Bayern by Uli Hesse

Author:Uli Hesse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

9. PULLING OFF LEDERHOSEN IS HARD TO DO

Very few German football fans would recognise Udo Scholz, now in his mid-seventies, if they met him in the streets. That’s because his voice was more famous than his face. Between 1973 and 1994, Scholz was the stadium announcer at the most notorious Bundesliga ground, Kaiserslautern’s Betzenberg stadium.

Visiting teams feared the Betzenberg, because at the time it was one of the few football-only grounds (another famous one was Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion), which meant the fans were really close to the action. And these were passionate, not to say unruly fans. It’s probably no coincidence that the first-ever Bundesliga match abandoned because of crowd trouble was staged at the Betzenberg. In November 1976, during Scholz’s fourth season in Kaiserslautern, the game against Düsseldorf was terminated in the seventy-sixth minute after bottles were thrown from the stands and the referee felt threatened by the crowd.

Bayern found the Betzenberg particularly tough. We have already mentioned the Reds’ legendary 7-4 defeat in 1973. That was almost par for the course. Between 1975 and 1983, Bayern couldn’t win a single game in Kaiserslautern. It was so frustrating that after a 2-1 loss in March 1982, Paul Breitner famously said: ‘Maybe it’s best if we stay home and just send them the points by mail.’ But the following year, business manager Uli Hoeness came up with a novel idea to end the curse – he dressed the team not in their customary red or white but in what came to be known as the ‘Brazilian kit’: yellow shirts, blue shorts and white socks. Footballers being deeply superstitious beings, Kaiserslautern countered this ploy by playing in their green away kit. But the Hoeness mojo worked better. The home side wasted a penalty (about which more later), then Augenthaler scored the only goal of the game with a deflected free kick on the hour.

It’s tempting to imagine Udo Scholz sang the song that would soon become famous for the very first time on this day. The idea for the song had come to him while on holidays in Murnau, a picturesque market town in southern Bavaria. One day, Scholz went to a country inn nestled deep in the forest. Late in the evening, a group of young men walked into the restaurant. They wore Lederhosen, but one of them had badly torn his. Scholz says that somebody yelled: ‘Pull off that boy’s Lederhosen!’ For some reason, that phrase stuck in his mind. On the way back to his hotel, the car radio played the Beatles ditty ‘Yellow Submarine’ – and Scholz put two and two together.

A few weeks later, Bayern travelled to Kaiserslautern. As the visiting players came out to warm up, Scholz began to sing ‘Zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus’ – pull off Bayern’s Lederhosen – to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’ over the tannoy. The fans immediately picked it up and a new terrace anthem was born.

Scholz says all this took place ‘in the early 1980s’. But that can’t be right; it must have happened earlier.

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