Bengt Johansson has not only built a Swedish national handball team that has become the best in the world, he has built a Swedish national handball team that we all felt a part of.
How could the act of leadership be more or more important than that?
Although I knew Benjan Johansson was ill, I hesitated when news of his death arrived Monday morning.
It was like a blow from Alexander Toshkin’s shot.
“Bengan”, or “Bengan Johan” as the closest Poles and those who have been calling it for a while, are 79 years old.
Now when I try to describe what I did, I do so with a lump the size of a cucumber jar in my stomach.
when Staffan Olsonone of his companions, cried on the radio and I cried too.
Bangan Boys
For me, my athletic upbringing in the ’80s and ’90s, Bengt Johansson was almost always around with his national team becoming more and more popular in every tournament (or sports broadcast) they participated in.
The 1990 World Cup gold in Prague was a huge sporting experience (“Then, Ola Lindgren, what a goal!”) and the question is whether I’ve ever seen a national team happier than the one who celebrated their victory at Sportovní hala.
Not only did Sweden become world champion, but we did by killing the Big Russian Bear, just as we did at the Ice Hockey World Cup in Vienna in 1987.
Bengt Johansson showed that Sweden, with speed, creativity and solidarity, can also defeat the inexhaustible teams of the Eastern country with its giants and great bowlers.
Here and there, I and many others fell in the wake of handball, the “Bengan” and his seductive gang of thieves who became known as the “Bengans Boys”.
In countless sporting reports, we’ve been charmed by Bengan Johansson’s racy blowouts, far-sighted driving style and the atmosphere in the national team often coming straight out the window and our hair feeling as we half on Klippan’s couch and watch.
They looked very safe and seemed to have a lot of fun together, not just when they emptied a bucket of water, or threw donuts in their leader’s face.
Bengt Johansson himself filmed mostly during all groups, trips abroad and tournaments, after each season he cut the best tape he sent players.
I’ve sat and looked through countless people, and it’s not uncommon to hear Bengan’s slow, faint voice giving a loving rooster or saying something encouraging to the players being photographed.
With these cassettes, he may have extended the careers of Magnus Weslanders, Staffan Olsson and Bear Carlin by two years.
The films reminded the players how much fun they had in the national team, so they always continued another season.
During his years as captain of the national team, Johansson led Sweden to 13 medals in 16 international championships, but when his career and life are now summed up, the positions I think of are not primarily, but what kind of leadership he stood for.
“One of the biggest”
Benjan, a GIH-trained gymnastics teacher, always had team leaders, subjects, masseuses, and supervisors around him, but he didn’t have a select assistant team leader at his side.
He had 20 – in the form of his players.
– He said it must be better for twenty to think than one to think.
For 16 years, he was the obvious father of the Swedish handball group, along with the players of the “Bengan Boys”, he made Sweden a country dedicated to handball.
For me, he will always be one of the greatest Swedish sports leaders, and I usually see him as a kind of spiritual leader for the local league leaders from whom we have benefited the most.
Tommy Sandlin, Hussey Olson, Tommy Svenson, and later Johnny Holm, Pia Sundhag, Kaley Hajeskog, to name a few.
And so all sounds of course.
How many tournaments have you not sat in and wondered how Benjan controlled his national team and how anyone could ever understand what he meant when he appeared on the bench.
– Uuuuuh!!
– Wääuuu!!
or Bengan classics;
– night!
Bengt Johansson had a heart with an area larger than a globe, Haaland spoke as widely as Haaland sauce, his outside time was a traffic intersection in chaotic New Delhi and his smile was often nine meters wide.
I am grateful for every second with him.
