On the day that Johan Cruijff should have turned 75, son Jordi told NOS Sports news that he is still approached every day by people who tell them what his father meant to them. Jordi also receives messages from young people, who have never experienced Cruijff as a football player or trainer. †Wow, your father was a great player’, they send. Not because they saw old images, but because they play with Cruijff in football games like Fifa.
Later that evening I thought I would see Jordi again, only about 45 years younger, as a toddler. He was lifted from a bus by his father with a stroller at Barcelona airport, the day after the lost 1974 World Cup final. But a quick calculation showed me that Jordi was still a baby at the time and it was probably his sister Susila. . It was somewhere halfway through the VPRO documentary JC† Director David Kleijwegt fused an endless amount of archive material together into a beautiful film that was not so much about the football player, but about the human being and media personality Cruijff.
We saw Cruijff at Mies Bouwman, who asked him what he thinks is a good car. Cruijff who explains in the player bus of the Dutch national team about financial hassles between the players and the association. Cruijff who tells what is wrong with the breakfast culture in Spain. Cruijff, walking through Barcelona, explaining why you shouldn’t care about what other people say about you. ‘You live here, don’t you? The weather is nice and I think you should enjoy it.’
There was no narrator who talked it all together, and the names of the people in the picture were also missing: the film consisted solely of fragments from the life of Johan Cruijff. It was nothing short of beautiful. Lonely in the locker room after his last game, kissing Danny on the plane, laughing in a Spanish talk show, walking on the beach in Barcelona, theorizing in interviews. Sometimes cheerful, sometimes reserved, sometimes determined. Always different, always unique.
The film lasted just over an hour and was actually far too short (besides, the word ‘although’ didn’t appear once). Anyway, how long is long enough when it comes to Johan Cruijff? Two o’clock? Ten o’clock? Or just a single second, as with his Cruijff spin? I thought of the words of Jan Mulder, who concluded his piece in this newspaper after Cruijff’s death as follows:
‘Johan Cruijff and time were made for each other. One couldn’t do without the other. Still divorced, now. A strange, sad, empty feeling stretches from the Spui to the Ramblas. There we are, up to the neck in time, without Kruiffie, Die Kleine, Kroif, Kroef, The Oracle of Concrete Village, El Salvador and Number 14. Johan, the unforgettable one.’