Atze Schröder loves history!
“It’s just sensational,” he said recently in his “Tender Cousins” podcast when he laughingly recounted the wonderful story of a former Bundesliga star from the book “Dem Fußball seine Heimat”. And indeed: the story comes from a wonderfully different time, when the real guys made football so colossally entertaining, and not just in the Ruhr area.
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Flashback. Early seventies. The “beautiful Friedel” intoxication has a hit with women. Back then, the Schalke was said to have been the last to stand at the bar with a woman at parties – and the former teammates still roll their eyes when they reveal frivolous stories from the famous sewing box behind closed doors.
Story about intoxication in “Playboy”
One thing quickly becomes clear: Friedel Rausch was not exactly considered a food lover at the time. One day this is exactly what the richly illustrated erotic magazine thought, which men are known to buy solely because of the interviews that are worth reading, and wrote a hot story about the Casanova from the district. Of course, Rausch quickly got wind of the matter.
And so on the day of publication he stormed out of the warm marital bed into the cold autumn night early in the morning – with a dedicated mission. What he had not expected, however: In the morning fog, a team colleague spotted the attractive Schalke player at a kiosk in Duisburg, when Rausch was lifting a large pack of “Playboy” issues into his trunk with his hands full.
But Rausch did not let itself be confused. The Casanova looked around nervously in all directions. And only when he had closed the flap of the trunk, he casually sat behind the steering wheel of his sleek sports car and said with a cheeky look to his teammate: “Hmmm, it’s clear. Not a word, no !? I have to go on. Everyone Buy up expenses before my in-laws find one. “
When Rausch roared away with screeching tires, his team-mate looked after him, puzzled. He looked at the back of the car with a skeptical look. And then he smiled: the cart was almost on the floor with its ass due to the weight of the hundreds of notebooks.
Bite the ass
Who now thinks – Friedel Rausch, I still know him from another crazy Bundesliga story, right? – that is absolutely correct. It is exactly the Schalke who played the main character in one of the most unforgettable stories in league history on September 6, 1969 in the Rote Erde stadium in the Borussia Dortmund Revierderby against FC Schalke 04.
Actually, on this legendary day, you don’t need to say a lot about the double bite of the good shepherd dog Rex in Friedel Rausch’s bites. The agonizing minutes of that day, when hundreds of spectators stormed the pitch and were supposed to be pushed back by muzzled dogs, have gone down in the collective memory of the Bundesliga.
The wonderfully spectacular idea of the Schalke President Oskar Siebert to fetch four real big cats from the Westerholt Lion Park during the second leg and to have them patrolled by four files on a leash at the center line is legendary and well known.
But Friedel Rausch preferred to keep to himself for a long time that weeks after the wound pain had subsided. Because the teasing of the opponents not only annoyed him in the following months, no, they were also a little embarrassing to the vain sun boy.
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Intoxication became the “laughing stock of the league”
The smart Friedel Rausch had suddenly become a mockery of people on the football field: “It was hell. My opponent came up in almost every game and went ‘woof-woof’. From then on I was the laughing stock of the league.”
And his Schalke team-mates also played their jokes with frenzy. So in the days after the incident they asked their poor buddy hypocritically: “Friedel, think about it, the dog would have bitten you in the front …?” But the old macho from the Ruhr area, Rausch replied coolly and calmly: “Then the mutt would have lost its teeth …”
By the way: Many years later, his BVB opponent Siggi Held pointed out an aspect of this memorable day that had been neglected for a long time: “History always falls short of what kind of clever dogs there were in Dortmund back then.”
How true. Because although the place was full of players and spectators, the dog chose the Schalke Friedel Rausch, of all people. BVB fan Atze Schröder will certainly have liked that too!
Ben Redelings was born in 1975 in the floodlight shadow of the Bochum Ruhr Stadium and is an expert on the entertaining moments of football. The book for the SPORT1 series is a popular bestseller: “Best of Bundesliga: The funniest legends of German football“As a SPORT1 columnist, Ben writes regularly about the” Legends of Football “and” Best of Bundesliga “.
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