A cat has nine lives, but Joop Reilman (78) might have more. Karateka, drummer, coach, gym owner and together with partner Jeany Veras Rots in the surf for Emmer Elderly. The Emmenaar is colorful and a bit chaotic. Now he catches all his adventures in an autobiography.
Islands, Reilman calls all the memories that have sticked into his memory over the years. “I have about seventy on paper.” They are the common thread for his book. “I also get a day older and I would like to leave something.”
More than fifty years ago, Reilman initially caused a furore as a karateka. For the then still young Reilman, the sport still unknown in the Netherlands was a kind of lifebuoy. Small in stature and frightened, he is often the target of harassment in Groningen, where he grows up.
Reilman takes lessons and quickly becomes worked out in martial arts and decides to visit his seepage spirits. “Wrong, wrong, wrong, I know. My teacher said: You have a white suit. The color of cleanliness. You don’t fight for fighting. I have always remembered that.”
Reilman belongs to a small group of people with a black band Karate in the 1970s. He becomes friends with and is taught by Jon Bluming. “The best Knokker I have ever experienced.” He also gained fame as an actor in films such as Turkish fruit and nude about the fence.
Reilman starts teaching himself. “At a certain point in fourteen different gym rooms in Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland. I had a private driver who brought me everywhere.” He started a gym in Emmen in the 70s, because there were most members there at some point. “That success really laid the foundation for my further sports career.”
But then the success changes and Reilman is confronted with a huge tax liability. He goes bankrupt and his wedding is stranding. “I lived in a caravan around 2003. At that time, only a handful of old friends arrived occasionally.”
One of them is Henk Kuipers, the later captain of motorcycle club No Surrender. They know each other through the gym. Bluming and Kuipers help Reilman out of debt and together with Kuipers he starts the Active Leisure gym.
Soon Reilman throws it over a different approach. He becomes a motivation and anti-aggression coach. He gives lessons to companies in the North. In the media, Reilman regularly appears with his well -known break tests: the striking of sturdy stone stacks. In 2015, the then 69-year-old manage to slap 204 stones in half in a minute and a half. A world record that still stands.
Text continues after the photos: