Stillness and Speed: My Story (32 page)

It’s odd that you played football in front of tens of thousands of people in stadiums, and hundreds of millions more were watching on TV, and that was fine. But a few hundred people
watch you doing something else and you go to pieces.

‘It’s so strange. When you go into someone else’s arena you want to do well. That’s just how I am. I want them to go home and tell everyone: “That Bergkamp, he can
play golf.” So I get nervous. It’s not like I’m afraid to fail. I just want to do so well. I want to leave a good impression on people and therefore you raise the bar maybe far
too high for yourself. You put yourself under pressure so people will say: “You know, I played with Tiger Woods, but Dennis Bergkamp could hit that shot even better . . .” It’s
silly, but it’s not an ego thing. I just want to do well. I want to be good.’

And you won’t just put on a shabby tracksuit . . .

‘No! It has to be the full gear, to be perfect. Everything has to be right. The right pants, the right shoes . . .’

I’m guessing that the actual movement and control of the ball fascinates you in the same way as the football fascinates you?

‘The annoying thing for me is that I can hit a golf ball now, and I can make it do different things. But it’s not
real
control. I
almost
know how to do it, but I
don’t
really
know. Like I can sort of get the ball to move from right to left, but it’s not quite there yet. And I’ve got backspin a few times, but I don’t know how
I did it. It’s so frustrating! With a football I know every shot, everything. So I keep coming back to the golf course, I keep trying . . .’

How is it with tennis?

‘Similar. My agent organises a tournament every year where it’s golf, tennis, poker or whatever, and one time it was tennis and we played in the doubles final, Marc Overmars and me,
against two other players. And there were ex-pros sitting on the sidelines watching us, like Jacco Eltingh and Paul Haarhuis, a fantastic doubles team who won a lot of Grand Slams. Again
you’ve got the feeling: “OK, I want to really impress them!” But of course tennis is easier than golf.’

Why?

‘With tennis, you can put some things from football in there. You’re working with your body and with your shape. You can use your pace, you can use your little skills. Whereas golf
is so internal. One swing. Just . . .
boom!
And that has to be perfect because a millimetre wrong on the ball is fifty yards wrong on the course. It’s interesting.’

Are there ideal shots in your mind? Do you dream of a hole in one?

‘No, nothing like that. And I don’t think about putting either. It’s more about depth. You see the shot, then you hit it and it just takes off exactly as you want, and it goes
there. It’s not like, “Oh, I need an eagle or a birdie.” Not at all. It’s more like: “I enjoy that approach. I want it to be the perfect approach.”’

It sounds like the way you thought about the perfect pass and the assist in football.

‘Could be . . .’

Because somewhere deep in your soul you’re always searching for the same thing?

‘It looks like it, doesn’t it?’

21

A
FTER RETIRING FROM
Arsenal in the summer of 2006 Dennis played golf, relaxed and spent time with the family. It was
delightful. For a while. By late 2007 the man with a drive for perfection was getting bored. A few months later he and Henrita decided to take the family home to Holland where he enrolled on the
Dutch FA’s fast-track trainers’ course for former top players. Part of the course was spent at Ajax when Marco van Basten was the coach.

Ajax had fallen a long way since winning the Champions League in 1995 and had ceased to be a European power. When Dennis returned to the club of his first great successes to become a coach to
the Under-12s he was, in effect, joining a bucolic backwater. To the casual visitor, Ajax seemed cheerful and tranquil enough. But the stage was being set for one of the most bitter battles in all
of Dutch football history. The conflict would pitch Dennis into unfamiliar emotional territory and prove to be another turning point in his football life.

The key figure – as so often – was Johan Cruyff who had, for years, been criticising Ajax, usually through his weekly column in Holland’s biggest-selling newspaper,
De
Telegraaf
. Cruyff’s principal complaint, even in the mid-nineties, was that something had gone badly wrong with the club’s youth system. At a time when Louis van Gaal’s team
of tyros was the best in Europe, this looked like sour grapes. Yes, he conceded, results looked good for now, but he had seen the younger teams and it was clear to him that a few years hence the
flow of exceptional players would cease. As he never tired of saying later, Patrick Kluivert was Ajax’s last great home-grown striker. Few people paid attention in the late nineties, but a
decade later Cruyff’s critique found a more receptive audience.

An outsider might be tempted to take a more relaxed view and see Ajax’s decline as inevitable. The global football economy had changed so massively and so quickly that complaining about
the failure to produce new Van Bastens and Bergkamps was like worrying why the city of Rembrandt now had so many graffiti artists. Due to forces beyond anyone’s control, Ajax’s football
Golden Age had passed. In any case, there was still second-hand glory to be had. Seven of the 14 Dutchmen who played against Spain in Johannesburg in the 2010 World Cup final had started their
careers at Ajax. Most clubs would take pride in having produced half a World Cup final team.

But Ajax was not most clubs. Even the directors were worried by the long decline and had commissioned a study, known as the Coronel Report, focusing on structural problems, which was to be
presented at a members’ meeting in February 2008. Few people ever read this report, because Johan Cruyff gate-crashed the meeting and pulled off a stunning coup. In style it recalled one of
his most legendary exploits. In 1980, at a time when he had no formal link to the club, Cruyff was a spectator in the crowd watching as Ajax trailed 3-1 at home in a Cup match against Twente. So
angered was he by Ajax’s performance that he walked out of the stadium, came back in through the players’ entrance, made his way onto the touchline and sat himself down in the dugout.
Having thoroughly upstaged coach Leo Beenhakker, Cruyff suggested a few changes – and Ajax promptly rallied to win 5-3. The TV cameras caught every moment of his intervention, and the match
became a symbol of his near-superhuman footballing powers.

Now, in February 2008, Cruyff produced another game-changer: he turned up unannounced at the members’ meeting. The crowds that greeted Ayatollah Khomeini when he arrived in Tehran from
Paris in 1979 had nothing on the enthusiasm of the Ajax members that night. They acclaimed Cruyff ecstatically, and when they urged him to save the club, he graciously agreed. The power of the old
board simply melted in his presence; it was the smoothest of velvet revolutions. Soon the chairman had resigned and Cruyff’s candidate, Marco van Basten, was installed as coach. Just 17 days
later, however, the revolution ended as suddenly as it had begun. Van Basten had declined to follow his mentor’s advice to sack most of the youth academy staff. So Cruyff simply turned around
and flew home to Barcelona, saying: ‘Then I’ve got no more business at Ajax.’ Wrongly, this turn of events was interpreted as a humiliation for Cruyff. In fact, he and Van Basten
remained on good terms and the deeper significance was missed: Cruyff had revealed his extraordinary influence as club icon and fan favourite. As the new chairman Uri Coronel would later say
bitterly: ‘Cruyff is not just anyone. He’s a demi-god here, or maybe a whole god.’ By the time the old hero was ready to renew his assault in late 2010, conditions had changed
once more. Van Basten’s reign had failed: he left after less than a season, admitting: ‘I can’t live up to Ajax standards.’ Cruyff was now free to direct his withering fire
on yet another board-appointed coach of whom he disapproved, Martin Jol.

Meanwhile Dennis Bergkamp, from his vantage point as youth coach, had reluctantly come to a conclusion of his own: something had gone badly wrong with the club’s youth system. He was
dismayed by the prevailing attitude: ‘Things were really going downhill, but no one seemed to notice or perhaps they didn’t want to see,’ says Dennis. ‘Everyone seemed to be
saying: “Hey, we’re Ajax, we’re the best, look at 1995 when we won the Champions League.” I thought: “What’s all that about? Nineteen ninety-five is thirteen
years ago.”’

The club’s youth teams were still good enough to win trophies, he noted, but the academy (immodestly called
De Toekomst
– The Future) had turned into a weird soccer version
of Stepford. ‘It was as if all the kids had been made in the same factory. It felt strange. They were all good, tidy, rather technical players, but they weren’t special or flexible or
creative. They did what was asked of them. They knew their positions, played their roles, but even in the first team they had so little creativity. When they had to improvise they’d look
helplessly to the touchline as if to say: “Now what do we do?” All the teams played four-three-three the way you’re supposed to at Ajax. But it was completely uninspired, totally
lethargic. The right-winger kept nicely to the right wing and did all the little things a right-winger is supposed to do, like getting to the goal line and putting a cross in. The left-back played
exactly like a left-back and the defensive midfielder played like an Ajax defensive midfielder. It was all by the book, but the heart was missing. I didn’t see one of the typical old Ajax
lads with that cheeky attitude: “Let me have the ball, I’ll do something good with it.”’

For Cruyff, meanwhile, Ajax’s humiliating defeat at Real Madrid in September 2010 was the final straw. The score was only 2-0, but Ajax had managed just one shot on goal and Madrid could
easily have scored ten. In the glory years, Ajax had measured their greatness by their crushing victories in the Bernabeu. In 1973, Gerrie Muhren had juggled the ball there en route to Ajax winning
their third European Cup in a row. In 1992, Dennis Bergkamp scored one of his great goals in the stadium. And when Van Gaal’s team produced a sensational performance there in 1995,
Real’s poetic coach Jorge Valdano waxed lyrical: ‘Ajax are not just the team of the nineties, they are approaching football utopia.’

The pathetic Ajax performance of September 2010 revealed how bad things had become. Cruyff had already spent months ridiculing Jol’s counter-attacking style and his signing of expensive
but mediocre foreign players and had said that the sight of overweight Egyptian striker Mido in an Ajax shirt made him feel physically ill. Now he stopped being polite. Jol’s shambolic outfit
was the worst Ajax team he had ever seen. Ajax was no longer Ajax. The manager and the board would have to go. Cruyff had an alternative plan.

Around that time, Dennis received a call from his old mentor. ‘Johan thought it was time we caught up, and he invited Henrita and me to dinner. He wanted to know how I saw my future at
Ajax. I told him I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, that I would see how things developed. For the time being, I was just a rookie youth trainer. But Johan took a different perspective; he
was thinking further ahead and began talking about a managerial role at the club, some kind of director’s position as well as some practical work on the pitch. I listened to him talking about
me, about Ajax, and I thought: “Hey, something’s going on. Johan is up to something.” It got me excited.’ Cruyff was talking to other former players as well, preparing a
cadre of ex-Ajax stars for an unprecedented revolution. His belief, nurtured over decades of battles with directors, presidents, chairmen and other ‘suits’, was that former top players
knew far more about football than the grey men who ran the game. Great former players should therefore be in charge. Great former players like Dennis.

Cruyff’s plan was now much more developed than it had been during the off-the-cuff intervention of 2008. Urged on by his media allies, Ajax fans began chanting his name in the stadium.
Jol’s position was becoming untenable. One afternoon in December 2010, Dennis bumped into chairman Uri Coronel in the car park. Coronel said bleakly: ‘Your manager has just been
fired.’ Dennis shrugged his shoulders. ‘I just said: “OK,” but I was thinking: “Now let’s see what happens.” Jol’s departure set the wheels in
motion. I had no idea that the next months would become a nightmare.’

Frank de Boer was appointed manager, with the approval of Cruyff, who was now working with the club in an ‘advisory capacity’. But, as far as Cruyff was concerned this was just the
first of many steps. He wanted to change the very DNA of the club. In April 2011 the Ajax board resigned, saying they found it impossible to work with Cruyff. A new, temporary board headed by a
lawyer and psychologist called Steven ten Have took over. But Cruyff’s campaign continued. He wanted his plan implemented in every particular area.

The plan had taken physical shape in the form of a report written by members of a circle close to Cruyff and reflecting his ideas. The authors were Wim Jonk, Ruben Jongkind, an athletics trainer
who specialised in improving performances and who had worked with Jonk on an experimental training programme, and Todd Beane, Cruyff’s son-in-law, an American coach who had spent eight years
developing the international dimension of Cruyff’s football institute, which helps educate youngsters who want to build a career in sport – and prepares them for life afterwards. The
report envisioned a root-and-branch transformation of the club through its youth. The old, Van Gaal-style focus on tactics, systems and teamwork would be swept away and replaced by a new intensive
approach to developing extraordinary individuals.
De Toekomst
would become less like a football factory and more like a workshop for encouraging and educating genius: not so much a
vocational apprenticeship, more like an Oxbridge college or a French
Grande Ecole
. The greatest of former Ajax players would become tutors, imparting their know ledge, wisdom and
experience to exceptional young talents who would in turn become not only spectacularly good footballers but wise beyond their years. The roles of technical director and head of training would be
abolished and replaced by a sort of revolutionary committee known as ‘the technical heart’. This would consist of manager Frank de Boer, Wim Jonk . . . and Dennis Berg kamp. A canny
financial dimension was built into the plan, too. The unplanned career paths of men like Cruyff, Van Basten and Bergkamp would now be used as a prototype business model. By educating their own
junior players to first-team standards, Ajax would both save money and ensure a steady stream of players for the first team. These players would be much better than the mediocre foreigners the club
had been buying. And later, the young players and Ajax would share the financial rewards when the stars were sold on to Europe’s elite clubs after a few years in the Ajax first team.