Yahoo News What former Stoke City manager told ambulance crew after heart attack left him dying
Johan Boskamp thought his time was over when he collapsed in the shower about 10 years ago, he has revealed in a new autobiography hitting the shelves in the Netherlands this week. A quarter of his heart gave up and his wife Lydia explained: "He looked me in the eye and said, 'I'm dying.'"
But, this being Boskamp, that is just 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 protesting. He didn't want to go because there was an important match on TV that evening. The paramedics had to promise him that he would be allowed to watch in the hospital. Typical Jan.”
Lydia has helped to co-write Mijn Leven - or My Life: Sporting and other confessions - as the former Stoke City manager, now aged 75, reflects on a career that saw him star as a player in the Netherlands and Belgium, coach around the world and become a colourful and very popular television pundit across 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 worries. When I met him, he weighed 140 kilos. He only ate steak and chips and drank litres of cola. 'Vegetables are for rabbits and water is for fish,' was one of his mottos."
That wasn't her first concern about Boskamp, however, going back to when they met in the 1970s.
She said in an interview for HBVL: “In the 1970s when Jan was still playing football for RWDM, he and his family came to live in our village on the outskirts of Brussels. I didn’t meet him for the first time until many 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 would ring the doorbell of a man who always opened the door in his underpants.
"As a worried mother, I went to get the story - and there he was: effectively in his underpants. But I quickly realised that 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, in Dutch and not in English yet unfortunately, has been written to raise money for charities that Boskamp and Lydia support, fighting against child poverty and South African AIDS orphans.
Boskamp himself said: "Everything is discussed. It even becomes a bit dangerous, because there are things in it that no one knows about. Does that mean you should read the book? No one should read it, but you should buy it, because the proceeds go to two charities chosen by Lydia."
Boskamp managed Stoke in 2005/06, either side of spells under Tony Pulis.
He previously said: "If I'm honest: I still regret every day that I handed in my contract back in at Stoke. Stoke is really a fantastic club and I enjoyed the experience of football there. But yes, I seem to be strangely wired. If I don't like something, I give my contract back. Stoke-on-Trent and the surrounding area is one of the poorest areas of England. Stoke is a real outlet for them and you see that with Port Vale, which also comes from Stoke-on-Trent. Their club is in fact the only thing they have."
