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I

My name is Bart Hoffman. Actually it’s Johannes Albertus Hoffman—Hoffman as in Dustin, with a double f and one n. I was born almost fifty years ago in Zutphen, a town on a river in the easternmost part of Holland. My father was the head of a Christian primary school.

I’m a crime correspondent with a national newspaper—I belong to the generation of student dropouts who found their way into journalism. A guy I knew from studying Dutch wrote the occasional piece for the arts page of a big daily. He heard that they were looking for someone in the sports section to type in the results on Sunday morning. When they were short-handed, I was occasionally allowed to go to an unimportant football match. Writing came quite easily to me, and when they were looking for a reporter, I applied for it and got the job.

It was painless, packing in my studies. I didn’t like the other students. I didn’t like all the hot air they talked about Dutch writers like Reve and Lucebert, or Chomsky’s generative grammar. I was the only person in my year who read Football International. The fact that I could effortlessly recite the first five minutes of the TV commentary of the 1974 World Cup Final, a fantastic ready-made artwork, made no impression on my fellow students. Long before it came into vogue, I had a very good imitation of Johan Cruyff in my repertoire, but they didn’t even recognize it.