‘SO, TELL ME, WHAT is it exactly that you have achieved in your life?’
Now that was a question I hadn’t seen coming. I almost choked on my glass of water when the psychologist at the Sporting Chance Clinic asked me this, and not because it was water.
Didn’t this man read newspapers? Didn’t this man watch TV? Didn’t this man follow football?
Okay, a few days ago I had been on the rampage – again. This time, on a flight to Johannesburg. I couldn’t deny it. But, hey, I was Fernando Ricksen, highly successful professional football player. Twelve caps for the Netherlands. Loaded. Capable of bedding any woman I wanted. Winner of seven – did you get that, shrink? – seven major trophies with Glasgow Rangers. Voted Best Player of the Scottish Premier League – by my colleagues. Best Player, meaning just as much a hero as Paul Gascoigne, Mark Hateley, Brian Laudrup, Ally McCoist and Henrik Larsson.
How about that?
And this man was asking me what I had achieved?
I was the captain of Glasgow Rangers, one of the best and biggest football teams in the whole of Britain. Only the real big shots in football will ever have the privilege of wearing the captain’s band in a team like Rangers. Big shots like, well, me.
This guy is nuts, I told myself. Asking me what I had achieved, the sheer idiocy of the question. No respect whatsoever. It was a joke!
At that very moment I knew it: this whole Tony Adams clinic wasn’t for me. What the heck was I doing here? Had I really come to the place voluntarily? I remembered having had doubts beforehand. I’d been right!
But, being the confident person I thought I was, I explained to him that loads of people were envious of me. Okay, minor detail: Paul Le Guen, Rangers’ new manager, had just kicked me out of the squad for ‘indecent behaviour’, which in this case meant running through an aeroplane on a flight to a training camp in South Africa – stark naked and pissed as a parrot.
Nevertheless, stadiums full of people would love to swap places with me. In their eyes I had a career to die for. They, in other words, simply admired me for all I had achieved.
And I wasn’t exaggerating.
‘Oh?’ the psych said, leaning backwards and folding his hands behind his neck. He had a completely different opinion. My self-image sucked. Big time.
I offered him a question mark.
‘Yes,’ he said. The word sounded as if it came straight out of a ventilator. Then the volume knob was turned to the left. He started whispering. ‘Listen. Your club doesn’t want you any more. Your wife wants to leave you. Basically your life has gone down the drain. Completely.’
Those words had an enormous impact on me. I listened in silence. Because, deep down, I knew he was right. Of course he was right. As a football player I had made it – no doubt about it. Even a blind man could see that. But as a human being? Not quite.
I had to face it: I had been drunk and disorderly for years now. I had kicked my way through life like a football hooligan with an insatiable thirst. Thanks to that, my life was in tatters. It was just as the guy with the pencil who was sitting in front of me said. I knew it, but I’d never wanted to show it to anyone. Scared shitless to lose all the respect I had gained over the years.
I know it sounds odd, but I was glad that on that sunny morning in Hampshire in July 2006 the doctor came to this verdict. More important: I was happy that he shared it with me. I felt relief, more than anything else. Finally someone had the guts to stick a needle into the balloon. Or, in this case, a sharp pencil. I felt liberated. Free. As if a huge weight was falling off my shoulders. This really was what I needed.
I decided to stay. Motivated at last. As I said earlier, I had come to the clinic voluntarily, but at the time I didn’t think much of it, to tell the truth. The clinic’s big boss Peter Kay had advised me to seek help here, but I genuinely thought I didn’t need any. I believed I was doing all right. Well, that’s what it’s like when you live in your own fantasy world. How wrong I was ... I did need help, and I needed it fast.
So, as I was sitting there, regarding the natural beauty of Forest Mere, Liphook, I realised that this could be the chance to leave Never Never Land, with all its destructive seductions, for good and start facing reality. There was no time to lose, otherwise I would lose more than time alone, meaning my beloved Graciela and my just as beloved Rangers.
There and then I took the decision that would change my life. I was ready to fight myself. ‘Deal,’ I said to the psych, while stretching out my arm. He shook my hand.
Here, on this beautiful estate, I would be reborn. Just as Kay hoped, when he advised me to check in to the clinic.
‘For the next few weeks I’m gonna do exactly what you tell me,’ I said to the doctor.
He smiled, and nodded. ‘Good to hear that, son.’ He told me I wouldn’t regret my decision. To start with, I wasn’t the first addicted sports hero here. There had been truckloads of them before me. And each of them had walked out of the clinic as a better person. Cured, sane.
I could follow in their footsteps, the psychologist said. And he was right, or so it seemed. After a few difficulties in the beginning, I was more than happy to leave the clinic as a reborn man. A lot less egotistical than when I had arrived only four weeks earlier.
Little did we know ...
I mean, the feeling I had was one of total euphoria. It just wouldn’t last. I didn’t know there were more terrible things lined up for me, over the horizon, and things would get worse. Much worse.
It must have puzzled a few that, of all people, I ended up in rehab, battling booze and reshaping my mental self. Several eyebrows must have been raised in Hoensbroek, the quiet town in the Dutch province of Limburg where I was born on 27 July 1976, with the name of Fernando Jacob Hubertina Henrika Ricksen (I was named after the hit single by Swedish pop group ABBA, who happened to be my mother’s favourite band). Everyone in and around Eikstraat, or Oak Street as you would say in English, knew me as a quiet and even polite child.
In nursery I never caused any trouble. I was shy and well behaved. Every time the headmaster of Saint Paulus – Limburg is a predominantly Catholic region, hence my four Christian names – called my mother to tell her one of her kids had been a bit of a naughty boy, she knew who he meant straight away.
It was always Pedro, my younger brother. Never Fernando. And, indeed, Pedro was a bit of a mean bastard. Always pushing his luck, always trying to get away with things, always looking for trouble. Totally unlike me.
I was a good boy. And that didn’t change when I went to primary school. Every single year I ended up with good results. Strange to say it now, but I think I was a perfect child.
Pedro, who is only three years younger than me, was completely different. A whirlwind. Always on the rampage. If my mother wanted to visit friends or relatives and mentioned that she would be bringing Pedro with her, the visit would be cancelled. Nobody wanted Pedro in their house. Quite understandably, I have to confess.
Pedro loved the negative effect he had on people. He thought it was cool to be the bad boy. And boy, was he bad! Even towards me. I remember playing with my brand new Commodore 64, which I’d received from Santa. My friends and I were gathered around the computer and the television screen having heaps of fun, until Pedro pulled the plug. Just because he felt like it.
I don’t know if you remember the Commodore 64, but you needed tapes to upload the games. Needless to say Pedro cut those on more than one occasion, the sneaky bastard.
He didn’t give a toss whether my stuff was brand new or not. In those days, a Game Boy was the coolest thing a boy could have. It allowed you to play games wherever you were. And I was so damn proud of mine! Still, it didn’t take Pedro long to destroy it. I still remember where it happened: in the car, on our way to the Piccolo camping site in Domaso near Lake Como, our annual holiday spot. He simply broke it – and with that he broke my heart too. God, without my beloved Game Boy, the drive to Italy took an eternity.
As if driving to the campsite wasn’t boring enough, being the experienced truck driver he was, Dad never felt the need to stop along the way. We just drove straight to Italy, without any nice and cosy intermissions. Fourteen hours in an old Ford Taunus (which was like the Ford Cortina in the UK) without air con, it felt like a barbecue in hell – but without any sausages. Between Limburg and Italy we had one, maybe two, brief stops, but that was it. Daddy Huub, who was in fact my stepfather but we always called him Dad, wanted to reach the campsite as fast as possible. Not least because the whole family was waiting there already. Personally, I never got it. I mean, we stayed there for six bloody weeks, so what was the rush?
At times, I had to beg to stop for a pee.
‘Not yet,’ Dad always said.
By the time my bladder was ready to explode, he would give in and pull over. But not, like normal people do, in a parking area. He’d just stop on the hard shoulder! There, with all the motorway traffic speeding past, I had to go. And I had to go fast, Dad said. With the pee still dripping from my willy I had to jump in the car again, as the driver said we had no time to lose.
No time to lose! The old Ford was so heavily loaded that we barely made it on to the motorway again. It was so chock-a-block with luggage and people, the pressure on its wheels must have been enormous.
Oh, and apart from us humans, there was a dog on board as well. We didn’t want to put Max, our beloved Cocker spaniel, into a kennel, so he went with us to Italy. I had this drooling animal sitting next to me for the full fourteen hours, which drove me nuts. That, and the caravan dragging behind us, meant we could hardly pick up any speed, so the trip seemed to take for ever.
The only distraction I had was my Game Boy. For as long as it lasted, that was. Why the hell did Pedro have to destroy it? And why couldn’t he sit still for one bloody minute?
I cried a lot on those occasions, but Pedro didn’t feel guilty at all. If anything, he looked as if he was enjoying the situation. He always picked on me, always.
‘Nando!’ he yelled one day. ‘Turn on the radio! I made a request for a record, especially for you!’
I was excited. It was nice he’d done that for me. Full of anticipation I sat in front of the radio, listening to a local station from Heerlen, a city not far away.
And then it came: ‘And here’s a song especially for Fernando Ricksen from Hoensbroek.’ I was thrilled. Until I heard it.
The song was ‘Huilen Is Voor Jou Te Laat’ by Corry en de Rekels. Or, in English: ‘Crying Comes Too Late For You’ by Corry and the Rascals. The Corry in question was a blonde hairdresser from the province of Brabant, and it was the kind of shit music grandmothers like. A Dutch attempt to make a Tammy Wynette-style country ballad, but much, much worse. Check it out on YouTube ... The fact that it spent a total of 41 weeks in the Top 40 says a lot about the Dutch and their taste, I guess.
Anyway, it was a crap song and it made me cry. Appropriate title, after all!
Pedro used to end up in fights, all the time and everywhere. He had arguments at school, on the street, and, yeah, even at our local football club EHC.
He’d always been a lot crazier than me. That’s why my parents chose him to be Prince Carnaval: a nutter dressed as a jester who jumps out of a box at the opening evening of the local carnaval club.
I need to explain something here. Carnaval, four days in which people dress up, drink gallons of beer and dance the conga for hours, is a huge deal in Limburg. The ideal stage for a bullshit artist like my brother Pedro. Being Prince Carnaval would make him the centre of attention. Perfect! It was just that he was too young. So my parents had to come up with a substitute.
Me.
I didn’t like it at all. I was too shy, too introverted for that wacky stuff. But I didn’t want to let my parents down. Besides: what did I have to lose? Nothing.
So, before I could say ‘confetti’, I was dressed up in a white uniform with matching gloves and, er, tights. On top of my head I had the traditional red and white bicorn hat with a long pheasant feather. To complete the picture I had a silver sceptre in my hand and some well-earned medals around my neck. Well, any prince would have been allowed to walk around with those decorations, as they were just handed over by one carnaval club to the other.
So, as much as I hated it, I jumped out of the box. Just as I was told. I even managed to smile, believe it or not. Well, if you really want to, you can check it out yourself, as it was captured on camera. My mother was so proud she immediately hung the photo of her Boy Prince on the wall. And for years and years I had to walk past the damn thing.
Much later I asked Pedro why he’d always been so unfriendly to me. Why he did all those things that made me feel uncomfortable, that made me cry. ‘I was envious of you,’ he confessed. ‘You were everybody’s favourite little boy. I hated that.’
Nowadays Pedro is one of my best and closest friends. And I have to say that it has had some benefits, being the brother of this little brat. For instance, I never had to be scared of anyone, because as much as he was unpleasant to me he also defended me on more than one occasion. Anyone stupid enough to lay a finger on me could expect a good hiding from my little hooligan brother.
From the moment I went to Saint Jans College, a high school on Patersweg (Priest Road) in Hoensbroek, things changed. Because I did. Training with the professionals of Fortuna Sittard, all grown men, on an almost daily basis, did something to my body. It made me a different guy. Stronger – both physically and mentally.
And all of a sudden things were different. Now it was Pedro who would ask me to help him to solve the odd problem. The poor little chap really thought he could beat up some of my classmates, who were all three years older than him. So what do you do as a big brother who has gained a muscle or two at the Fortuna gym? You beat up the bastards who are bullying your kid brother. Despite the fact that it had been him who had started stirring the shit most of the time.
Where the Ricksen family was living at that time, fisticuffs were part of daily life. It was the end of the eighties and we had moved to Heerlerheide, a notorious area in the northern part of Heerlen, a grim city close to the German border. They didn’t call Heerlerheide ‘Little Chicago’ for nothing. I mean, you couldn’t get a bus in our neighbourhood, because the drivers were too scared to enter the area!
Before then, the local bus company did have a few stops in Little Chicago. But after being hit by flying bricks and concrete missiles every single day, all of a sudden they decided not to take the risk any more.
Pedro and my parents still live there, and, from what I understand, it’s still a tough neighbourhood. Unemployment and criminality galore. Angelique, Pedro’s wife, never goes out for a walk at night. Too dangerous.
The sound of sirens is the soundtrack of my years in Little Chicago. It was completely normal to see a police car or an ambulance racing through the streets. So I didn’t really think much of it one afternoon when I was sitting on the couch, just home after a holiday in Spain with Pedro, and heard the sirens. It gave me a buzz. It was top amusement. And, hey, guess what? This particular time we had front row tickets!
But, er, why were the cops lining up in front of our house? And what was the meaning of the red and white ribbons at either end of the street? I asked Pedro, but he didn’t have a clue either. Point is: we were both just back from our holiday and no avid readers of the local newspaper. So whatever was going on in our neighbourhood, we didn’t know about it. The only thing I did know was that all of this was not because of a stolen apple.
Maybe it was murder! Maybe someone had been killed! Quite possible, in Little Chicago, with its German junkies.
But, no, it wasn’t about that. They were looking for a kid – a kid with a gun. Eyewitnesses had seen him, earlier that day, at a roundabout. The boy had been threatening a fellow driver. It seemed serious, hence the calls to the cops.
Turned out I knew that kid.
It was Pedro.
Enter the blue brigade, storming into our humble abode like the barbarian hordes of Attila the Hun. My father, bless him, tried to stop the invasion with the assistance of Max who, you may remember, was a Cocker spaniel. As they tried to shoot him – the dog, not my father – the old man backed off. He didn’t want to be responsible for a dead Cocker spaniel.
Yelling and cursing, they put their handcuffs on poor Pedro’s wrists. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got him! And off they went again – didn’t even ask for a coffee.
It turned out they had the right man too. Yes, it had been Pedro that afternoon at the roundabout, pulling a gun on another driver. A toy gun – okay, from a souvenir shop in Spain – but the thing looked surprisingly real. It was the type of pistol that John Wayne used to do the talking in most of his Westerns. Except this wasn’t the Wild West, it was Heerlen. And Pedro wasn’t exactly John Wayne.
Pedro wasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger either, so why he felt the need to whack a female copper at the police station, I don’t know. As if the arrest itself wasn’t bad enough. Anyway, my little brother ended up in jail that night. Dad had to get him out.
All in all he was left with a 250-guilders fine, which nowadays would be about £110. Oh, and they kept the gun.
The saga of Pedro’s Pistol isn’t the only weapons-related incident I have witnessed from a short distance. Let me introduce you to Maurice Rayer. We met in 1994, when he was playing with me at Fortuna. He was on loan from VVV, a club in Venlo. Beautiful guy – quite literally – who could score on and off the pitch, if you catch my drift. Needless to say I loved going out with this babe magnet.
Another ladies’ man was Hans Kraay junior, of Brighton, er, fame. In his active years record-breaking red and yellow cards collector Kraay junior (his old man, Hans Kraay senior, was a famous Feyenoord footballer in the sixties) played for a string of clubs the length of the Great Wall of China, one of them being San Jose Earthquakes where he rubbed shoulders with a certain George Best. Anyway, good-looking blokes, those two. Perfect company for a night on the pull. Our tight little mob was completed by pint-sized Nigerian Tijjani Babangida, who would eventually end up at Ajax.
I can’t remember which one of us was driving, but at a certain moment, in between pub visits, our car came to a sudden halt. No idea why. Neither did I understand why Hans all of a sudden left the car, yelling at the top of his voice. And why, for Christ’s sake, was he carrying a ... gun?
I knew he was mental. The whole of the Netherlands did. But this?
Hans went straight for a guy who was sitting on a bench. Completely out of control, fuming, like he was on the pitch.
It was like watching a B-movie in which the bad guy shouts, ‘Your money or your life!’
And that was exactly what Hans screamed.
I, in the meantime, was almost wetting my pants. Not because I was scared, but because it was hilarious. Top comedy. It was a practical joke, of course. Everyone knew it was a joke. Everyone except the poor tramp, who had been sitting quietly on a bench minding his own business.
‘Your money or your life.’ To a homeless person. Geddit?
To make things worse, the bum actually did give his money to Hans. All three guilders of it. The poor bastard was scared shitless. And pretty short-sighted, it seemed, as the weapon Hans was waving at him was a water pistol from a pound store. A yellow one, on top of that.
Of course, Hans, being the gentleman he is, told the hobo he could keep the change.
My weapon of choice, at the time, was always a billiards cue. No, not to beat people up, but to play a game of libre! I was pretty good at it, I must say. Hopeless at snooker, but quite a champ when it came to this continental version of the game, with two white balls, a red one and a table without pockets. Once I even came third at the Dutch Championships. The fact that I won bronze was remarkable. You had to be at least eighteen years old to enter the competition. I wasn’t. I was twelve.
It must have been great for the audience to see this little kid in his grand café outfit, hardly taller than the table itself. On more than one occasion I had to stand on my toes like a ballet dancer.
People would be in stitches when they saw me enter the arena, but within minutes there would be silence.
It must have been quite a sight, this little whirlwind going around the table, scoring one point after the other. I mean, I was smaller than the actual cue! In the end, nobody wanted to play against me any more. I was simply too good.
It was in the genes. My mother’s father, Willem Szymiczek, was one of the best players in the country. He’d taught me every trick in the book. He was a fanatical coach, my grandfather. I remember analysing TV footage of important billiards tournaments with him, or going through one of his many books. Great memories.
Playing billiards was very rare for a boy of my age. At school I was the only one. But I didn’t care. Every day after school I would run to my granddad’s house because he had a billiards table there. Never played with other kids; always practised alone, or with him. Couldn’t care about the other kids playing football in the street. My granddad’s workshops, that was what counted!
As a young and talented billiards player, I managed to win piles of silverware. One day I was even rewarded with a week-long training session with the one and only Raymond Ceulemans. I took it for granted. Had never heard of the guy. My granddad literally had to explain that this Belgian bloke Ceulemans was the best billiards player in the entire world. ‘He can teach you everything,’ Granddad said, without even trying to hide his excitement. ‘You’ll learn more than I could ever teach you, Nando.’
Of course he was right, for Raymond Ceulemans was a legend. It’s just that I wasn’t really into worshipping sports heroes. The walls of my bedroom, for instance, were bare. No posters with pictures of football players, rock stars or hot chicks. Pedro’s room, on the other hand, was covered in pictures of his favourite football club, Roda JC.
Every time the lot of us went to a Roda match, Pedro was determined to collect as many autographs as possible. Not me. I couldn’t care less, thought it was childish.
‘In a few years’ time, people will ask me for my autograph,’ I exclaimed, full of confidence.
What I did do, though, was wear replica football shirts. Always. But because we were not exactly rich, they happened to be poor quality ones. Fake-ish. Well, completely fake, to be honest. Official replica shirts were way too expensive for us. Hence the cheap Made in China rubbish I wore.
Apart from that, my mother knitted woollen football jumpers. She loved doing that. Between the two of us, Pedro and I must have had about seventy of the things. Personalised jumpers, too, with our own names – years before football clubs did stuff like that!
Apart from jumpers in the colours of Roda JC, Fortuna Sittard and Ajax, we had a lot of Italian ones: AC Milan, Inter, Juventus, AS Roma, Napoli ... I wore them day and night. And if I didn’t, it was because I was wearing my Dutch national team tracksuit. An official replica! I got it as a Christmas present and burst into tears when I first saw it. Albeit not as loud as when I fell on the pavement and ended up with a big hole in the trousers! I was inconsolable, until I realised that the knitting champion my mother was could fix it quite easily.
The fact that most of my jumpers depicted Italian clubs wasn’t a coincidence. Due to our annual visits to Lake Como, I grew to love Italian football culture. I even started to buy that famous pink football paper, La Gazzetta dello Sport, despite my knowledge of the Italian language being limited to the words ‘pizza’ and ‘pasta’. Staring at the pictures and all those beautiful names was exciting enough.
Every year, on one of the first days of our vacation, we used to go to Milan. To be precise: the famous San Siro stadium, which was like the Holy Grail to me. Its souvenir shop was the place where I parted with most of my 100-guilders holiday money. And most of the time on day two of the holiday! I didn’t care, and neither did my mother. For her, the holiday couldn’t begin until she had taken me to San Siro. Otherwise I would have been a nuisance – and she knew it.
‘One day I’m going to play here!’ I’d say, year in, year out, as I enjoyed the grandeur of the place so much. And of course I was joking there. Or was I?
Fast-forward fifteen years to 28 September 2005: Internazionale v. Glasgow Rangers, Champions League. I’d made it. I was playing in the stadium of my dreams. Dreams could sometimes come true! Although I have to say that in my fantasy the stadium was totally sold out. In reality it was empty, due to a UEFA punishment. And we lost, which was also not scripted by me. David Pizarro, Inter’s Chilean wizard, came up with a 24-carat free-kick. The first time our goalie Ronald Waterreus saw the ball was on the TV footage afterwards.
The Ceulemans session wasn’t a success. Three days into the week and I wanted to go home already. Not that I was homesick, oh no. I simply thought the whole thing was a waste of time. So I called my mother: ‘You can pick me up now, Mum.’
Raymond Ceulemans was the Johan Cruyff of billiards. At least, that’s what the world said – the whole world – but to me, the Johan Cruyff of billiards had another name. Granddad Szymiczek. A far better teacher than that Ceulemans chap, in my opinion.
Around my sixteenth birthday I had to make a choice between billiards and football. I’d become a pretty good footballer, and to get even better I needed to train on an almost daily basis. So that was it, as far as the noble game of billiards was concerned. My granddad didn’t like the choice I made, but in order to become the best in one type of sport, I had to drop the other. Simple as that. Sorry, Granddad.
Thinking back, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had dropped football. No doubt I’d have been one of Holland’s best billiards players. I mean, I already was! But, money-wise, have you ever heard of truckloads of hot girls swarming around a billiards player?
No, I made the right choice.