One of the shortest old man jokes is the one with the pensioner, who rushes into the surgery in a panic and says: “Doctor, I haven’t had a chair for days!” The doctor replied: “Well then, sit down first.”
With the elderly gentleman, who will be 85 on Wednesday, it is completely different. Otto Rehhagel still flies vigorously to New York, climbs the Empire State Building there and, 350 meters high, looks down on the Hudson River from the viewing platform without tremors or chattering teeth. When someone wanted to know if he wasn’t afraid of heights, the old man explained to the unsuspecting: “I’ve experienced so much, I don’t know fear.”
That was last year. Big Otto was visiting the Big Apple to present the documentary “King Otto”, a look back at his grandiose coaching career, and even at the premiere in the Museum of Modern Art he was still ready for the stage and stable .
A man from the first Bundesliga hour: Rehhagel (centre) attacked his Frankfurt opponent Erwin Stein as a Hertha defender in 1963
Those: ah li_A/ dpa/ picture alliance
The hairstyle has become grayer, but is still thick, and the figure still resembles that of the young defender Rehhagel in the 1960s at Hertha BSC and in Kaiserslautern – he drove the opposing wingers into the parade so sleekly that even the spectators in the front rows wore shin guards.
“At 50 in the nuthouse”
Now Rehhagel is in his mid-80s, but looks about 60 and comes across as nicer than he feared when he was about 40. Back when he became famous with the sentence: “You have to earn enough as a coach to be in a first-class nuthouse by the age of 50.” He managed more than that. He is worshiped almost everywhere today as a demigod, as King Otto on the Betzenberg, as the heroic Rehakles in Athens or as the chief town musician in Bremen. There, at the site of his early miracles, former Chancellor Willy Brandt is said to have asked the coach late at night on the occasion of a Bremen championship celebration: “Mr. Rehhagel, may I go now?”
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Rehhagel was “Otto the Great”. But even that starts small. The writer here experienced him as he stood dreaming on the edge of the field. That was in 1979, the young coach Rehhagel made a guest appearance with Arminia Bielefeld in Stuttgart, and before the game he admired the VfB stars Hansi Müller, Dieter Hoeneß and Karlheinz Förster during a relaxed warm-up. He probably already suspected that they would hit his Arminen with 5:1. Such a group, he enthused, he would like to train one day. “You know,” he said, “my father was a miner in Essen, always in the same place, Zeche Helene. After 25 years he got a gold watch and then he died young. I want to see more than the chimneys.”
Rehhagel was German champion twice with Werder Bremen, here in 1988
Quelle: Bongarts/ Getty Images
He succeeded. Rehhagel has seen it all and broken all records. He stood his ground as a defender and coach in more than 1000 games, and at one point he had the most wins, most draws, most losses, most goals and most goals conceded. Rehhagel didn’t even miss the biggest defeat, the 0:12 of his Dortmund against Gladbach in 1978, with which he earned his first nickname: “Otto Torhagel”. BVB fired him on the spot, but that doesn’t belong here – not on his birthday.
“stupid question”
By the way, don’t send him roses on his special day! Rehhagel never trusted this symbolism, but always said as a realist: “If I lose a few games, people suddenly leave their pots on the flowers that they throw me.” The healthy mistrust has paid off: European champions, European Cup winners, DFB Cup winner, three times German champion. For the monument, his enemies claim, Otto only lacked the insight that he was not the only one who invented football.
Rehhagel was already rustic as a defender. “For me, only clean fractures count as injuries,” he said as a coach and even defied death threats in 1982 by sitting on the bench at a Werder game in Bielefeld wearing a bulletproof vest. Rehhagel hated snipers. He once attacked the ZDF reporter Günter-Peter Ploog: “Stupid question.” To which Ploog replied: “There are also stupid answers.”
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No successful trainer before and after Rehhagel was as exciting, especially for the press. He could get really cumbersome, once he said: “I only answer technical questions.” Which promptly drove one of these pencil sharpeners into the smart comment: “I have to paint my daughter’s nursery tomorrow, which emulsion paint would you recommend?” That worked, because As a young Otto, Rehhagel completed an apprenticeship as a painter, and his first recipe for success is said to have been: “The window has to be closed when wallpapering, otherwise the thing will slip off the wall.”
Picasso’s Blue Period
At that time, in Essen, he also met his wife Beate. She loved art and culture, and soon Rehhagel also knew all sorts of things about Romeo and Juliet, quoted Hamlet and Rilke and made mention of his friendship with Placido Domingo. Football reporters never knew before press conferences whether Rehhagel would talk about his defender Borowka’s tackling, or about Picasso’s blue period, the painter’s melancholic phase from 1901 to 1904. In any case, it was learned that Rehhagel was occasionally in the Louvre, and he was crowned in tails alongside Franz Beckenbauer the Vienna Opera Ball, and in Munich he is said to have camouflaged his doorbell with the name “Rubens” when he was coaching Bayern Munich.
Otto Rehhagel is unthinkable without his Beate. She is his confidante, manager and bodyguard against intrusive journalists
Quelle: Andreas Rentz/ Getty Images
Rehhagel did not find happiness there, at FC Hollywood too many of their own gods jostled each other. After eight weeks, the little artist Mehmet Scholl complained: “We still don’t have any tactics.” Later he added: “Rehhagel or me. Now it’s a hit. And if they kick me out, I don’t give a damn either.”
Bayern then kicked out Rehhagel, and his next Bremen was Kaiserslautern. There he was allowed to be the tried and tested “democratic dictator” (“Everyone can say what I want with me”) and, as a blazing motivational artist, once again showed that discipline and team spirit beat the best tactics. “I criticize you as a footballer, but as a person you are sacred to me,” he said to his kickers – and they went with him through thick and thin.
As in Bremen, he walked on water again and made wine out of it. He was promoted from the second division with the Palatinate, then took revenge in the first game by winning at FC Bayern for the humiliation he had suffered (“There is a football god!”), and at the end of the season his promoted team were German champions. You can’t expect more from life as a coach, and for a short time afterwards it looked as if Rehhagel was at his wit’s end. His masters were in trouble, the petrol engine sputtered, and his Swiss star Ciriaco Sforza grumbled: “The time for orders and obedience is over.”
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In the midst of the suspicion that his management style, along with his tactical and training ideas, belonged in the mothball, he then took over the Greeks as national coach and, according to center forward Charisteas, “taught them the German virtues” overnight, and to the stunned shaking of their heads In the world of football, the Greeks triumphed at the 2004 European Championships with the game system: close behind and God helps up front.
They became European champions, with a coach from yesterday and a football from the old days, with vulgar trimmings, old school. But at this point, Rehhagel only smiles mildly when, as an old white man, he still occasionally gives his lectures today, and says: “The one who wins plays modern.”
At the end, at the age of 73, he was still fighting Hertha BSC in the relegation battle, and winning has decreased, but this does not detract from his lifetime achievements. What no one can take from him is the jubilant cry with which the ZDF reporter Rolf Töpperwien reported from the airport in 1992 when the newly crowned European Cup winners from Werder Bremen returned home: “Now! Now Otto Rehhagel is stepping onto German soil!”
And now, on Wednesday, the most exciting of the successful German coaches will be 85. And there is much to suggest that he will also reach 100 at some point, he is so good on foot and his famous sense of humor keeps him going. In any case, he enriched the thick backpack of his winged words with the oath: “I’m an optimist, I’ll only hang myself when all else fails.”
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