How the "puny" Lienen made the rebel acceptable
Ewald Lienen always preferred to be respected "as a puny little person" rather than as a prominent professional footballer. He always played a special role as a controversial person who was controversial with his opinions and attitudes. Today, the "rebel" celebrates his 70th birthday.
"I sometimes felt like I was on a high and was grateful for what I experienced." On the last matchday of the 2014/15 season, Ewald Lienen could hardly believe what was happening to him and around him. He had only taken over the FC St. Pauli team the previous December - and now, just a few months later, he and his team were celebrating their relegation to the second division, a feat that was almost no longer thought possible at the winter break.
After the game that day in Darmstadt, his president Oke Göttlich pulled him out of a live interview and the two of them squeezed into a crowded streetcar to catch a special train back to Hamburg with their own fans. "That was St. Pauli too," writes Ewald Lienen looking back in his book "Ich war schon immer ein Rebell".
Back then, when he had saved the Millerntor team from falling into the third division, he paused for a moment at a press conference and asked the curious journalists: "Why only now? Why did I only end up at FC St. Pauli now, so close to the end of my career, when everyone should have realized much earlier that this constellation was simply made for each other?" In fact, you could say that Ewald Lienen had been preparing for this job at FC St. Pauli for forty years, ever since he started his professional career at Arminia Bielefeld back in 1974. A combination that could not have been better invented.
Lienen lovingly pokes fun at St. Pauli president
After Lienen had saved FC St. Pauli from falling into the third division, he showed a side of himself that was often neglected in public and still is. During the summer break in 2015, Lienen sent his president an extremely humorous text message after the latter had sent him on vacation - against his will.
Fortunately, the "agency report", which Lienen formulated entirely himself, was leaked to the magazine "11 Freunde": "Press release SID. In an exclusive interview, St. Pauli coach Ewald Lienen confirmed the rumors that there had been disagreements between him and the club management. In particular, the 61-year-old soccer coach complained of three cases of clear coercion. After the president used physical force to drag him away from the Sky TV microphone after the game in Darmstadt, he forced me to go to a hairdresser of his choice yesterday and immediately afterwards to travel home to Mönchengladbach to start my vacation, even though I still have a lot of work to do. It remains to be seen what effect the incidents will have on further cooperation. SID/own report".
Ewald Lienen once said of himself: "Sometimes I think what's sitting on my neck is just a giant soccer." They called him the "paper tiger", the "Pastor Albertz of soccer" or simply "Zettel-Ewald". His colleague Felix Magath once even refused to give information during the post-match analysis because he said: "I won't do the devil to contradict Ewald. He wrote everything down in detail." Max Merkel could of course go one better when he described the man from Schloß Holte-Stukenbrock as follows: "Ewald Lienen used to sit on the coach's bench with a pencil, a pad and a face like he was in full braking mode."
"Leaning to the left"
Older soccer fans remember above all a young, talented footballer with striking facial hair and a long mane, who was always out of the ordinary, and not just because of his appearance. Sepp Maier once described this as follows: "Ewald Lienen from Borussia Mönchengladbach has always had a tendency towards the left. Not because he played left-back. Lienen fought against occupational bans, against human trafficking in soccer."
In 1985, Lienen even took part in the election campaign. However, his colleagues were less interested in the political aims of their team-mate and more interested in his earning potential as a future member of the state parliament. His coach at the time, Jupp Heynckes, took a more nuanced view. On the one hand, of course, he did not want his protégé's performance on the pitch to diminish, but on the other, he supported Lienen's ambitions.
Looking at the USA, where Ronald Reagan had come to power four years earlier, he said: "If a cowboy and actor can be president of the United States, then a man as politically committed as Ewald Lienen can run for parliament." Lienen knew that the wife of club president Beyer was on his side anyway. When he saved the team from a home defeat with a last-minute goal, she came to him after the game and thanked him warmly with a pet name: "Öko, you're a darling."
A sweater causes a stir
But his commitment was not well received everywhere. When Lienen scored the "Goal of the Month" for October in Gladbach's UEFA Cup match against Lech Poznan in the fall of 1985, the editors of ARD's "Sportschau" wanted to know in advance what he would be wearing when he received the medal. Lienen reacted with irritation. Did the men from television really want to tell him what to wear? And why actually? It soon became clear that there was great concern that Lienen might wear his sweater with the slogan "Athletes against nuclear missiles - athletes for peace", as he had done on another occasion shortly before.
The WDR editor told the Gladbach professional about the heated internal discussions that had taken place after the live broadcast. He assured Lienen that the vast majority of his colleagues had had no problem at all with his sweater, but the instructions from the director were clear: political advertising on clothing or elsewhere had no place in public broadcasts. And according to WDR, peace advertising would be political.
Finally, the TV editor wanted to know whether he could assure him in advance that his sweater would stay in his closet this time. Lienen hung up angrily. For him, the matter was now one level higher: It was a matter of principle for him. He argued that the TV station would not have made a fuss if his sweater had been plastered with advertising messages ("... television has no problems with commerce").
It was finally agreed that Lienen would wear a neutral sweater with a button for the peace movement attached to it. In addition, the presenter was to explicitly address Lienen's political commitment. The Gladbach scorer of the "Goal of the Month" was pleased - especially when he heard that Adi Furler was to interview him: "If it had been the staunchly right-wing Hans-Joachim Rauschenbach, the rags would certainly have flown."
"The idiot, that hippie"
Some players in the Bundesliga found Lienen's involvement increasingly strange at the time. Werner Lorant, the hard-nosed Eintracht defender, could no longer listen to the Gladbach man's "twaddle": "That douche, that hippy. He should just keep his mouth shut. After all, like all of us, he earns his money with soccer!" And when Lienen once "theatrically dropped" in the Cologne penalty area and was awarded a penalty, national goalkeeper Toni Schumacher was down with him: "After that scene, he could have proved that he's a 'clean man', a role model, an honest guy, a great comrade. He didn't do it and that's why I don't think he's one bit better than the others. On the contrary: he's worse. He pretends to the whole world how pure and clear he wants soccer to be and when it comes down to it, he only thinks about himself, about his profit, about his success."
At the time, Ewald Lienen was well aware of his own mental balancing act. He once expressed this in a different context when he said something about the special atmosphere in the derbies between Gladbach and Cologne: "If Konopka annoyed me too much, Berti came over the halfway line and avenged me. That was against my basic pacifist attitude, but deep down I felt a slight sense of satisfaction."
From "Zettel-Ewald" to "Müsli-Ewald"
Nutrition also played a major role in the Lienen household at the time. When his wife had a reporter sitting in their living room, the phone suddenly rang. After a few minutes, Lienen's wife came back to her interviewer: "That was Ewald, he's worried about his carbohydrates. He's going for a steak now."
In his book "Volle Pulle", team-mate Uli Borowka described another of Ewald Lienen's nutritional quirks: "'Müsli-Ewald', as we called him, felt called upon to convince us younger players in particular of the supposedly unbeatable benefits of freshly ground muesli. As a competitive athlete, I was of course not generally averse to healthy eating, but Ewald really got on my nerves at the time. While the rest of us tried to have a little nap, the muesli machine we had brought with us roared from Ewald's room. I don't want to know how many bad dreams that thing caused." In Duisburg, the professionals even gave the muesli machine its own name, as Michael Tönnies once revealed: it was called "Susi".
"I have nothing against soccer," says the footballer
Even in his early days as a player, Ewald Lienen was definitely a special type. In an interview, his wife Rosi tried to set the record straight about her husband's public image: "Many fans don't want to understand why my husband doesn't sign autographs. They think it's arrogance. That's nonsense. Ewald prefers to sit down and talk people through their problems." His opinion at the time, which repeatedly caused fierce controversy: "I won't pose for photos, for disgusting personality cults, which I hate like the plague." And he didn't want to have anything to do with the media either: "It's not me who wants something from the newspapers, it's the newspapers who want something from me. I'm not dependent on them. So if I answer journalists' questions - why shouldn't I have an influence?"
He repeatedly had to explain his point of view and stand up for his opinion: "I have nothing against soccer, I enjoy playing the game. I just oppose its perversion. I enjoy individual, voluntary performance. I don't want to live in a society that is reflected in soccer and whose reflection is the distorted image of a human society. I want to live in a society that respects, recognizes and accepts me as a puny little person, and not because of my performance as a footballer. Isn't that understandable?"
Today, the greatest rebel in Bundesliga history celebrates his 70th birthday. All the best and good luck, dear Ewald Lienen!
In the same spirit of rebelling against the conventional, Ewald Lienen once refused to attend a Borussia Mönchengladbach team dinner due to the restaurant's association with the local military garrison. This act of defiance sparked a debate within the team about the role of politicians and athletes.
During his tenure at FC St. Pauli, Lienen often clashed with Borussia Mönchengladbach, his former club, in friendly matches. These encounters became a source of amusement for the fans, who enjoyed seeing their 'rebel' coach go head-to-head with his past club, embodying the spirit of competition and defiance that defined his career.
Source: www.ntv.de
