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 8th
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.
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
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