‘Gullit gave me a Ruud awakening’
BY MANCHESTER UNITED legend Ruud van Nistelrooy credits Dutch master Ruud Gullit and basketball legend Michael Jordan for helping to make him a goalscorer supreme.
Van Nistelrooy, 47, finished as top scorer in three different European leagues and remains the sixth-highest Champions League goalscorer, with 56, following his time with PSV Eindhoven, United and Real Madrid.
But he might never have been so clinical had Oranje great Gullit not given him the benefit of his wisdom or had he not learned of a practice used by Jordan.
Van Nistelrooy said: “I had been signed by Heerenveen, a club in the north of Holland, and one day Ruud Gullit was coming over to watch our team in training.
“I was a young striker and wanted to make an impression, so I started to do all fancy tricks, scoring with a back-heel, with a chip and all sorts.
“But Gullit said, ‘What on earth are you doing in the box? Just bang it in. You receive the ball and you hit it, straight and fast. Don’t try to do all this difficult stuff. Apart from that, you are not a bad little player’.
“The day Gullit pulled me aside, I thought, ‘If Gullit tells me this, I’d better bang every ball near my feet in the net’.”
Van Nistelrooy also credits Jordan with an indirect piece of advice that helped shape his life.
He added: “I played at a small club called FC Den Bosch.
“As a young player, I wrote down in a notebook the things I wanted to achieve in my life.
“You can play at a small club, but if you have goals or targets, you know you can go far in your career.
“People used to tell me, ‘You’d better work hard at school and try your best because, with your football, it’s not going to work’.
“But I had read that Michael Jordan had said there is a much bigger chance of your goals in life becoming real when you write them down.
“Apparently it worked – because I started at the small amateur club in my village of Geffen and I ended up at Manchester United and Real Madrid.”