Johan Cruyff, the High Priest of Dutch Soccer, Dies at 68
By ANDREW DAS

Johan Cruyff, a brash Dutch soccer star who helped develop a style that revolutionized the way the game is played, becoming the Netherlands’ greatest player and later a scolding conscience of the sport, died on Thursday in Barcelona, Spain. He was 68.

The cause was cancer, Cruyff’s family said in a statement on his website.

Cruyff, a heavy smoker until he had heart problems in the 1990s, revealed in October that he had lung cancer. But as recently as Feb. 16 he had predicted his recovery, saying he had “the feeling that I am 2-0 up in the first half of a match that has not finished yet.”

Widely acclaimed as one of the best players in history, Cruyff (pronounced CROYF) teamed with the famed coach Rinus Michels in the 1970s to perfect a style called Total Football, a shape-shifting system in which players switch positions effortlessly.

A wiry and deceptively quick forward, Cruyff was the personification of the style, bursting forward to attack or drifting back to defend, but always ready to deliver an incisive pass or to appear in the perfect position when an opportunity to score arose.

He was a proponent of beauty over efficiency, though he preferred to demonstrate both. “Quality without results is pointless,” he was quoted as saying. “Results without quality is boring.”

Cruyff, though, was never boring. Supremely confident in his opinions and quick to share them, sometimes with an acid tongue, he left a trail of bitter feuds as a player, coach and executive. He quibbled about money and sponsorships, and about tactics and control. He departed his boyhood club, Ajax Amsterdam, on bad terms several times and was fired by Barcelona in 1996 — four years after winning the European Cup — after a falling out with the club board.

Yet the vision and adaptability inherent in the Total Football he helped create changed the way soccer was played, and lifted its adherents, notably Ajax, F.C. Barcelona and the Dutch national team, to great heights.

Ajax won the first of three consecutive European Cups in 1971 with Cruyff and Michels at the controls, and the Netherlands reached consecutive World Cup finals in the 1970s, becoming known as the Clockwork Orange for the team’s orange jerseys and sweeping movements.

Cruyff, like Michels before him, preached Total Football at Barcelona, which Cruyff coached to its first European title in 1992 and which continues to hold to t style of play as its guiding philosophy. His influence on the club’s youth academy and players and coaches like Pep Guardiola set a foundation for Barcelona’s, and Spain’s, recent era of trophies and championships.

The former England striker Gary Lineker, who played for Cruyff at Barcelona, said, “Football has lost a man who did more to make the beautiful game beautiful than anyone in history.”

Hendrik Johannes Cruyff was born on April 25, 1947, in Amsterdam, and grew up in a working-class neighborhood that was only a short walk from the Ajax training facility. He joined the club as a 10-year-old and made his first-team debut at 17 in 1964. Michels arrived a year later, and together they turned Ajax into one of the best teams in the world.

With Cruyff directing the Total Football symphony Michels had designed, Ajax won the European Cup, the forerunner of the UEFA Champions League, three straight times, from 1971 to 1973. In 1973, Cruyff joined Michels at Barcelona for a transfer fee of about $14.1 million in today’s dollars, a record at the time. A year after that they led the Netherlands to the World Cup final in Germany.

The Dutch took a 1-0 lead in that game before the Germans even touched the ball, stringing together 17 passes from the opening kickoff until Cruyff won a penalty, which Johan Neeskens converted. But Germany answered with two goals, denying Cruyff and his country a title they have yet to claim.

That final, like the Barcelona transfer, offered a glimpse of Cruyff’s mercenary side. The Dutch federation had signed a sponsorship with Adidas for that year’s World Cup, but Cruyff, who had his own deal with rival Puma, refused to wear the team’s official uniform, believing that to do so would be a conflict. To appease their star, Dutch officials relented and allowed Cruyff to play in a custom-made shirt bearing only two stripes on the sleeves instead of Adidas’s famed three.

Honored as Europe’s best player in 1971, 1973 and 1974, Cruyff won nine Dutch League titles in Holland (eight with Ajax and one with Feyenoord at the end of his career) and another in Spain with Barcelona. He later coached Ajax and Barcelona, with whom he won four Spanish titles and his fourth European club title. But despite flirtations with the Dutch federation, he never led his national team.

Cruyff retired from international soccer in 1977, missing the Netherlands’ return to the World Cup final in 1978 in Argentina. The reason given at the time was that he opposed the military dictatorship in Argentina; years later, however, he revealed to a Catalonian radio station that he and his family had been subjected to a kidnapping attempt in Barcelona a few months before the tournament.

He left Barcelona in 1978 but returned to the game a year later when he signed a $1.4 million deal with the Los Angeles Aztecs of the North American Soccer League. At the time, he credited his comeback, at age 32, to his love for the sport and to the chance to bring the game to a new place; in reality, he acknowledged, he had lost money in a series of investments and saw the rich contract with the N.A.S.L. as a welcome payday.

He played for one season with the Aztecs and another with the Washington Diplomats before returning to Europe for a brief tenure with Spain’s Levante and then a return to Ajax. When Ajax did not offer him a new contract in 1983, he signed with rival Feyenoord — and promptly won the league and Dutch Cup double at age 37 before retiring for good.

The English journalist David Miller labeled him “Pythagoras in boots” for his ability to see open space and advantageous angles on a field. David Winner, in his book on Dutch soccer, “Brilliant Orange,” compared Cruyff’s play to the perfection and organization of a Vermeer painting.

His game was so sublime that he has a move named after him: the Cruyff turn, a deft sleight-of-foot maneuver in which he teased defenders in one direction before using his heel to push the ball behind him and a burst of speed to break away.

“There is no better medal than being acclaimed for your style,” he said in 2008 after watching another eye-pleasing Dutch team try, and fail, to win the World Cup.

But as much as he prized elegant play, Cruyff loathed teams that turned away from his ideals. When the Netherlands reached the World Cup final in 2010, Cruyff decried the team’s bruising style as “antifootball.”

“This ugly, vulgar, hard, hermetic, hardly eye-catching, hardly football style, yes, it served the Dutch to unsettle Spain,” he told a Spanish newspaper. “If with this they got satisfaction, fine, but they ended up losing.”

Spain won the final, 1-0, playing with a possession-based style more to Cruyff’s liking, and with a goal scored by a player, Andrés Iniesta, who had emerged from the Barcelona youth system Cruyff had nurtured.

Cruyff is survived by his wife of 47 years, Danny Coster; two daughters, Chantal and Susila; and a son, Jordi, who followed his father into professional soccer, playing with Barcelona and Manchester United, and coaching.

荷蘭全能足球之父告魯夫 68歲辭世

足球史上偉大球員之一告魯夫（Johan Cruyff）的家人說，告魯夫今天因肺癌辭世，享壽68歲。

這位傳奇球員的官方網站發聲明說，告魯夫「不敵癌症病魔，在家人圍繞下，平靜地離開人世」。

告魯夫效力荷蘭足球俱樂部阿賈克斯（Ajax）時，贏得3屆歐洲盃（European Cup）冠軍；他本人3次獲選「歐洲足球先生」（Ballon d’Or）。他後來帶領巴塞隆納隊（Barcelona）於1992年首度奪下歐洲盃冠軍。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/sports/soccer/johan-cruyff-netherlands-soccer.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytstyle.com/culture/20160324/tc24cruyff/zh-hant/

2016-03-24 聯合新聞網 中央社