I COULDN’T BELIEVE MY eyes. Those birds over there, in the lobby of our hotel in Bucharest, were they ... hookers?
Of course, I’d seen a working girl before. But those women were different. More gorgeous. Hotter. Juicier. They didn’t make ’em like that, back in Limburg. Oh no.
I was in Romania with the under-21s, to play in the European Championships. But despite my determination to get a good result in the pending match against the host country, football didn’t seem to be that important any more. I couldn’t get my eyes off those typically Eastern European girls in the corner: blonde, tall, perfectly formed and breathtakingly beautiful, and wearing practically nothing but a belt.
Irresistible!
Yes, they were whores. Why else would they be in that lobby, scantily clad and winking at everything with a dick? They were at work, simple as that.
I thought I would go mad. And, no, of course I didn’t think about it! I mean, I was barely an adult. And besides, I was representing my country. If I had dragged one of those high-heeled supermodels into my room – purely hypothetical of course! – there would definitely be some punishment from the football association.
Still, I was fascinated, to put it mildly. I’d never seen prostitutes as attractive as them. And it was also the first time I’d encountered whores in a hotel lobby. I found it exciting. Maybe it was because, unlike the other guys who lived in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven, I was more or less a country boy. And therefore pretty naive. My teammates who played for Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV must have been familiar with drop-dead-gorgeous working girls. Yes, that must have been the case, because they didn’t blink an eye while shuffling through the hotel. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop staring at those women. No penny for my thoughts!
It was 1998, and I was one of the very few players from a small club who had made it into a national team. It had been like that since 1991, when I was invited to come to the woods near the village of Zeist, where the Dutch football association has its headquarters. Me and 49 other talented kids had to show their skills on one of the FA’s perfectly trimmed pitches. Each one of us had the same dream. It was just too bad there were only 31 available places.
The idea was simple: show the scouts and coaches you were good enough to become one of the chosen 31, who, after that, would have to compete for one of the eighteen orange shirts in the final squad.
And I did lay my hands on one of those jerseys. To give you an indication of the strength of this particular under-16s group, my teammates had names like Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Nordin Wooter, Denny Landzaat and Boudewijn Zenden (or ‘Bolo’, as he would be called at Chelsea, Middlesbrough, Liverpool and Sunderland). Not a bad team, eh?
Being called one of the country’s best footballers in your age group is something special. Of course it is. Only I wasn’t impressed at the time because I had that knowledge already. I didn’t need a football association to tell me how good I was. I could pinch a ball off an opponent, I was fast, I knew a trick or two, my oversight was perfect: in short(s) I had everything it takes to be a good, modern professional football player.
Some guys have it; others don’t. I had it, and I knew it.
Yet I almost missed the boat, thanks to some of my ‘colleagues’. In the final, crucial match, guys from Ajax and PSV – I’m not going to mention names here, or did I do that already? – refused to pass me the ball. Why? Because doing so meant my chances of being chosen were limited. They wanted to have as many of their own in the final squad. My mother is my witness. She heard Louis van Gaal, head coach at Ajax, mentioning this strategy and even captured the quote on video.
Personally I didn’t experience it quite like that. Okay, I noticed that I received the ball less than normal, but I didn’t think anything bad about it. But my mother did, and, more important, Rinus Israël did too. The former Feyenoord legend, the first Dutch player ever to lift a European Cup (in 1970, after beating Celtic), was one of the men who had to judge us, together with the likes of Dick Advocaat and Bert van Lingen. Israël, one of the original Hard Men in Dutch football (nickname ‘Iron Rinus’), was furious. He even ran on to the pitch and stopped the game. Anyone, he screamed in his distinctive Amsterdam accent, who in the remaining minutes of the match continued to neglect ‘that little blond boy from Limburg’ could pick up his gear and go home.
It worked, as the iron one wasn’t somebody to mess with. About a minute later Clarence Seedorf passed me the ball. I steamed up to the box and produced a lovely pass, which Patrick Kluivert used for one of his effective headers.
I winked at Israël and Advocaat, because I knew I had made it. Fernando Ricksen was here to stay.
Immediately after that last game, I was invited by Bert van Lingen to join his juvenile squad. My mother captured the moment on camera. It was a bit of a lousy pic – sorry, Mum! – but you could still make me out, that little brat from Roda JC, and, among others, the famous Dick Advocaat from the Dutch football association.
It was the beginning of a long and beautiful period, in which one invitation for an international match after the other landed on the doormat of our humble abode. It happened so often I wasn’t even surprised any more to find yet another brown FA envelope when I returned home. It was just the letters themselves that puzzled me. They always started with ‘Dear sport friend’.
Sport friend? As if it was your school inviting you to a day of gymnastics!
Apart from the fame and pleasure, those international games had another advantage: they were lucrative. We didn’t earn any money yet, but at least we had our expenses reimbursed. You know, petrol money and stuff. At least fifty guilders per session. That was the advantage of living so far away from Zeist. Players who had to travel from nearby Amsterdam received a lot less.
Four years later I bumped into Rinus Israël at the prestigious Festival des Espoirs youth tournament in the French city of Toulon. All of a sudden he was there, as a substitute for Hans Dorjee who couldn’t be there because Guus Hiddink had chosen him to be his assistant during Euro ’96 in England. Nice for Dorjee, but not so pleasant for us. For, despite his efforts to give me a fair chance four years earlier, I found him to be a weird man. Always, always negative, and a pretty crappy coach too. He couldn’t even remember your name!
That led to some embarrassing situations – for him. At a point during the opening game against Russia (1–3), he wanted to give me some instructions. But all that came out of his mouth, together with some gobs of phlegm, was: ‘Hey! Hey! What’s your name again?’
Not very professional, eh? As an official national coach you should know who you’re dealing with, even if he is ‘just a little boy from Fortuna Sittard’. I thought this was all due to a lack of respect towards us. So that’s why I didn’t listen to him. First do your homework, Mr.
Another coach I worked with in those early years was Bert van Lingen. Now he was a proper coach! World class. Knew everything about everyone and was a master in building an organisation. He’s the architect of the youth education department of the Dutch FA, which is considered one of the best in the world. I’m glad I met him again later on in my career, as Dick Advocaat’s loyal deputy sheriff at Glasgow Rangers and Zenit Saint Petersburg.
Another top bloke in those days was Carel Akemann, the Dutch FA’s jack-of-all-trades. He did everything for us – and I mean everything. I’m sure I must have driven him insane, as I’d always lose my money or my passport. But he always managed to solve the problem.
Despite his age – he was a pensioner already – he acted like one of the boys. When it came to topics like booze and sex, he talked like he was seventeen! And he never failed to surprise us. I remember a game against England, early 1994, which he was watching from the dug-out. Now, picture this. Second half: a ball flies through the sky like a comet, about to go way over the sideline. The old man gets up, eyes focused on the object, and ... I swear to you, before the ball could touch the ground, it dropped dead on Mr Akemann’s knee.
I was in stitches. To see the old geezer performing this Maradona-like trick, out of the blue, was an amazing sight. When he finally left the Dutch FA in 1995, after thirty years of good work – including jobs during the highly successful World Cups of 1974 and 1978 plus the triumphant Euro 1988 – I was convinced I would never forget him. His inclusion in this book proves that I was right.
Hans Dorjee was another man I fondly remember. This national youth squad coach was one of the sweetest men you’d ever meet. Never got angry, not even after a defeat. That’s why we really wanted to battle for him, although it never led to grabbing a big prize, not even during that tournament in Romania. Unbelievable, given the fact that we had a squad with guys like George Boateng, Nordin Wooter, Kiki Musampa, Mario Melchiot, Arnold Bruggink, Roy Makaay and Ruud van Nistelrooy! Bronze was all we won with that dream team, would you believe it?
Poor Hans Dorjee, who sadly died in 2002 during an innocent game of tennis, wasn’t to blame for this. I was. Well, sort of ...
In the semi-final against Greece, I was rewarded with a red card, although I still object to that decision. Yes, it was a strong tackle. Yes, it was a tackle from behind. But, come on, I was kicking the ball, not the player! It just so happened that in those days referees had been given new rules. Any tackle from behind meant an automatic red card. I think the whistleblower, Miroslav Radoman, wanted to be the best student in the class, knowing UEFA and FIFA were watching him. So, yes, according to the new rules he was right, but how about a little bit of humanity? Because all of this happened in the first minute of the game!
So we were down to ten men for the remaining 89 minutes. And we lost. Of course we lost! 0–3.
Although I was pissed off, I still have to say that one of the Greek goals was more than just a beauty. Future Ajax and Feyenoord forward Angelos Charisteas, who would end up scoring the winning goal in the Euro 2004 final six years later, scored from almost behind the goal, with the outside of his left foot. Never seen anything like it. Our Angelos may have looked like a wooden puppet but he was one hell of a footballer. Too bad he had a Greek passport, instead of a Dutch one.
Charisteas wasn’t the only youngster who I shared a pitch with who would turn out to be a superstar. There was that Portuguese bloke, Nuno Gomes. Kicked us out of the under-19s European tournament in Spain, 1994, with what can only be described as a cannonball. And then there was that French dude, a left-winger, who basically played like a machine. With or without the ball, this guy was so bloody fast! And he did practically everything right. Too bad for him his direct opponent was one Fernando Ricksen from Limburg. I sank my teeth into him from the first minute onwards – not literally of course! – and didn’t give him one millimetre of space. In the end we won (3–2, thanks to two goals from Zenden and one from Kluivert), so my man hadn’t been able to make the difference. But, boy, it had been a difficult evening! Out of curiosity I kept an eye on his career. And I must say I wasn’t surprised to see him becoming one of the best players the English Premier League ever had. I salute you, Thierry Henry!
Still, there was an even mightier player in my younger years, despite the fact that he was tiny and prematurely balding: Ivan de la Pena. He’d never reach further than the ranks of Lazio and Espanyol, but in those early days he was the best of the lot. It was him and not so much the team who beat us 2–5 during that competition in Spain, in 1994.
We were given a chance for revenge against the Spaniards, in the so-called ‘consolation final’ for the third spot. Well, my teammates were offered that possibility, more to the point. I was suspended. Story of my life – already!
Yes, I was a tough guy. Whacked the odd pair of legs, and whether they belonged to an opponent or to one of our own players it was all the same to me. I didn’t do it for fun, by the way, but only when I felt a little correction was required. Like, for instance, when somebody had been so unfriendly to tackle me from behind, with two legs. Not to me, buddy!
Richard Sneekes can confirm this. Still no idea what the curly-headed Sneekes (who would end up playing for Bolton Wanderers, West Bromwich Albion, Stockport County and Hull City) was thinking, that afternoon in 1993, on the training ground of Fortuna Sittard. We were just in the middle of a little position game. No tension whatsoever. Just a bit of passing the ball around and stuff. So I didn’t see it coming. I only felt it.
The guy almost kicked me in two. I was crying my lungs out. What a moron! And the same goes for our coach Chris Dekker, incidentally, who didn’t even stop the training.
From a distance, Mark van Bommel looked at me. He smiled. I smiled too. We both knew what was coming. In a few minutes Richard Sneekes would be dead meat. And I was the butcher.
I didn’t give a toss about the fact that this poodle was only sixteen years old. I couldn’t have cared less that he was about to have a beautiful career move to a foreign club. You don’t try to cripple Fernando Ricksen. And if you do, you’ll pay for it.
So the next moment Sneekes asked for the ball – he always asked for it, he loved the thing – I scrutinised him. And the moment he got it, I went on the attack. With two legs, just as he had done to me. I went straight for his ankles, and the noise must have been heard all the way across the border in Germany.
Game over for Richard Sneekes.
Coach Dekker was fuming. ‘Fernando, what the hell? You’re not gonna ... I mean ... one of your own teammates!’
‘Well, he did it to me too!’ I replied. ‘So, better tell the little boy to stop crying. He got what he asked for.’
‘Shut your fucking mouth!’ Dekker roared.
In the corner of my eye, I could see Sneekes leaving the pitch. For a moment I was scared that I’d really seriously injured him.
Yet Richard never got angry with me. Respect! Shows that underneath all that hair, there was a top bloke. And he managed to have a nice career after all.
The fact that Mark van Bommel, who is one year younger than me, was grinning on that particular afternoon didn’t surprise me. We were mates. Did our homework together, shared rooms on training camps, that kind of thing. He was a lot more serious than the rest of the guys. Mark never joined us when we sneaked out to go into town. He didn’t care much about girls either. Especially not after he met Andra, daughter of the future head coach of the Dutch national team, Bert van Marwijk.
Although we were friends, I was completely different from Mark. Any chance to go out, I took it. Always. Like when we were in the Dutch seaside town of Vlissingen, at a training camp with the under-18s. I loved those camps. They gave me the opportunity to score both on and off the field. And it came easily to me, I have to confess. Girls like a good-looking football player.
So, back to the hotel it was one night, with the bird of my choice. Didn’t have a clue what her name was. I was about to have a bit of carnal pleasure, and that was what counted. There was only one small problem. Mark!
Because he’d gone to bed early, being the serious guy that he was, the chick and I didn’t have the room to ourselves. And, frankly, I didn’t like the idea of Mark van Bommel on the sideline watching me penetrate her operational zone. I left her standing in the corridor while I woke up my pal. Would he mind leaving the room for, er, a little while so that I could play my much anticipated game of hide the sausage?
And off he went without a grumble. A true friend.
‘Thanks a lot, buddy. It won’t take long.’
But it did. I was simply too drunk to ... well, you know the old Dead Kennedys song.
After an hour Mark started banging on the door, the door next to ours, to be precise. Could he sleep there ‘until Fernando has finished what he has to do?’
‘No,’ said future Feyenoord and PSV star Patrick Paauwe. ‘We don’t have enough room in here.’
Of course they didn’t. Both Paauwe and Vitesse’s Jochem van der Hoeven were sharing the bedsheets with a girl of their own!
So, all poor Mark could do was snuggle down on a bench in the corridor. No problem for him, and we could hardly wake him up once we’d finished our business!
It wasn’t just the national team that gave me the opportunity to travel – even with modest Fortuna we went away on a regular basis. In the summer of 1993 we even had a trip to China lined up. I was excited, as this was going to be my first proper flight. Fifteen hours on a plane: I was looking forward to it, believe it or not!
But it was weird. I mean, we had to go to the other side of the globe to play some kind of a tournament with ... Roda JC, FC Utrecht and FC Twente!
Why there? Why couldn’t we face them just around the corner?
Money, obviously. By running around on Chinese turf, the club would be rewarded with 150,000 guilders – plus another 50,000 for each team that would make it to the final.
So off we went. We were, after all, Fortuna Sittard, not Ajax. We needed that money.
Hey, I was going to China! It was a brilliant opportunity for a boy my age. So when I got the phone call – at, of all places, the Hommelheide campsite in Susteren where I was spending my holidays – I said yes immediately.
Hang on, you’re probably thinking. No Lake Garda holiday? Yup. We’d swapped our regular Italian holiday spot for something closer to home – much closer to home! – because as a youth player at Fortuna I had to start preparations for a fresh season quite early. From 1992 onwards, six weeks in Italy was out of the question.
So our new holiday destination was Susteren, a tiny little village near the Belgian border. It was fine. I remember building myself a little wooden chalet, next to our caravan. It had a bed and a TV set inside, and on the outside a darts board. Never a dull moment.
After our stint in Susteren, my parents moved on to a campsite in Germany, a two-hour drive from the border. I didn’t join them any more. Because it was too far from Sittard? No, because it wasn’t far enough! I had caught the travellers’ bug once I started moving around with my team, and I never got over it. I still love hanging around at airports and in hotel lobbies, watching the world go by.
By the way, the China trip was a disaster. Not just for us, but for all the Dutch clubs. Take the guys from Twente and Utrecht. They ate some dodgy veg and had suspicious ice cubes in their Coke. Most of them ended up as sick as a dog. Diarrhoea galore!
Basically, the only thing that stayed inside was the Roda JC squad. Inside the Phoenix hotel, that is. They were not allowed to leave it, not even to train. They were held hostage!
This was all due to Vitesse, another Dutch team who had been invited to the tournament but bottled it at the last moment, just like the Belgian clubs Liege, Bruges and Beveren. They didn’t trust the organising committee and decided to stay at home.
The Chinese were pissed off, to put it mildly, not least because they had already printed lots of posters announcing the arrival of ‘the best football team in the Netherlands’. They meant Vitesse.
Well, they were Chinese and no one had the internet yet.
Anyway, the sports committee in Dalian, the city that would host half of the matches, wanted to see either Vitesse or a compensatory amount of cash. Hence the fact that Roda were kept indoors, as some kind of pledge.
This was totally unacceptable to us. So, together with Utrecht and Twente, we made it clear that we wouldn’t play a single minute until Roda were released. Either they let them go, or they could say ‘Zai jian’ to their tournament!
Oh, and we also threatened to pay a visit to the embassy.
The next morning Roda JC were free to go – from Dalian to Shenyang, that is, some 500 kilometres down the road, where they were expected to play. It was a nice moment, also for the folks back home who had been worried.
More unusual things happened during that trip. There’s the tale of Jacques Opgenoord and Pierre Schmeitz who had booked a mini-van for the trip to the stadium. Halfway there, they were stopped by a policeman who confiscated the vehicle. The next moment this copper, the driver and two of Fortuna’s board members were racing through the streets of Shenyang, trying to catch a truck driver who had been speeding. In doing so, they almost reduced some cyclist to a portion of satay.
The stadium in which we had to play held 70,000 spectators. And it was brand new – or so they said. ‘Only one year old, sirs.’
In fact, the building looked like Rome’s Colosseum. And it was dusty. So was the food. I remember the hard-boiled egg that our assistant coach Dick ‘Cooky’ Voorn peeled. It was black! And big. Way too big to have come out of a chicken, if you ask me.
So instead, we ate Mars bars.
No way were we eating the local food. The burgers, for instance, were stone cold. Frozen! The rice was cold too – and home to the Bacillus family. Nevertheless, the Chinese ate it by the bowlful and, even weirder, seemed to enjoy it!
Because a diet of Mars bars gets boring after a while, we decided to be polite guests in the end. On the last day we did eat some of the food. And the rest of the trip was spent on the toilet.
After twelve days we were happy to fly back home. And strange things continued to happen – even during the flight! At some stage, somewhere between Beijing and Shenyang, we had to turn back. No idea why – none of us spoke a word of Chinese – but judging by the pale, anxious faces of our fellow passengers something was terribly wrong. And damn right something was wrong: the reason we had to abandon the flight was due to an open door!
Anyway, after landing in Holland, many hours later, we made a unanimous decision: none of us would ever go back to China and we’d never eat Chinese food again.
And, as it goes, Fortuna never received all of the money. Just a lousy 50,000 guilders.
Worst of all was the fact that many of our players came back with injuries. At least seven of us were unable to play; among them our goalkeeper Ruud Hesp who had damaged his little finger.
Me, I was only shitting non-stop. No broken bones or pulled muscles, nothing. I was one of the last men standing. In international football, only the strong survive, and the ill-fated journey to China had proven that I was strong enough to make it.
After my oriental adventure, I was puzzled. Up to that point I had proven to be stronger and better than the rest of my age group. Then why oh why didn’t headmaster Chris Dekker give me any credit for it? Did he really still think I wasn’t good enough for the main team? I had no idea; he never spoke to me.
Come Friday, 1 October 1993, and the blackboard with the selection for the next match: the names of those who were going to face NEC in De Goffert, that ugly concrete stadium in Nijmegen. Among those names was, yes, Fernando Ricksen.
I pinched myself and had another look. It was still there.
Fernando Ricksen.
So the bugger must have changed his mind. All of a sudden I was good enough to play in Fortuna’s first team. I was one day away from my debut at the highest level!
A warm feeling crept through my body. So this must be it, I said to myself. This is the feeling they always talk about. What was it they called it again? Oh yes – nerves.
I was positioned as a midfielder, on the right side, one line before René Maessen who they used to call ‘Mr Fortuna’. A great honour! But it also meant that it was going to be a difficult afternoon. You see, Mr Fortuna had a habit of steaming ahead towards the opponents’ box, even though he was a defender. This meant that I had to keep an eye on his spot, in case he wasn’t able to return in time. So I knew I was going to make a lot of miles that afternoon.
My direct opponent would be a guy named Kees van Wonderen. Although playing for NEC in the First Division, he was already a force to be reckoned with. In a few years’ time he would play for Feyenoord and the national team. You could see that coming. The guy was good. And he never stood still.
So with Maessen constantly running away from me and van Wonderen constantly running towards me, I was constantly on the move. At one stage I got sick of it and cursed Mr Fortuna, told him to stay on his spot once in a while. He wasn’t having any of it and just kept going. And so did I, until I was totally out of breath. After an hour I had to be taken off the pitch. I couldn’t even blame Dekker for my substitution. I was empty, completely empty.
Besides, I had shown I was eager and good enough for this level. So I had earned myself plenty of other chances. Or had I?
No. In the remainder of the 1993/94 season I played a few more minutes against Veendam – and that was it.
Of course, I sensed some kind of a conspiracy. The older players, in my opinion, were scared of me. They thought I was better than them, so I had to be kept out of the team. That’s why they never helped me at all. Same with Mark, who debuted a few months before me, against Cambuur Leeuwarden. They didn’t like his skills either. Luckily Mark and I had each other. Without his support, I may well have drowned. Who knows? It’s a strange world, professional football. I always thought of it as a team sport; you know, togetherness and solidarity. I was wrong.
We ended in tenth place that season, with just 33 points from 34 games. So Chris Dekker had to leave. No chemistry any more, as they say.
Enter Pim Verbeek, a former Feyenoord coach. His task: bring Fortuna Sittard back to the Eredivisie, the Dutch Premier League. Ambition at last! I was totally up for it, but we had a bit of a problem. Verbeek said I was a defender, not a midfielder. But that spot, on the right side of the field, belonged to René Maessen. Actually, it had been his spot for sixteen long seasons, so when I say he was already playing there when I was still in nappies, I am not exaggerating! Besides, he was doing well. There was no need at all to have him replaced by that young kid Ricksen.
Here we go again, I thought. One available spot and it belongs to a guy who has played more than 400 games in that position. What to do?
Training, as hard and intense as possible. That’s all I could do. Hope he would break his legs? No way. First, if I wanted to reach the top, I had to do it with my own ability; that was my idea. Second, Maessen was a nice guy. Simple as that.
Eventually Maessen did lose his spot to me. It was just after an under-19s tournament in Spain that I made my way into the first XI – for 30 matches. Now, Maessen could have been extremely pissed off with that, but he wasn’t. He wished me, his successor, the best of luck and even helped me here and there. Now that’s what I call a good teammate!
And what a year we had! Due to a 2–0 victory at Telstar on the last day of the season – 13 May 1995 – we won the title in the First Division, ending up with just one point more than our main rivals, De Graafschap. Back on the highest level at last!
All credit to Pim Verbeek for giving youngsters like Mark van Bommel, Maurice Rayer, Roberto Lanckohr and, er, me a fair chance. The average age of our wonder team was 22, so that more or less sums it up. The celebrations in the town centre of Sittard were massive. We had thousands of fans singing to us on the main market square – at one-thirty in the morning! All you could hear was ‘Fortuna noa veure!’, authentic Limburgian for ‘Go, Fortuna, go!’ Nobody was thinking about the bonus of 220,000 guilders we would receive after winning the title. Who cared? After all, it was 220,000 divided by 22 players.
From that moment on, I got better and better, stronger and stronger. None of the big guys, whether they played for Ajax, Feyenoord or PSV, could mess with me. I became a ‘better than average’ player in the Dutch League simply by standing my ground.
Until a fateful moment in 1995, just before Christmas, when I became the man who fell to earth – literally – after an unlucky slide by PSV’s Ernest Faber on a frozen pitch (it was minus seven that day) in Eindhoven. I fell and I couldn’t get back up. My ankle hurt like hell and I was in a lot of pain. I thought it was the end of my career.
The next day, in hospital, it was revealed that I had torn ligaments in three different places. Well, it was Crimbo time, so I wouldn’t miss that many games. A few weeks in plaster and I would make my comeback. I was convinced of it. And indeed, on 24 February, ten weeks after the collision, I was kicking a ball again, in an away game against Sparta. The doctor said it was close to a miracle, the fastest recovery he’d ever seen.
Nevertheless, that ankle became my weak spot. My Achilles’ heel. Much later, at Rangers and at Zenit, it happened more than once that I had to stay on the bench. Too much pain. Still, that rehabilitation period taught me how to fight properly. Those were the weeks in which I developed my so-called fighting spirit. Battling pain that was cutting through my body like a hot knife, day in, day out, was hell, but I had to do it. I didn’t want to run away from it. Couldn’t run away from it. I was challenging demons, provoking them, only to be rewarded with the most acute pain I’d ever felt in my entire life. But I had to do it in order to get stronger. I had to come to terms with the limitations of my body and expand them.
The reward for my efforts came in 1997, when I won one of the most valuable individual prizes in Dutch football. I became Rookie of the Year, as chosen by the editors and reporters of leading Dutch football weekly Voetbal International. I was ahead of guys like Jon Dahl Tomasson, Boudewijn Zenden, Mario Melchiot and George Boateng, to name a few. And, to make things even better, the prize was given to me by none other than the mighty Johan Cruyff.
So, in order not to look like a provincial jerk, I bought some new clothes for the occasion: a white shirt with a black, sleeveless leather waistcoat. It was the nineties, okay? And, yes, it did make me look like a provincial jerk.
‘If you continue like this,’ Cruyff told me, ‘you have a great future ahead of you.’ I think I nodded, or maybe I said yes. Definitely no more than that. For this was the one and only Johan Cruyff, the greatest Dutch footballer of all time. And in the presence of someone like Cruyff, even Fernando Ricksen is quiet.
Oh, and I got a pair of new boots! Cruyff Sports, naturally. Well known in Amsterdam, but a novelty in Limburg, where everybody was wearing Puma or adidas. With my pair of Cruyff shuffles, I was The Man, feet-wise.
Too bad they only lasted for a few weeks.