Writer Nico Dijkshoorn (61) is a stadium avoider. Thousands of people who put on the same football shirt and then are synchronized from the leg when the opponent scores. He never understood much of that. “I used to go to De Meer with my father and brother. Watching Cruijff, Tahamata, Van Basten, Rijkaard. I’ve seen a lot of highlights pass by. But I was also there when Feyenoord player Peter Houtman scored a crushing goal. Really, a very nice goal. What do you think? All those people in the stadium angry. Because he had scored against Ajax. Against Ajax.”
He only watches football here. At home in Leiden. Where cupboards full of books and CDs flank the walls and a rack of guitars immediately catches the eye in a living room of the type where people live, with liqueur on a side table and instant noodles in the cupboard.
The TV, it turned green this Sunday afternoon. Dijkshoorn may avoid stadiums, but he doesn’t miss a game on the screen. Karl Ove Knausgård’s open book already reveals that he was not looking very concentrated at RKC-NEC. He also looks at AZ-Sparta with a slanted eye, although he tries to pick up the goals between talking. “Nicely seen,” it sounds when he sees Jesper Karlsson of AZ use a penalty.
We are sitting at the dining table. Next to his coffee cup is the reason for the conversation. The Failed Roundabout. His recently published collection of columns. Written for Vsoccer International, the weekly newspaper for which the then editor-in-chief Johan Derksen asked him to write eleven years ago. In addition, he has a range of other clients, from trade magazine Adformation and the Belgian newspaper The newspapaer, until The Parool and the Dragonflywhile still writing novels.
Of course, he really became famous from The world goes on. There he wrote a column in the row behind the guests, which he recited during the broadcast. He’s barely been on TV since that show ended. „When they call me to come and talk about Gerard Reve or Cees Buddingh’, I immediately put on my coat. But to start talking about the return of the wolf or politics… I once let myself be seduced by a political program. I sat there talking next to Alexander Pechtold and Frits Wester. When I got home, my friend Tanja said: ‘We shouldn’t do that anymore’. And she was right.”
Football, that suits him more. And especially the idiosyncrasies from that world. Dick Advocaat’s crying fits, the way in which Wout Weghorst sings along to the national anthem or the hat that accused Memphis Depay of stardom. About the latter: “Should football players all look like Dirk Kuijt?” In his own words, he is seen as someone who has no idea about it, but who does have an eye for the frayed edges of the sport. “I have never been invited to a program that is really about football.”
Player’s Bras
He is amazed by the football world. About pink football boots. “Players’ electronic bras.” “Proletes of trainers who are talking from their necks”. Dijkshoorn: “You saw that well in that Feyenoord documentary on Disney. Then you see Steven Berghuis really wondering what the heck Dick Advocaat is talking about.” Still, in his eyes, all those football players continue to listen to their trainer. “She was taught that.”
Photo Roger Cremers
Dijkshoorn saw the latter himself. With his now 26-year-old son Bob, who was allowed to play football at AZ as a child. Nice, thought Dijkshoorn and his ex-wife initially. Ignorant as they were at the time, they were eager to believe how special it was that a professional club like AZ had judged their son as a potential professional. Their son was a “miracle”.
Later Dijkshoorn would write about it in Hard Gras. Including this: “I crawled into a corner of the field and watched the game in silence. My ex is coming over. How I think Bob plays football. Good isn’t it? He just scored. “He needs to keep it more compact, bring more speed to the ball,” I say. I’m scared of my own words. Bob is eleven.”
Dijkshoorn remembers the deadly serious trainers who rarely handed out compliments and preferred to keep parents at a distance. His son was sent away after two years, which mostly felt like an escape. Dijkshoorn: “Those football clubs are all talking about the fact that school is also important, but they only care about that one boy who will continue.”
Nevertheless, the adventure at AZ has also yielded positive insights, he says. “The value of friendship, for example. Bob felt that he had missed two and a half years with his friends. When I see how much time he spends on them now. I’m more of a hermit. Someone you just can’t see for six months.”
Cardiac Arrest Eriksen
Last summer Dijkshoorn wrote another piece that has stuck with his readers and has been given a place in his new collection. The column about Christian Eriksen after his cardiac arrest. “That’s what I felt when Christian Eriksen was lying in the grass. Terrified,” he wrote that evening. “I not only felt it, but I remembered it. razor sharp. My second major stroke, three years ago.”
“It was as if the football world had come to a grinding halt,” he says now at his kitchen table. „Friendship, team spirit. Suddenly everything was in limbo.” It moved him. Not just because it brought back memories of his own health problems that prompted a healthier lifestyle. “I also had to think about funerals. You often resolve to make different choices in your life, but the next day you find yourself agitated again because you don’t have a coin for a supermarket trolley with you.”
It reminded him of his favorite poem by Cees Buddingh’, the poet he admires so much. Buddingh’ tells of a football match that comes to a halt because a zeppelin flies over. “We all looked up for a moment, into the silence that fell suddenly, that strange silence, a silence such as I only knew from Sunday school books.”Buddingh wrote. „Then the game went on calmly, we won 4-2 in the end (I scored two goals).”
#avoids #football #stadiums #Nico #Dijkshoorn #watches #screen