Saturday, December 11th, 2021
Groundsman tied to the post
Most fun trainer ever
Posted by Ben Redelings
There are a lot of coaches in Germany who are better known than him. But there is no one else who is and was more entertaining than Uwe Klimaschefski. His sayings, pranks and quirks are legendary. Especially the story of the groundsman at the goal post.
Uwe Klimaschefski wasn’t just a trainer. He always had several jobs at his clubs. At FC Homburg, for example, he was often not on the sidelines during the games, but behind the fence. When one day a referee was surprised, “Klima” only said: “We don’t have enough stewards in our small club. Sometimes I have to step in.”
Klimaschefski also took on the role of club doctor himself at times. His specialty: mysterious ointments that should help players get fit faster after injuries. But not all professionals were able to take advantage of this “medicine”, although their trainer swore by them himself: “I tried it on my rotten bones beforehand. One of them stank so much that my wife fled the apartment.”
His favorite discipline, however, was that of the marketing director. Since his clubs mostly had very little money and he was considered a savvy man himself – he only ever refueled his car for 10 marks so that his car was lighter and consumed less, and he liked to have two or three stones packed for himself on construction sites on the side of the road in order to gradually build a house with it – Klimaschefski had some crazy ideas about getting coal.
He had one of his craziest ideas before a game against Fürth. In order to attract more spectators to the stadium, Klimaschefski came up with a trick. He announced through the media that a very special race between two female topless models would take place during the half-time break. Thanks to his good contacts with a Homburg bar owner, the plan had matured that two women from the establishment should cover a distance of 400 meters in their work clothes. And the first part of the plan actually worked. 1500 spectators more than calculated turned up in the stadium. But there was nothing to be seen of the bare-breasted women at halftime. “Klima” had withdrawn at the last moment: “The DFB would not have liked to see it that much.” Does not matter. The hoped-for additional coal was also in the bag.
“When scrap prices rise again!”
Klimaschefski was both feared and loved by its players. Understandably, not all professionals liked his straight and open manner. Someone he approached directly had to swallow hard: “What does he want, money? He should be happy if he can breathe the oxygen free of charge in our place.” It is understandable that Franco Foda once said of him: “Anyone who can hold out for a year under Klimaschefski has come a big step further in life and no longer needs to be afraid of anything.”
But the media loved their trainer with powerful language. Klimaschefski’s sayings are legendary to this day: “I had contacts in France, but as a coach I would have needed an interpreter. Now I’m looking around Berlin and I hope it won’t work there.” Sometimes he sat desperately in the press room after a defeat, only looked briefly at the journalists and then said sentences like these: “I can’t answer any further questions the cabin to the bus cannot be found. ” Yes, as a professional under Klimaschefski you had to have a thick skin. Also unforgettable is the saying from him when a journalist asked when he was thinking of selling the next players. Klima’s answer, in a nutshell: “When scrap prices rise again!”
And yet: players rarely rebelled against him. But in his time at FC Homburg there was another tough one. An intrepid man nicknamed “Underberg” resisted the coach from time to time. Klimaschefski rubbed himself with him time and again. And one story tops everything.
“Getting some balls in front of the sack”
On a Rose Monday, this “Underberg” in his function as groundskeeper – who was also the owner of the club’s restaurant – prevented the trainer from exercising on the lawn. Instead, the team should switch to the hard court, which, according to Klimaschefski, was “actually so hard” that you could have landed a jumbo “without any major problems”. But when the coach noticed that the groundskeeper was “already full as a bucket”, he still sent his boys onto the lawn. That didn’t fit “Underberg” at all. He kept pointing out to the trainer by heckling that he had landed in the wrong place: “Klimaaa, you idiot! Get off the lawn!”
Ben Redelings is a passionate “chronicler of football madness” and a supporter of the glorious VfL Bochum. The bestselling author and comedian lives in the Ruhr area and maintains his legendary treasure trove of anecdotes. for ntv.de he writes down the most exciting and funniest stories on Mondays and Saturdays. More information about Ben Redelings, his current dates and his book with the best columns (“Between Puff and Barcelona”) can be found on his website www.scudetto.de.
At some point Klimaschefski got too stupid and instructed a young player to fetch jump ropes. Then he gathered the team at the center circle and said: “You go down now, take him prisoner and tie him with the ropes.” And that’s exactly how it happened. The defenseless groundskeeper was tied to a goal post and shot at with balls that had been positioned on the edge of the penalty area. Klimaschefski remembers: “He got a few balls in front of the sack, but it didn’t buckle, the boys tied him too well for that.” At the same time, “Underberg” s pants kept slipping down during the evasive attempts, until at some point he was standing at the post only dressed in his underpants.
The whole gruesome spook finally ended after almost fifteen minutes, when the groundsman’s wife stormed out of the club’s restaurant armed with a bread knife and cut her husband off the post. It was just one of many small and large frictions between the coach and “Underberg” over the years.
But understandably this one story followed Klimaschefski all his life. And so he said, remembering that day, and whenever it got a little louder again: “I’ve calmed down now, and I won’t tie the groundsman to the post during shooting training as I did in Homburg.” Today the most entertaining coach of all time is celebrating his 83rd birthday. All the best and luck to you, dear Uwe Klimaschefski!