Last Saturday, the Union Berlin players actually clinched the most important win of the season. Derby against Hertha, home game at the Alte Försterei, sold out, final score 3:1. A few days later, on Tuesday, Timo Baumgartl, 26, is sitting in the same place and also talks about a victory that – as the sportsmen like to say – pushes the sporty aspect into the background. In the past three months, the defender has not been fighting for a regular place on the pitch, but with an operation and chemotherapy for the tumor in his testicles. He is now bald at the press conference. Baumgartl defeated cancer.
As he sits there, in training clothes, smiling every now and then, everything actually looks like a normal press conference. But Baumgartl says too many basic things about life that you rarely hear from footballers’ mouths: “You can also be pretty without hair.” And: “I’ve learned that you don’t get so upset about the little things.” And probably happier about others. He has been able to train again for a good week without major restrictions, but he is still doing individual training on a neighboring pitch. But being back on the pitch for the first time “was overwhelming”.
Baumgartl is not the only soccer player in the Bundesliga who was recently diagnosed with testicular cancer. Sébastien Haller, who had moved to Dortmund to replace Erling Haaland, who had moved to Manchester, received the same diagnosis shortly after his arrival at BVB. Such a tumor was also found in Marco Richter from Hertha BSC in mid-July. There have also been footballers with testicular cancer in the past. Marco Russ from Frankfurt was diagnosed with testicular cancer in May 2016 and was able to make his comeback in February 2017 after a break in treatment. Testicular cancer is most commonly found in young men between the ages of 20 and 40. Most health insurance companies only cover the costs for a check-up from the age of 45.
What if he had to leave his girlfriend, family and friends behind? Only recently did he become a godfather
It would have been too late for Baumgartl, if he didn’t have any problems, he went to preventive medicine. He has been doing this for three years, always before the summer break. “It’s usually ten minutes,” he says, but this time, in early May, it was different. “Out of the blue,” he recalls, when he received the diagnosis: cancer. And then his merry-go-round of thoughts began to spin. “I was inevitably concerned with what happens when you’re no longer there,” says Baumgartl.
What if he had to leave his girlfriend, family and friends behind? Only recently did he become a godfather. At first he had “dark thoughts”, says Baumgartl now. He also cried at that time. He had to learn how to show emotions again, “because I had built myself a protective shell.” You don’t want to come across as too emotional in interviews, for example. When the doctors took away at least his worst fears, he managed to stay positive. The chances of a cure for testicular cancer, especially in the early stages, are very high.
That’s why he’s so open about his illness, says Baumgartl. Although it is “a taboo subject, a very personal subject”. “As a footballer you have a role model function,” he says: “If just one person goes to preventive care and then a tumor is discovered, I’m proud.” It seems as if he has been successful: oncologists have written to him and reported, he says, that their booth is being run over.
Footballer Timo Baumgartl gives an unusual press conference on Tuesday.
(Photo: Matthias Koch/Imago)
He talks just as openly about his chemotherapy. He spent three long six days at the Charité. “Time doesn’t go by there,” remembers Baumgartl; he was tired and in a bad mood, but put up with the chemo comparatively well. In consultation with the doctors, he “went a five-kilometer jog in the morning during the chemo.” The thought of his Bundesliga comeback motivated him.
Baumgartl is currently working on this one. Will he play a game this season? “I hope not just for one.” Could it still be something in 2022? “I’m ambitious.” Some of Timo Baumgartl’s sentences were quite normal Bundesliga player press conference sentences.