Text: Fred Ape
My Life as a Goalkeeper, or the Truth About My Time at Aston Villa
As far as my career as a goalkeeper is concerned, my early dreams were bigger than the later reality. I was in every representative team there was (except, admittedly, the national team), but in my day, keeping goal for a Westphalia select side at 18 was certainly worth as much as being called up to a German FA youth team today.
A reflective look back on a great career: Fred Ape.
We only had football back then – everyone played (in the early 1970s), and everything else was a “fringe sport”; in fact, we sometimes didn’t even know other sports existed. At the time I kept goal for Hombruch 09 in Dortmund in what was then the highest German youth league (the youth district league!!!), I already had a great connection to the sports desk of the “Westfälische Rundschau” in Dortmund. I was doing an apprenticeship in publishing, but was already more interested in writing.
The sports editors there – Willi Wittke, Klaus Bäcker and Alfred Heymann – must have liked me, and I was allowed to write articles early on. On the other hand, they supported me with glowing reviews of my matches in the local sports pages. That must have laid the foundation for the idea, in the minds of football-minded people in Dortmund, that I was somehow on my way to a great career. Be that as it may: nothing came of a professional contract, and I left Dortmund with many then very good footballers for VfB Altena in the Sauerland. (Legend later turned that into Altona 93.) After almost completely stopping in 1975 – I simply didn’t feel like it any more, or had other things on my mind – I ended up back in Dortmund at FC Brünninghausen, then a suburban club, where I still play today.
At the same time I began my career as a musician and songwriter. Which isn’t exactly normal. That’s where the story was planted (not by me) that if Ape trained properly, he’d be number one everywhere again in no time! I didn’t care. I toured Germany with my band Ape, Beck & Brinkmann, and when I was needed, I went in goal. Thanks to my solid training as a shot-stopper, I still occasionally play in the district league today, at 63.
If you have a regional WDR studio in Dortmund, plus a cable pilot project unique in Germany, it’s obvious that as someone working in culture you have or make contacts there. That was the beginning of a great career with the WDR Trallafitti team, which led to many exciting trips (1990 to Sarajevo, later Poland and Lithuania, but also here and there in northern Germany, with wonderful encounters with former professionals such as Dietmar Beiersdorfer, the Votavas, Frank Mill, etc.).
Playing with such stars (when we weren’t the Trallafitti select, our shirts said “Starkicker”) was simply brilliant. There were many highlights, e.g. the unveiling of the Helmut Rahn memorial at the Georg-Melches-Stadion in Essen in 2004, where I kept goal alongside Uli Stein in a Bundesliga select team in front of 15,000 spectators. Of course, the media photograph and exploit that sort of thing. When the TV channel Kabel 1 filmed the format “Heroes of the District League” in Dortmund, I played with our fun team FC Brünninghausen 3 against FC Hacheney, who were coached by Manni Burgsmüller, followed by Kabel 1 and desperate to win promotion to district league B.
Before the match there was the legendary interview with me by some young presenter from the channel. The question was who would leave the pitch as the winner. I said, word for word, into the cameras (the recording exists): “It’s obvious who’ll leave the pitch as the winner – after all, I used to be a professional in England at Aston Villa and was in the squad for the 1981 European Cup final against Bayern.” (I kept embellishing this story later on.) And when the summary of the district league C Dortmund Group 2 match, Hacheney vs FC Brünninghausen 3, was broadcast on the Monday, the presenter introduced it with:
Fred Ape and Uli Stein – close friends since their days at Eintracht Frankfurt …
“… after all, a former Aston Villa professional is in goal for Brünninghausen” – and it’s simply unbelievable how many people saw this rubbish and, even worse, believed it. So I allowed myself a few more pranks and planted them in the press, e.g. that Uli Stein and I were now considering joining FC Hacheney together, since Uli and I knew each other from the time when Eintracht Frankfurt threw away the German championship in Rostock and I was their second goalkeeper.
And so on, and so on … These days I no longer comment on questions about my goalkeeping past. The last nice story dates from 2015, when we travelled to Lithuania with the “German journalists’ select team” to take part in the unofficial European football championship of sports journalists there. “We” were the same bunch of lads who get rounded up whenever we play as the WDR team against the city marketing departments of Waltrop or Arnsberg.
Top performance in Lithuania: Fred Ape is voted goalkeeper of the tournament.
But never mind. It was a wonderful experience, and among the 11 nations I was honoured as the best goalkeeper of the tournament. Vain as I am, I naturally got this little picture into the “Names and Notes” column of our local paper. The picture is nice, nobody reads the small print, and if they do, it says “Fred Ape becomes European champion in Lithuania”. Job done!