice gone bad and has the mouth feel of cough syrup. This didn't matter too much, it contained 25% alcohol and that was all that counted. On my way to the toilet, one of the other regulars had jokingly thrown the 8ball from the pool table in my direction and I had responded by headbutting it back in his direction, much to his surprise. The owner of the bar had installed himself at our side of the bar and had lined up his 13 year old son and his wife for bar duty, leaving him free to watch the match, chain smoke and get drunk.

Harry and us got along just fine, especially because he kept buying rounds for us. By the time the match started, you could cut the tension with a knife. Everyone in the bar was hyped up. Could this be our year? Would it finally be our time? We kept smoking drinking and biting our nails. The match was as tight as we had expected, with no time to settle the nerves for either the players or the fans. The bartenders had by now stopped emptying the ash trays as everybody was constantly smoking to relieve the pressure. The lead in the match changed hand a dozen times and eventually, and inevitably, it came to a decider and then to a tie break in the decider.

This was unbearable. I could hardly watch as the players, now clearly struggling through the marathon length of the match, tried to get to the end of it first.

Then it happened, the very end of a long and mentally exhausting championship. The aim, the release, and the following half second seemed to last forever.

And then, with a soft thud, the dart landed in double 8 and Raymond van Barneveld was Champion of the World for the first time. Everybody in the pub went mental, beer flew through the air, group hugs were all around, grown men were crying, all was right in the world and our guy had won the World Championship. Harry, the owner of the bar declared free beer for everybody for the next hour, to the detriment of his wife who had probably hoped that she could knock off her shift after the match, something that was now totally out of the question as her husband now had his mind set on getting really seriously completely drunk with his mates. The party went on until very late. Vincent and I were sharing a house at the time and neither of us could be bothered to go to work the next day, opting instead to have a serious sleep in, and then went out to play pool.  It was an immense achievement from Raymond van Barneveld because, it seems impossible now, darts wasn't a big thing in Holland at the time and was only played by British expats and people with a strange fascination for British pub games, like us. After this victory, darts took off in a major way in Holland and Holland is now one of the powerhouses of darts in the world and every pub has darts teams these days. Darts, in fact, is now the second biggest sport in Holland, after football, both in tv ratings and participation. And we have Barney to thank for that.

And that was it, my favorite sporting moments. Hope you enjoyed reliving them as much as I did.

Cheers
Lennard