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Uwe Seeler is 85: "Everyone wanted to be like him"

2021-11-03T15:36:58.569Z


Uwe Seeler will be 85, and the NDR dedicated a sensitive portrait to him on the occasion. A film that shows how special he was as a footballer - and how special the person is.


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Us Uwe and his problem child, HSV: »Don't complain or make a theater«

Photo: Christian Charisius / dpa

There are so many wonderful Uwe Seeler sentences in this film that you just want to quote them.

Seeler sits at the coffee table with old football colleagues and remembers the World Cup final in 1966 and why the German players accepted the infamous Wembley goal of the English without much complaint: “Well, the Queen was in the stadium, and you wanted to don't complain or make a fuss. "

Don't complain and don't make a fuss - you could also write that about your life.

Uwe Seeler, who will be 85 on Friday and will be honored on this occasion in a soulful NDR documentary, is satisfaction personified.

In the film he is sitting on a bench because it is now difficult for him to walk, his hands on the walking stick, his Ilka at his side, and says: "We want to be calm and relaxed and enjoy what we have."

Uwe Seeler is one of those people who buy it straight away.

Always bought: "I think the most important thing you can have in life is when you are normal." Uwe Seeler, the normal one.

Through life together for 62 years

The filmmakers Reinhold Beckmann and Ole Zeisler have dedicated an almost touching 45-minute life portrait to him, the film can be seen this Wednesday evening (9 p.m.) on NDR television.

Always there: Seeler's wife Ilka, they have been going through life together as a married couple for 62 years.

If you don't feel warm at the scenes where they sit together and talk about these 62 years, you can probably not help.

Uwe without Ilka, Ilka without Uwe, both unimaginable.

Once, when her husband worries that he might stumble across a meadow while walking, Ilka says: "I'll catch you, don't worry." Another sentence that applies to the whole life of the soul.

In three quarters of an hour, all of the well-known stages in Uwe Seeler's footballing life run again in front of the audience's eyes: Wembley, the terrible Achilles tendon rupture in 1965 and his sensational comeback afterwards, the goal behind the head at the 1970 World Cup, the 1960 HSV Championship and of course that The offer that Inter Milan made to him in 1961 - and which he turned down after thinking about it for days.

"It was all good that way"

"The Italians made a mistake there," comments Ilka on the bench.

"They only talked to the men and not to me too." A rookie mistake.

So why did he decide against Inter's million dollar offer?

"As an Adidas sales representative, I had earned a lot of money, everything was fine the way it was."

Uwe Seeler, the decent guy.

That's the story of his life, but with him it's not choreographed, staged, not flirtatious.

He's just like that.

Sports philosopher Gunter Gebauer says in the film: "It wasn't about money for him, it was about being a hamburger and being there for his HSV." It all sounds so incredibly cheesy today if you just read it that way.

When you see Seeler doing it, it's only logical.

The filmmakers put Olli Dittrich, the comedian and HSVer with heart and soul, on the bench with Seeler, and Dittrich says: "Everyone wanted to be like him." CDU politician Wolfgang Schäuble calls him "a symbol of loyalty," the former national player Max Lorenz considers him "a role model".

Incidentally, it is a charming idea of ​​the filmmakers to put Seeler at the same table with the two old Bremen football greats Max Lorenz and Dieter Zembski of all people.

If two Werder idols only say good things about an HSV, then it really has to be that way.

Overstrained as president

Seeler was a lucky child, only as president of his heart club in the nineties was he wrongly staffed, externally determined, overwhelmed.

“That wasn't the right thing,” said Ilka in a nutshell, and the former “Tagesschau” spokeswoman Dagmar Berghoff, then on the HSV supervisory board, said in retrospect: “He had to deal with numbers and finances, that wasn't his world .

He enjoyed the idea of ​​being president of his HSV. ”That wasn't enough.

The eternally satisfied Uwe Seeler was never more dissatisfied than at that time.

Beckmann once asked in the film: "What would Uwe Seeler be without Hamburg?" Actually, he should have turned the question around: What would Hamburg be without Uwe Seeler?

Seeler says that Hamburg "will always be a beautiful city, even without Uwe Seeler."

But it will never be quite so beautiful again.

Without the honorary citizen of Hamburg.

Udo Jürgens dedicated a song to him when Seeler said goodbye to active football in 1972.

The song was called "Don't forget the Uwe."

Don't worry, just as you won't forget Udo, so will Uwe.

What Olli Dittrich says: "Uwe Seeler will be talked about in 100 years, oh what, in 200 years."

Source: spiegel

All sports articles on 2021-11-03

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