Not an everyday occurrence: Dutch writers calling on the bookshop to take a book off the market. Fate befell Johan Derksen and the biography that Michel van Egmond wrote about him. The writer Jaap Robben took the initiative and his colleague Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer quickly supported him. Too bad, because I’m not in favor of boycotting books and writers. Where does it end? Should the anti-Semite Céline also be removed from the shelves? The poet Lucebert, who had a soft spot for Hitler in his younger years? Knut Hamsun with his Nazi sympathies? Writers should be the last to call for book boycotts. Readers can decide for themselves what they should or should not read.
Against this call for a boycott are the angry reactions of Derksen fans in the social media. They cannot accept that their hero has fallen from grace. The most striking reaction was an excerpt from a talk show by Eva Jinek, two years ago. In it, the ex-footballer Sjaak Polak of Sparta tells a bizarre anecdote from his career.
Anthony Obodai played for Sparta in 2007, a Ghanaian midfielder who had failed at Ajax. Teammate Polak was annoyed by Obodai, who liked to show off his tough body and sometimes walked naked through the halls of the stadium. One day he decides to take down Obodai. Together with his teammate Ricky van den Bergh, he grabs Obodai, throws him on the massage table and binds him with a few rolls of tape. At the insistence of Jinek, Polak, about whom a biography was also published in those days, told what exactly happened next. “I walked very quietly to the medical cabinet and took out one of those wooden spatulas. I picked up ‘Red Hot’ – a pretty spicy balm – and look right into his sphincter. I say to him, “Just relax.” I kept waiting for him to relax and hit that spatula on his tailbone. Eventually I took him down through his buttocks, through the scrotum. He didn’t like that.”
Jinek and her other guests, including Alexander Pechtold, choked with laughter while Polak concluded his story, laconically like a good joke teller who serves the pointe: „The best thing, Eva, he thought it was ready, but the weather was nice. at Spangen, 26, 27 degrees, beautiful sun, and then we put it on the center spot… Yes, you know, that’s humor.”
Jinek has now stated on Instagram that it was an innocent incident about which she recently called Obodai. He assured her that he himself had found it “hilarious” because it “illustrated the way the team treated each other.”
Is Obodai holding up here? He was indeed friends with Van den Bergh, but the fact is that he later left Sparta because he was bullied “by some of the players”. By the way, Polak’s rendering also shows that Obodai at the time was certainly not happy with this ‘joke’.
The Derksen fans use this unpunished incident to comparatively condone Derksen’s ‘slippage’. There is no reason for that, although I suspect that Jinek and Polak would have had as many problems with this anecdote about two white men and a black Ghanaian as Derksen with his story.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 4, 2022