In my house, they rarely told us to shut up, except when the name of Johan Cruyff was pronounced on television, the pagan god of my childhood, the star that lit the atmosphere in the dining room. Faced with that sparkling emotion, we children remained attentive to their images, still in black and white. We admired her haircut and her legs, which snaked in a loop of optical illusions. “How clever is the lanky!” my father would say. My mother confirmed his attractiveness, but she challenged his air of pimp, “ros de mal pel”. The last joy I gave my father a few days before he died of cancer was to find my name in Sergi Pàmies’ book on Cruyff (I gave it to him unaware that he was quoting me).
After a childhood marked by the shadow of the Dutchman, when I became a journalist I did not stop pursuing an interview with him. It was in 1993, for Woman magazine; I keep the cassette and the memory of the pain in my chest. Thanks to the arts of Joan Patsy, we got in right. And Cruyff showed us that fashion was not alien to him. He posed for photographer Toni Bernard, who, between shots, exclaimed: “Great, wonderful, mel”. But far from being embarrassing, Cruyff, so comfortable, took off and put on the Ray-Bans with which he arrived in Barcelona that summer of ’73.
Even the children were surprised that this glamorous and cosmopolitan couple stayed to live with us. In Spain, Mocedades sang Eres tú in Eurovision. Censorship still slapped the face and it was necessary to make a pilgrimage to Perpignan without complexes to discover the other uses of butter. An ancient thirst wanted to be quenched with long drinks of modernity. The fashion of the seventies expanded in a reformulation of the hippy and the folk in an urban version. And short-sleeved checked shirts, turtlenecks or Saint Laurent-style pants with elephant feet found an impeccable hanger in Johan.
The Cruyffs liked the Carnaby style, but in a polished version, since they had landed in Washington, where they became friends with their neighbors, the Carters. Danny sported bobs and banana bows, wore hats and tall patent leather boots reminiscent of French cinema of the time. He also chose mini dresses, or trapeze skirts in a twist of the Courrèges style.
As for crack, Robert Redford and Steve McQueen were sensed as referents, although translated into Dutch. In addition to flared trouser suits and shirts one size smaller, he wore knitted sweaters that didn’t seem to itch. A fabric that accompanied him until the end of his days: cashmere. And the easywear.
Danny and Johan, holding hands, represented a modern couple in which he also gave the children bottles and taught Jordi to kick the ball. When his father died, Johan was 14 years old, and they took him out of school to work. They called him Jopie, according to Auke Kok, the author of a biography, when he went to work selling sportswear in a store owned by Leo van de Kaar, Ajax benefactor, who let him wear new boots to first-team footballers. He then worked at Litrico, another textile establishment where he learned to haggle and negotiate. His image was always impregnated with rebellion and self-confidence, not in vain did he stand up to Adidas in a World Cup. He told it like this: “They wanted us to wear a shirt and I asked for my share. They denied me saying that the shirt was theirs, and I told them that the head was mine. So throughout the World Cup I played with a different shirt from the rest (I had a contract with Puma)”. Without knowing it, he was inaugurating a genre: the overwhelming business of sports brands and their ambassadors.
Cruyff wore his hair elegantly and had sex appeal, although he said he never worried “about that”, and added: “I think about other things”. He learned a frontier Spanish that did not feign charm, like his perhaps, at a given moment or his chicken skin. In his gestures he dispatched adrenaline, speed of thought, surreal phrases and a photogenic style of smoking. It was what Mick Jagger did in rock – without ever stepping foot in a coffee shop. Cruyff appears in all the lists of the 70’s style icons.
He invented his own brand, three decades ahead of Beckham, in the 1980s. And Cruyff Classics visited the Dutch delegation at the Seoul Games in 1988. When he quit smoking after the heart attack, he became fond of golf and Italian fashion, Brunello Cucinelli or Loro Piana, and took on a softer, even more spiritual air. He continued to talk to his father on a daily basis.
When I interviewed him for the second time, at the Cruyff Foundation, it was 2013 and he gave me three kisses when he greeted me. He gave off a clean and elegant air, and a refined education – he, who joked that he only obtained one diploma in his life: swimming. What hypnotized you was that mixture of security, poise and liveliness that made up the Cruyff style. The beauty of charisma.
