These stories from a bygone era could not really be expected of a modern person today.
This steep thesis on his own account by the author Oskar Beck must be checked as a pessimism of purpose.
The sports journalist born in 1949 is drunk with everything he has seen, experienced, absorbed, felt and accordingly published in 50 years as a journalist.
He wasn't a mad reporter, his texts are too rested for that. His voyages of discovery led to the stories behind the stories. Why was Johan Cruyff only a shadow of himself in the 1974 World Cup final in Munich? Yes, "Terrier" Hans-Hubert Vogts had dogged him, but it is only half the story. More will not be revealed at this point. The personal register of those to whom Beck devotes himself ranges from Andre Agassi to Zinédine Zidane.
But where is the age limit of the "born late", as Beck addresses those who once had prominent names such as Dieter Baumann, Georg Best, Hans Blickensdörfer, Jimmy Connors, Joachim Deckarm, Helmut Haller, Armin Hary, Ben Johnson, Billie Jean King, Rudolf Kreitlein, Gustav “Bubi” Scholz or Mike Tyson can still do anything at all? That's a promise: For those who are born late it is an entertaining journey through time and discovery, for those who are nostalgic in older semesters it is a re-encounter with an aha effect.
Beck is someone who shows a clear edge and formulates accordingly. The referee Gottfried Dienst, who decades ago at Wembley Stadium (goal or not goal?) Awarded the English a goal against Helmut Schön's troop, is punished by the confessing Swabian as a “godless whistle”. Beck takes the toothpaste story from his fellow countryman Baumann, in the tax case Uli Hoeneß prevails when he is imprisoned, pity instead of malice.
Beck confessingly reaches linguistic limits only when it comes to praising someone like Messi, when everything, but also everything, has already been said. Beck's treasure trove of quotations is a treasure trove, he has retained his unbroken sympathy for edgy types and becomes a soft focus when the sport, as for the fencer Matthias Behr, becomes the tragedy of his life. Or when Beck remembers Gertrude Ederle, who was the first woman to swim the English Channel in August 1926 - first celebrated, then forgotten by the world.
There is the ode to the down-to-earth Vorstopper Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck, without whom Franz Beckenbauer, this "exceptional creature", would hardly have risen to become a figure of light.
It is an enviable, vital language with which this self-proclaimed “stylus sharpener” gets down to business in our computer-aided times.
“Number 10 is the diva among the numbers on the back,” remains a phrase that will last forever.
For him, great sport has always been great theater with great emotions.
Nope, it was like that and nothing else
He is an ardent lover of life-affirming football. How else could he have celebrated Günter Netzer's dream football in London at the European Championship finals as hymnically as he did. "The church bells have rung, and the historians in the stands were dipping their pens in golden ink as if electrified, in order to record the unique for posterity of those who were born late." Applied too thickly after "unrestrained steep passes" by the first pop star of football? Nope, it was like that and nothing else. Helmut Schön once confessed that he always dug out the video with the Wembley game when he felt like a mood-enhancer. Beck's conclusion: "If he took the video with him to heaven, the angels there are still moving the harps to one side."
The time of the economic miracle was extended, courted and tolerated types and had a cornucopia of possibilities for scribes ready. "Back then, the footballers and journalists were still capable of trusting dialogues," Beck remembers wistfully. The boulevard and Max Merkel, this Viennese rascal "with his wicked courage to face brutal truth", played one-two. When Ernst Happel signed on with Hamburger SV, the greatest cynic of his class allowed himself to remark that his Austrian compatriot in the coaching bench looked “like Beethoven in the final phase”.
It borders on self-denial when Beck answers the question of whether everything was better in the past with "everything was different in the past". Afterwards, after considering the state of sport and its status in society, he at least admits that he mourns the old days. His “crazy reporter days, when chance and luck shake hands at the same time” were neither chance nor luck, but the essence of his curiosity and passion. They made him what his book is all about.