Season 1965/66: “Ball round, stadium round, me round”. All was well with Bayern coach Tschik Cajkovski – as long as his team won and he had enough on his plate. The funny little Yugoslav who brought FC Bayern to the Bundesliga was a real league attraction!
“Small, fat Müller shoot faster than Chik can think.” What Bayern coach Tschik Cajkovski said about his new star in the sky as a striker was actually intended as a compliment, but Gerd Müller’s wife Uschi was audibly angry: “Small and fat? Such a disparagement. And that from Tschik with his pot belly.” The man was a real asset to the Bundesliga back then in the mid-sixties.
Hardly anyone spoke sentences like him in the beginning: “The goalkeepers are all a bit crazy. I knew someone who wrote a letter slowly because he knew that his mother could only read slowly.” The world of the small, funny Yugoslav was easy to describe. In his own words, it sounded like this: “Ball round, stadium round, me round”.
With him, Bayern rose to the Bundesliga in 1965 and celebrated their first major victories. Tschik, as subtle as he is, wanted to have the successes in Munich refined right away. He was vying for honorary citizenship. When the mayor curiously asked Cajkovski why this award was so important to him, he received a surprising answer: “I heard that honorary citizens don’t have to pay taxes.” Tschik was known for his extravagant storytelling talent. He once told his Bayern pros about an international match against Hungary: “I’m playing against Puskás, they don’t take a trick! Unfortunately Hungary win 2-0!” When Gerd Müller cautiously asked who had scored the goals, Cajkovski answered very quietly, almost insulted: “Puskás!”
Another time he told his team: “I played 22 years, never injured.” A little later his wife Rada joined the group. She sat down next to her husband and, without knowing what he had just said, asked: “Do you remember, Chik, how you had your foot in a cast for four months?” The players slapped their thighs with laughter. One of Cajkovski’s outstanding qualities was ambition. Franz Beckenbauer liked to talk about the days with Tschik with a big grin on his face: “In the final training game, he never stopped until the team he was part of won: ‘See you at night, play to win!'”
The Yugoslavian coach was particularly satisfied with the food. It’s not for nothing that goalkeeper Sepp Maier christened him “Mister Suckling Pig” because of his great passion for the culinary delights of life. Sepp Maier explained: “Nobody was bothered by the fact that he always smacked his lips while eating. And when he finished his plate in record time, got up promptly and brushed around our plates like a hungry dog, we already knew what was coming next. ‘Hmm, smells good. What are you eating? French fries.’ And already he had fished a good portion from the plate of a slow eater with his thick sausage fingers. ‘Does the meat taste good?’ was the next question, which he then answered himself tangibly.”
But his greatest passion was football. When Cajkovski once happened to meet the coach of the sixties, Max Merkel, in a department store, they chatted animatedly for a long time about the round leather. After more than an hour, they both went home – and had completely forgotten their purchases.
And it was precisely this Max Merkel that Tschik Cajkovski met in his first Bundesliga game as Bayern coach – when there was a real bang in the first minute of the new season. In the derby of the newly promoted Bayern Munich against 1860, Timo Konietzka shot the new Bayern professional Pitter Danzberg from close range. And while Munich was still on the ground, Konietzka played Drescher elegantly, passed Beckenbauer and scored an untenable goal for Sepp Maier. 1:0 for 1860 Munich in the first minute of the new season.
But the duel Konietzka against Danzberg was not over yet. In the 85th minute, the Bayern player hit the scorer of the first goal of the season so roughly that the referee had no choice but to dismiss Bayern’s new signing. The game ended 1-0 for TSV in every respect. A tailor-made start for the sixties. And it should remain the season of TSV 1860 Munich and its coach Max Merkel.
The Austrian coach was without question the man of the season. Merkel finally became a media star who, like no other, knew how to use the Bundesliga stage for herself. His sayings were appreciated by journalists and loved by football fans: “I feel like a tamer cracking his whip in the arena. If he turns his back on his predators for even a moment – they will grab him with their paws . Even footballers need the whip. And if it works, they get their candy from me.”
Merkel always stayed true to his line in everyday life, even if it sometimes hurt. It was with a heavy heart that he had to suspend his unerring striker Rudi Brunnenmeier during the current season because he disregarded the strict ban on bar visits only from Saturdays to Mondays. Rudi’s thirst was once again greater than reason.
Until shortly before the end, the duel at the top was Borussia Dortmund versus 1860 Munich and was only decided when BVB won the European Cup Winners’ Cup against Liverpool. Suddenly the team had a problem, as Aki Schmidt once said self-critically: “There was a pub across the street, there was always something going on. I couldn’t get any rest. The whole celebration cost us the championship. We were still playing at home around 1860. Had we won, we would have been champions. That’s what happened in 1860.”
The Austrian master coach was one of the few to suspect that this triumph was a very special one: “There are titles that put you in the book of records. My championship in the sixties, for example. 100 years before there was nothing, 100 years later it will be there won’t be anything.” What nobody could have guessed at the time, however, was that the freshly promoted newcomer from Munich, FC Bayern, under his coach Tschik Cajkovski, would slowly but surely lay the foundation for a success story that would be unparalleled in 60 years of the Bundesliga.