One of the most moving things I ever saw on television was a documentary about an artist who decided to bring a stone that ended up in Borger back home to Sweden during the last ice age. The highlight was a stone whisperer who came to ask the boulder what he thought of it. Answer: “I no longer have a job here. I’m just lying here.” This is how the stone disappeared from the roundabout in Borger, where dozens of similar boulders lie waiting to see what the future will bring.
The fact that the future is always uncertain is also the heart of the book, which is located in a cupboard a little further away in an impressive row of sports books: Nouri. The promise. The book that journalist Henk Spaan wrote about Abdelhak Nouri, the Ajax player who suffered a cardiac arrest on the field in 2017 and suffered serious brain damage. Spaan (1948) had known Nouri since he was nine and traveled endlessly to Ajax youth matches to see the little miracle. He fell in love with football: because of Nouri’s technique and insight into the game, but also because of his personality. ‘Appie’ was not only friendly, he also kept an eye on the well-being of his fellow football players like a little shepherd.
Now the latter has been written and said about Nouri more than once and Spaan’s book is also full of endearing anecdotes about the boy whose promise was never fulfilled. Typical stories about how little Abdelhak refused to take off his football boots before going to sleep (his parents did that when he slept). Besides, Nouri wasn’t good with laces anyway; these were often tied a little extra by adults. And once by teammate Donny van de Beek, when Appie suffered two broken metacarpals in a youth match against the young brutes of Atlético Madrid.
Amsterdam New West
Nouri. The promise is also about mourning. Because 49 years before Nouri spent every possible minute playing football in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, the young Henk Spaan did so. Without the talent, but in the same streets. In those streets he now searches for memories of Nouri and his own past. In between, Spaan rails against everyone who has ever bothered Nouri, especially former youth coaches who preferred physically stronger players.
There is sometimes something clumsy about Spanish quest – sadness and clumsiness often go hand in hand. Take the moment when Spaan decides to take bus 21 to his old neighborhood, first looking for the stop on the wrong side of Central Station and then wondering about the route the bus takes. Once on site, he is amazed by the table tennis tables completely (even the ‘net’) cast from vandal-proof concrete that he finds on a square. It will come as no surprise that Appie was also good at ping-pong – and that despite that disarming smile, he wanted to win every game at all costs.
Spanish quest also has a social component: he wants to show what he recognizes in Nouri and the other boys in Nieuw-West – as a contrast to the ubiquitous stories about Dutch people of his generation who claim they “no longer recognize” their old neighborhood. Spaan recognized it: the talent, the ambition and the hope. Towards the end of the book he writes that it is a pity that the stone on the squares in Geuzenveld-Slotermeer has no memory: “Then the footprints in the asphalt would have a lot to say.”
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