In his time as a footballer, Johan Derksen was a good left back, notorious for his aggressive style of defense. In his time at Veendam, for example, he once knocked over the last man of Cambuur. “He was insulted from all sides and chanted ‘pervert, pervert’,” the deputy wrote Leeuwarder Courant late 1973.
In 2022, Johan Derksen has once again become discredited after an – later withdrawn – outpouring about a “rape” fifty years ago and his defense consists of the fact that times have changed. It is the ‘cancel culture’ that, according to him, means that he is now being “liquidated” because of “smooth stories” like this one. He decided to stop immediately as a football analyst at the SBS6 program on Friday Today Inside. Producer Talpa announced that the program has now been discontinued.
Was Derksen’s behavior in the 1970s indeed considered normal? According to James Kennedy, professor of Modern History at Utrecht University, sexual abuse did not receive any attention until the 1980s. “The sexual revolution mainly applied to men.”
In any case, Derksen had not only earned the reputation of ‘pervert’, as sounded from the stands at the end of 1973. In Newspaper of the North said a board member at the time: “Johan is an outsider both on and off the field.”
riotous left-back
Sports journalist Willem Molema spoke to Derksen for his biography about football club Veendam: The Eternal Spirit of the Long Leegte (2019). Molema describes, among other things, how the riotous left back asks two youth players, including a goalkeeper, for a joint sex evening with a mistress. The two novices have to hide under the bed and in a closet to enjoy themselves. The operation ultimately does not go through because the woman in question does not show up. One of the players, Jan Korte, says in the book: “I once said that Johan Derksen gave me sex education.” The book also mentions the name of the keeper who according to the AD was present at the incident with Derksen. It would be Dick Ploeger, who made his debut in the Derksen team when he was seventeen. Also in a second book, The Long Leegte Cries van Klaas Fleurke (2018), mentions visits to nightclubs and the use of pep pills. Youth player Roelf-Jan Tiktak says in it that “growing football teenagers feasted on Derksen’s experiences with women and in nightclubs”.
Just like now, Derksen eagerly reported his escapades in the 1970s. And even then he was not thanked. A year after he was fined, the exercise was finally over for the then 25-year-old Derksen at Veendam. That happened after an interview with Football International (VI) – then circulation of 300,000 copies. Earlier there was an interview with Frits Abrahams from Newspaper of the North to reprimand him.
“The whole of Veendam trembled in the swampy peat-colonial soil,” he wrote NRC at the time about Derksen
It was not the content of the interviews, but the fact that he had flipped out of school that he was remembered. That just caused some anxiety. According to Veendam trainer Arie Stehouwer, “other activities suffered as a result. You kept running into the Derksen problem.”
NRC Handelsblad did not copy the texts from the magazine, as Derksen expressed himself at the time. “The whole of Veendam trembled in the swampy peat-colonial soil,” the NRC correspondent wrote about it at the time. Gone was the peaceful tranquility of the provincial town. In a language more raw than the speech at the regular table of the local café near closing time, Johan Derksen had said his word. (…) He had never minced his lips. But this interview beat everything, made all previous statements pale to monk chatter.”
VI reporter John Linse accepted that story four days tour through Veendam and the surrounding area. From relaxation club to entertainment club and from pub to training field. In the meantime, he let go of the tape and generously quoted from Derksen’s reflections on his love life. About the flame for which he came to Veendam, for example, who had subsequently left him. “Look, I can go to bed with plenty of women in Veendam,” he says in VI, of which he later became the editor-in-chief. “In bed you can bite it, later you can shit on it. I’ll still make my number, I’ll really lose that quack. No problem.” “But still (…)”, he suddenly shows himself sensitively, “it was very different with her.”
What stayed the same
Johan Derksen who discredits himself by the way he expresses himself about his sexual “adventures”: that was at least as sensitive in 1975 as in 2022. Fifty years later, his defense still sounds exactly the same.
In VI he already called ‘picking up’ women and taking them to hotel rooms as a ‘normal’ phenomenon. “Players may be bastards, but if he (trainer Stehouwer, ed.) does not want to deal with that, then he should not work in this profession.”
But a man is rarely ‘cancelled’ forever, as it turned out in 1975. A month after his dismissal from Veendam, Derksen found employment at football club Haarlem again.
Also read this editorial: Talpa should have taken Derksen cs off the tube immediately
It no longer surprises daughter Marieke Derksen, who is also business-like with her father through publishing house Inside, that he regularly trains the nation with his statements. And she admits: even then that could lead to dismissal. But there is also a difference, she says. “When you watched the talk shows about this this week, it seemed like the war in Ukraine was being considered. It was all very heavy. People are now high in their emotions. Who takes the trouble to check the facts or look for the backgrounds?”
With the cooperation of Myrthe Bulder
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 30, 2022
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