Johan Cruyff was one of the footballing generation who smoked cigarettes. Many players did in the ‘old days’, even when it became apparent that smoking could have fatal consequences. He was in good – or was it bad? – company with Ossie Ardiles, Socrates, Gerson, Zinedine Zidane and even Bobby Charlton, who were also legendary smoking footballers. That Cruyff died of lung cancer suggests a link, does it not, between smoking and cancer?
In 1991, Cruyff required heart surgery after a lifetime of smoking. He said: “Football has given me everything in this life; tobacco almost took it all away.” That was when he quit smoking. 25 years later, lung cancer took him.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? I stopped smoking on 31st December 1993, some 22 years ago. If I contracted lung cancer tomorrow – and lung cancer took all the (smoking) males on my mother’s side of the family – I would probably be very unlucky given the statistical evidence that shows how your body normally recovers from the effects of tobacco, but it would probably not be a coincidence. Cruyff quit smoking two years before I did. I have seen no concrete evidence that tobacco was the reason for his lung cancer, but it makes you wonder.
On average, non smokers live 14 years longer than smokers, something you don’t really think too much about when you are young and, seemingly, indestructible. But then you look at an athlete, in prime fitness, whose body you might think would be able to cope with the damaging effects of cigarettes. All that fitness and conditioning probably saved Cruyff when he was younger, but who is to say that his passing, what with his smoking history, was a coincidence?
We all know that smoking is not good for us. Even hardened smokers who don’t want to give up acknowledge that simple fact. Why do you think the smoking ban in public places was so easily accepted? There were no smoking police in every pub. We all accepted that cigarette smoke in confined areas was equally harmful to smokers and non smokers.
I’ve grown to loathe cigarettes. The smell, the addiction, the cost and most of all the misery they cause. All my life I have seen family members and friends taken too early by tobacco. Lung cancer, by sudden catastrophic heart attacks (my mother, for example, although smoking had long taken its toll before the fatal moment) and by gradual deterioration (too many to name). I should never have smoked at all, just like Johan Cruyff knew he should never have smoked.
It may well be that smoking killed Johan Cruyff. Some of us had best cross our fingers that the effects are now out of our systems. I’m certainly not going to get all I-told-you-so about it.
