This article is an abridged excerpt from »The Golden Book of German Handball« by SPIEGEL author Erik Eggers.
"With or without anesthesia?" asked the doc. Oliver Roggisch quickly decided: "Without." A heavily bleeding wound was gaping on his forehead and had to be patched up in the dressing room. When the doctor began to shave, Roggisch only feared for his hairstyle and grumbled: "Ey!" – "Must be," replied the Doc and staple the wound twice. Then the circle runner trudged back into battle. A scene from the film »Project Gold« about the path of the German national team, conducted by Heiner Brand, to the 2007 World Cup triumph in Cologne.
The cinema documentary celebrated the toughness of the handball professionals by having national players talk about their injuries. Tendon tear in his hand, finger dislocated, kneecap damaged, broken nose, nothing major, said Roggisch with a smile. Left elbow dislocated, torn ligaments, metacarpal fracture, torn muscle fibres, bone chipping, the shoulder, Pascal Hens listed. He, too, grinned. It was as if World War II veterans were proudly recounting their wounds – each injury like a medal. "As long as it hurts, you know you're still alive," Roggisch said. "We're going to miss it when we don't play anymore one day."
Pain is part of handball, every player knows that, especially every professional. Nikola Bilyk from THW Kiel spoke of the "most brutal team sport after rugby", one has to be "a tough dog on the outside". In handball, you can't play without pain and live without pain. There's too much physical contact in the game for that," three-time world handball player Nikola Karabatic once told the FAZ. Competitive sport is a permanent crossing of boundaries. You have to accept that – or stop," explained World Champion Torsten Jansen at the end of his long career.
Initiation ritual with pipe wrenches
Pain is part of the everyday life of a handball player, but the culture in dealing with it is quite special. Do competitive handball players get used to it? Do they even experience pain as pleasurable?
In the junior academy of the SG Flensburg-Handewitt, young people were subjected to an initiation ritual with pipe wrenches: Three or four roommates held the newcomer, another injured the nipples with the pliers. When SPIEGEL revealed this, the public prosecutor's office in Flensburg investigated for grievous bodily harm, because the pipe wrench is legally considered a weapon. The idea behind it was obvious: If you survive this pain, you will go through every duel, no matter how hard. The boy, who described his case publicly, was on his way to the youth national team. Soon after, he got out.
Experts such as sports psychiatrist Valentin Markser strongly condemn such perverse excesses. The former Bundesliga goalkeeper says that pain is "very complex" and partly still unexplored, but is influenced by psychological, social and physiological aspects. Handball players switched to the mode of a "fight for survival" and produced adrenaline and other substances that endogenously dampen the pain.
"In the game itself, you don't feel the pain anyway due to the adrenaline," confirms the Kiel professional Bilyk. "But the day after can be bad." Every body reacts differently, says Detlev Brandecker. The experienced team doctor of THW Kiel reports on players with an enormously high pain threshold, who even competed with a broken finger: "Anyone who has gone through the school of handball and plays at this level must be a tough guy."
Obviously, habituation effects occur. "I started when I was six years old and learned to endure a little more pain every day," Pascal "Pommes" Hens told Stern.
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Erik Eggers
The Golden Book of German Handball
Publisher: Erik's Bookshelf
Number of pages: 376
Publisher: Erik's Bookshelf
Number of pages: 376
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As a professional, he had a completely different perception of pain, reports coach Markus Baur. "When you're in the juice like that, you can cope with the hardness much better. I don't want to say I'm a wimp today. But even if I take a Voltaren today, it has a much stronger effect than it did when I was a professional."
Field handball was once an almost contact-free game; In indoor handball, things were sometimes brutal from the sixties onwards. Above all, the fists flew internationally, for example in the duels between the FRG and the GDR, which in 1975 and 1976 were stylized as a "class struggle". We called it 'operating'," recalls backcourt player Kurt Klühspies. Covert and dirty fouls were part of the game – also because they didn't see each other for a long time afterwards: "Today, the players meet every week. But back then, we only played Romania twice a year. There was a good deal of access, it really gave the ears."
The referees let a lot of things go, without video evidence they could happily knock on the door. Hansi Schmidt, a star of the 1960s, listed the whole range of nasty fouls after his career – "punches to the face, kicks to the feet, kicks to the stomach or testicles, carried out at lightning speed with the elbow or the edge of the hand, horse kisses and stabs with the fingers".
Those who dealt out, however, had to fear revenge. For example, after a serious foul on Jochen Brand from Gummersbach, there was a threat of attention from his older brother Klaus in return. The main task of some defenders was to instill fear in attackers with their toughness. This was the reputation of defence specialist "Piet" Krebs from Tusem Essen in the 1980s, but he also had to suffer from time to time. Older Kiel fans still smile and talk about a game in which Krebs unexpectedly had to go on the attack when the regular circle runner was out.
Some coaches took advantage of the pain in the selection process. Former national coach Vlado Stenzel tormented his charges with breathtakingly intense training sessions. His motto: If you can still walk, you are also able to play. Once, when Richard Boczkowski was barely able to perform with a badly sprained ankle, he only asked briefly: "What is it? Can you play?" In a pinch, yes, replied Boczkowski. "Then Stenzel came and kicked me full in the shin" – "well, you can play." Whereupon the masseur bandaged his foot so thickly in tape bandages that Boczkowski could only walk straight ahead.
Nobody likes simulants
At the beginning of the 1990s, "the era of brutal thugs was over," recalls national player Karsten Kohlhaas. There were still very tough opponents, "but the rules were interpreted more strictly." Professionalization has rebalanced the way we deal with pain, says Kohlhaas, who is now a doctor: "There were the first full-fledged professionals during this time. And there was a growing awareness that you were developing a responsibility not only for yourself, but also for your opponent, who should have the same livelihood in handball."
In this era, a code matured among handball professionals that still regulates which fouls are allowed and which are not. It was still hard to get down to business, that's for sure. But those who now produced pain from dirty fouls had it increasingly difficult. "Today, there isn't really a player at a high level who fouls badly or plays dirty," said coach Baur.
This also includes not simulating pain: professionals with theatrical talent form the lowest caste in the handball system, as Ivan Nincevic learned. The Croatian left-winger tormented his opponents for years with trash talk and acting-like interludes. In 2013, Torsten Jansen, who was considered a fair professional, gave him a brutal headbutt. The HSV professional, frightened himself, apologized to Nincevic and averted a lawsuit by making a large monetary donation. But quite a few secretly supported the headbutt. What Jansen did was not right, said Kiel's captain Filip Jicha, but at the same time called for rules to punish provocateurs and simulants.
This is what happened in the summer of 2016: Since then, an injured player has had to leave the field after medical treatment and is not allowed to return until his team has completed three attacks – as long as the injury was not preceded by a foul. This provision is intended to prevent delays in play due to acting, but sometimes leads to an actual injured player picking himself up just so as not to risk a break in treatment. Then pain and injuries are suppressed.
As recently as the 1978s, painkillers were uncommon in elite handball. "If I ever got a horse kiss, I would put an aluminium disc on it and have it thickly bandaged so that no one could knock on it," says Kurt Klühspies, one of the sensational world champions of 2. Later, many professionals were too careless with pain pills, especially at large tournaments with a high frequency of play. "There was often a cocktail," Baur reports from the time of the "Golden Generation", then it was said: "Give me a mixture 1 to <> Voltaren with aspirin," or vice versa. Today, he knows how problematic aspirin is as a blood thinner, says Baur.
At times, handball players played three games in 48 hours, a tough schedule at tournaments such as the main round of the 2004 European Championship. The cocktail also helped with the "Winter's Tale" in 2007. "As long as such little aids are allowed, I'll take them," admitted circle runner Christian Schwarzer after the dramatic semi-final against France.
Constantly crossing boundaries is dangerous
During this time, Danish media accused German Bundesliga clubs of pumping players full of drugs. Around 2010, "almost half of the players took painkillers before every game," but less often today, says Kiel team doctor Detlev Brandecker: "My impression is that the players are much more aware of how they use painkillers." However, there are no valid studies on consumption in competitive handball.
Pforzheim sports physician Andree Ellermann sees the main problem in the fact that "the pain threshold drops, for example after injuries, and the athlete puts full strain on joints that cannot actually be fully loaded yet. This causes chronic damage." Pain is simply important as a function, "because it signals to the athlete that there is a limit here."
Handball players who constantly cross these boundaries have been and continue to be admired. So Flensburg's backcourt hero Holger Glandorf marched into every cover as if there was no tomorrow; after a cortisone injection for foot pain in 2012, he was threatened with the end of his career. Steffen Weinhold crashes to the ground from lofty heights in every game because he is looking for the tackle in the jump. Other players have been accused of avoiding this zone of pain. So does Markus Baur, who can laugh about it: "That's what it was only said after defeats."
Baur cites Andy Schmid as an example, who was also said to lack toughness in his first Bundesliga years. The Swiss played extremely intelligently and only developed into the best professional in the league with his approach to the game, not to simply run blindly into every cover wall and thus avoid injuries. Schmid, says Baur, calculated the pain perfectly and was thus able to prolong his career – an alternative to the "tough dog" type. Schmid didn't miss the pain in the game and won't miss it after his career.