Marina Zucchi
08/02/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
stories
Updated 08/02/2021 9:01 AM
Imagine a man trying to get to the bathroom, crawling.
Imagine that same man in flashback, a couple of years ago, when he was playing soccer and his body was like clay.
Now he can't reach the toilet.
"I was disabled", he
yells and mixes curses in Dutch, in Dutch, in invented language.
He hates doctors, blames them for ruining his life.
"Sons of bitches," she cries and drops all the dead weight of her body into the toilet.
The Dutchman on the scene is Marco van Basten, "The Swan", the elegant backbone of the courts of the eighties and nineties. He vomited his ordeal into a book (
Fragile
) which will shortly be adapted into a Dutch TV series. It is not necessary to invent too many dramatic spikes to the script. The true story includes them all.
If Andrea Agassi gives a masterclass in biography with
Open,
Van tries to emulate him on his almost sports self-help path.
"I am lying on the floor next to the bed. If I spend many hours on a soft mattress, I feel excruciating pain. I count to three, and then I
start the long and painful process of getting up," says the former tennis player.
Basten also speaks of the body as a prison and the adventure of getting up.
A Van Basten figurine at Ajax.
"The person who most damaged my ankle was not a player, but a surgeon"
, shoots Marco in one of the 300 pages. They are lines that go "to the bone", they do not stop only at that goal, how he hit him and how many passes he added. They build the identikit of that mythical Ajax and Milan striker who seemed to be on his way to a perfect life, but ended up "a game", temporarily crippled, depressed and even bankrupt.
"For the one who expects blood, drugs and rock & roll, no, I have never taken methamphetamine,"
the reader stops abruptly.
"I have not been hooked on cocaine for years either. Nor did I go into a pool with naked women during a Euro or World Cup. I am not addicted to the game either
. And I have never worn a toupee. Sorry to disappoint you."
What remains when you are no longer the person you were
, the best in the world?
The first big question asked is the one that triggers the other thousand.
The mysterious "San Marco" takes off the mask of "imperturbable" and
delivers all his vulnerability on a platter.
The champion's shreds, all on the floor, like giving a lesson in mending and mending.
Marco Van Basten's first steps in football.
Chronicle of a subhuman pain
The forward actually named Marcel (shortly after he was listed in the civil registry he was informally renamed Marco as a loving adaptation the world met him with)
marks 1992 as the year of Olympus and the great fall.
Voted best footballer in the world for the third time, a decade into his career until then, he had won three European Cups when just before Christmas he had to undergo surgery on his right ankle.
On December 21, he entered the operating room and went to hell
: “From an icon of refined movement to crawling with less coordination than a baby.” Four hours later, my life had changed forever even though I didn't know it.
My career was over
.
I would no longer touch a ball decently, I would no longer jump for joy after scoring a goal. "
He confesses that his greatest prize was "walking to the bakery without feeling too much pain."
It took him three years to recover from that intervention and almost 30 to dare to tell it all in a text.
"For seven years I hid. Now I will have no mercy in talking about anyone and less about myself."
The great account of his biography focuses on a day long after the postoperative period,
the day he wants to urinate, he feels his bladder burst, but he goes through an odyssey to go from the room to the bathroom.
"I never get there before I count 120. The last thing I need is to fill the hall with pee."
Van Basten's book cover, Fragile
"The stabbing pains don't leave me even after taking sedatives. I can't think of anything other than the pain. And the fact that the doctor promised me it wouldn't get worse,
I
limp.
I'm disabled. My ankle is like a stalactite cave and stalagmites ".
Without cartilage, with "the splinters of bone" hurting his own leg, he brutally describes how putting his foot on the floor was to see the force collapse. At night, while his family slept, he "swallowed" the scream so as not to wake them up. "Sometimes it helps me think about God, sometimes I get angry.
Why do I have to go through this shit? Is it humbling? Was I too arrogant?"
"Animal" wounded ego, the Nureyev of calcium -
as apodaban- so,
then begins to reject invitations to see Milan.
He doesn't want to be seen on crutches
.
"I prefer to sit in the dark at home."
He resorts to physiotherapists, acupuncturists, sorcerers.
The pain does not go away and the stomach ends up
"dismembered" by so much medicine.
"My problem was the bad doctors, who instead of understanding the situation and improving it, made it worse.
My worst enemy was never the kicks of the rival defenses."
A France Football cover with Marco van Basten
"I was injured for the first time in December 1986 and it did not improve. Johan Cruyff had a discussion with the doctor, who said: 'He
has a problem, but it will not be worse, he can play
.
'
We made a deal with Johan: 'No you play all the competitions and you can skip some training sessions. But whatever happens, you have to play the final. 'I went on and on and the damage got worse. When we made the decision to operate, it was too late, because
the damage was done. "
"In the summer of '87 I signed for Milan and took advantage of the holidays to rest thinking that this way I would recover, but the pains returned. I demanded that they check me again and then, ten months after the first diagnosis, they told me:
'It is probable that you have torn ligaments. "I had played for ten months without ligaments, and the damage had affected my bones. They operated on me, my ligaments were welded, I played for five more years
. It was stop, keep going, stop going. discomfort The doctor told me: 'We are going to clean the ankle of bone remains so that you can play another five years with greater freedom.' It seemed like a great idea to me. But I couldn't play again. "
"I had the misfortune that the doctors performed the wrong operations on me, but I was fortunate in the end after a doctor decided to block my joint by welding my bones with nails. I could no longer flex my ankle, nor could I return to running, but I got a new life without pain. "
Van Basten Ballon d'Or 1989
In that prolonged stay on his couch, staring at the ceiling, a childhood trauma returned to his head.
So much free time made him rewind to an area of memories that seemed blocked: one winter day at the age of seven he played escape to Amsterdam with his neighbor Jopie (one year older) and misfortune struck them.
They were walking on a frozen lake when a block of ice broke and Jopie fell "like in a hole."
Police found the hat floating first.
Then the tiny body of the drowned boy.
"Should I have saved him, behaved more heroically?" Marco asks himself every day.
The retirement funeral
Marco feels that "rivers of ink flowed" on his person, but no one could describe his depths until now.
"A lot of nonsense has been said, often I didn't even read what the press wrote."
Born in Utrecht on October 31, 1964, in a middle-class family, raised with two brothers, as a child he started as a midfielder, but at 11 he became a forward.
The son of a former player of the Dos Utrecht club, he made his football debut at the UV of his hometown, at 6, and at 16 he already signed with Ajax.
His professional debut was on June 3, 1982. He was on the bench,
entered for Johan Cruyff -symbolic relief hoax- and scored a goal that day
.
For the 83/84 season he was already the undisputed starter.
He became the top scorer in the Dutch league (28 games in 26 dates) and second best scorer in Europe.
All that talent would be on the rise.
Cruyff advised him to leave the Netherlands to achieve the worldwide notoriety he deserved.
Thus began a magical story with Milan.
It became a phenomenon in the city of fashion.
In September 1987 he played his first game in Serie A, but came to a stop due to surgery on the clavicle.
He returned to the end of the championship, beat Diego Maradona's Napoli, came out champion and followed the injury course.
His goal against the Soviet Union in the final of the 1988 European Championship ended up making history as one of the greatest volleys. The end of his career, at 28, occurred after infiltrating the Champions League final against Marseille. He asked for the substitution due to the unbearable pain and those were his last minutes on a playing field. After two years without playing, in 1995 he announced his retirement.
"Today I attend my own funeral,
" he shot then.
The road from depression to rebirth was not magic.
"At that moment I did not understand what was happening.
I was too focused on being bad. I would have wanted to say that I relied a lot on my family, but in fact I was a great weight for them for years
. One day I realized that I was thinking about crutches It came naturally and I was the one who called the doctor. I couldn't bear the idea of my girls thinking of a lame father any longer.
I accepted the proposal to lock my ankle forever. "
Marco in his time as a coach.
(EFE)
A blow to your economy
If the physical Via Crucis turned him over, the economic one finished burying him. He tells in his book that in 1999, when he could walk like an "almost normal" man, he
invested 20 million euros in a Dutch bank, but the financial crisis put his money in check
. He felt "like Leo DiCaprio in
The Wolf of Wall Street
." In 2001,
the Dutch Tax Agency demanded 32.8 million euros from him
. He thought that he would have to sell up to the three Ballons d'Or obtained (1988, 1989 and 1992) and still end up homeless.
In the midst of his financial ignorance came a threatening letter.
"Mr. Van Basten is ordered to pay this tax assessment in full before December 31, 2001: 32.8 million."
His advisers explained to him that the origin of the debt went back to his return to the Netherlands: 100% interest and a sum to pay that led him to want to be swallowed by the Earth.
"Now I write a little for that: to encourage elite athletes to train in finances.
More than winning a lot you have to know how to lose little economically.
I tried to learn from Cruyff, who wanted to manage his business himself and was wrong. I looked for advisers but I was not right either. "
A photo of Marco in 2006. (AFP)
With so much drama on their backs, the love affair also suffered danger of collapse.
"There was a moment when my wife, Liesbeth, left me, but with a note saying that she loved me," he confessed to
La Vanguardia.
"In the end he forgave me and came back. That love made me strong. I had little luck as a coach, but a lot as a husband."
Stress, resignation, and a Nazi comment
In his attempt from player to coach, the stress of the role ended up causing him heart problems.
In 2014, after not being able to deal with the pressure of the fans (and the journalists), he resigned as head of AZ Alkmaar in the Netherlands and became an assistant.
"I made a good decision when I left. When I became an assistant, I was smart and helpful. I had patience. As a head coach I was the opposite.
I am not a coach.
The coach is not only responsible for tactics and technique, he must be a judge; doting father; mother, brother; master tactician, philosopher. Too much. "
Turned into technical secretary of FIFA, the great football ambassador of the Netherlands had a great criticism of César Luis Menotti in 2017, when he suggested reforming the football regulations and eliminating offside.
"I have never heard so many nonsense", "El Flaco" was shipped without a filter
.
"A soccer field has 7,000 square meters, each player has 700 meters that are impossible to master. The wise man who put the offside did it so that your intelligence can handle the dimensions. The offside allows the reduction of spaces, that is the wisest thing. "
During a press conference in 2009.
That pilot test for FIFA linked Marco to the VAR, but the results were not the best. "The idea was to correct flagrant errors, but the result has been the opposite, now with the VAR we discuss unimportant things, trifles that were clearer before."
By 2019, when life seemed like a plateau of tranquility to him with his foray into sports journalism, he
made a "Nazi" comment that jeopardized his solid image
. Commentator for the television network Fox Sports, he came out to apologize for the commotion of his sayings ("Sieg Heil", an expression used in Third Reich Germany, something like "long live, eternal, victory"). The Dutch Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, came out to put cold cloths. "It is not necessary to enlarge what happened and accuse Van Basten of Nazi sympathy, but this incident symbolizes the present moment: it is clear that we must explain why it is a mistake to speak in this way."
One of the peaks of Van Basten's book is his close relationship with Cruyff, as a disciple and later as an opponent.
He regrets that he and Cruyff later quarreled over plans to restructure Ajax, and did not reconcile before Cruyff's death in 2016. "He was my hero, my best example and my friend. His opinion was different from how I saw it. things at Ajax.
It was painful but that happens sometimes with a teacher and his student. He went to the right and I to the left. Suddenly, we had no contact.
After his death, I saw his wife in a golf tournament in Turin. Talking about Johan was liberating. "
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Marco van Basten (@marcovanbasten)
Father by three and grandfather by two, already an expert in golf and squash, "The Swan of Utrecht" teaches young people in every interview he gives: "Take care of your body. Be careful with the doctors. Be careful what they do with your money. ".
After 50, he seems to have learned that life has something of that unmanageable curve that sometimes makes the ball even if the intention is different.
"I went from the highest level of football to the lowest level of personal unhappiness. A very big fall and a really dark time. I was afraid of having bone cancer
. I played like a God, I had a coach that I liked like Fabio Capello, I could not leave in peace. Reinventing myself as a person was something hard (...) I live in a constant state of ambiguity. Arrigo Sacchi was right, I am somewhat lunatic. I am an imperfect person, who knew how to sign a pact of his fragility ".
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