A success coach, but also an ogre, bully. Gerard Bakker, who discovered table tennis champion Bettine Vriesekoop, died last week at the age of 84, was ahead of his time in the 1970s. In a decade in which individual top sport in the Netherlands was synonymous with amateurism, he led a reign of terror as propagated in the Eastern Bloc countries.
According to statistics, with success. Under the guidance of two different coaches, Vriesekoop became European champion twice and won the equally prestigious Top 12 tournament twice. The ultimate goal – to knock the Chinese off the top of the world – failed. Her highest global ranking was seventh place.
But the Spartan training methods had a dark side. The very young Vriesekoop visibly suffered under the coach with the big glasses and the tight tracksuit. Bakker later blasted her in front of the NOS camera just after she had qualified for the quarter-finals at the 1988 Games in Seoul. An hour later she was eliminated by a less strong European opponent. Mentally battered, the 27-year-old quit immediately, and soon afterwards made a successful, more relaxed return without Bakker under trainer Jan Vlieg, who advocated a soft approach.
Father figure
Bakker was a father figure for the farmer’s daughter from Hazerswoude, who lost her own father when she was eleven. TV images of a scared, pale teenage girl being cheered and verbally abused to the point of tears did not quite lead to parliamentary questions. They were a rewarding subject for the satirists Koot & Bie and Spaan & Vermeegen. And not only Vriesekoop was affected by the coach’s whims: in 1982, Bakker head-butted table tennis international Ron of Spain during an argument at a training camp.
Bakker became club coach of Avanti in Hazerswoude in the late 1960s, where he would later take charge of Vriesekoop. He resigned in 1984 NRC back to the amateurism he found. “They played once a week in a gymnasium. I immediately said to the chairman: you must first ensure that training can take place every day, otherwise things will never work out here.” Eight years later, Avanti had a luxurious table tennis hall where a great talent also presented itself: Vriesekoop.
The collaboration with the minor pupil had the approval of Bettine’s mother. She herself was initially positive. “He has always been like a second father to me. He saved me from negative influences from the association. In the past, many players have been destroyed by that atmosphere. Thanks to Gerard that didn’t happen to me,” she said in the same interview in 1984.
‘My mother had to give me up’
In 1999, Vriesekoop also closed NRC, reflects less positively on her relationship with Bakker. “The death of my father created a terrible atmosphere at home. Bakker more or less told my mother that she had to give me up. She had been happy for a long time; we have found a surrogate father, she thought. I wasn’t allowed to go to parties. His pedagogy had a purpose: performance.
“When I fell in love at the age of eighteen, he suppressed it. It was either quit with that boyfriend or he wouldn’t pay attention to me anymore. So I called the boy to tell him it wasn’t happening. In the 1980s he put my name under an advertisement for ‘bilateral disarmament’. I knew nothing, I was hardly concerned with social issues. He reminded me: you don’t feel or think anything yourself.
“After the Games in Seoul I wanted to move to Amsterdam, into the city alone, not with Bakker. Playing the beast. Start living. But Bakker thought Amsterdam was dangerous, I would get into drugs. I held on. With someone who thinks in such black and white terms, breaking contact is inevitable. That man was god to me. I don’t know what he felt about me. But if it had been love, he would have let me go my own way. I wasn’t his wife, he knew that. When a man has so much power over a girl twenty years younger, there is always some kind of tension. I won’t say more about that.”
Also read
This interview with Vriesekoop about Bakker in 1999
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