Johan Boskamp thought his time was up when he collapsed in the shower about 10 years ago, he reveals in a new autobiography that hits Dutch stores this week. A quarter of his heart gave out and his wife Lydia explains: “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m going to die.'”
But, this is Boskamp, that’s only half the story. Lydia added: “The emergency services brought him back to consciousness, but when they wanted to put him on the stretcher in the ambulance, he started to protest. He didn’t want to go because there was an important match on TV that evening. The emergency services had to promise him that he could watch in the hospital. Typical Jan.”
Lydia co-authored My Life and Other Confessions, in which the former Stoke City manager, now 75 years old, looks back on a career in which he shone as a player in the Netherlands and Belgium, coached all over the world and grew into a colourful and popular television analyst in the Low Countries.
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She has long warned him about his weight and the impact on his health, saying: “It’s still a struggle. One that has given me a lot of energy and worry. When I met him, he weighed 300 pounds. He ate nothing but steak and chips and drank gallons of Coke. ‘Vegetables are for rabbits and water is for fish,’ was one of his mottos.”
However, that was not her primary concern about Boskamp, ever since they met in the 1970s.
She said in an interview for HBVL: “In the 70s, when Jan was still playing football at RWDM, he came to live with his family in our village on the edge of Brussels. I only met him for the first time years later. My son often played football on a square behind his house. He told me that the ball sometimes flew over the hedge and that he rang the doorbell of a man who always opened the door in his underpants.
“As a concerned mother, I went to get the story – and there he was: effectively in his underwear. But I quickly realised there was not an ounce of evil in him. The next day he came to see me and we quickly became a couple.”
The book, unfortunately not yet available in English and Dutch, was written to raise money for the charities that Boskamp and Lydia support and that fight against child poverty and AIDS orphans in South Africa.
Boskamp himself said: “Everything is covered. It even becomes a bit dangerous, because there are things in it that no one knows. Does that mean you have to read the book? No one has to read it, but you have to buy it, because the proceeds go to two charities that Lydia has chosen.”
Boskamp was manager of Stoke in 2005/06, both times under Tony Pulis.
He said earlier: “If I’m honest, I regret handing in my contract at Stoke every day. Stoke is a fantastic club and I enjoyed the football experience there. But then again, I’m a strange person. If I don’t like something, I hand it back. Stoke-on-Trent and the surrounding area is one of the poorest areas in England. Stoke is a real outlet for them and you see that with Port Vale, who are also from Stoke-on-Trent. Their club is basically the only thing they’ve got.”
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