PHOTO: Bildbyrån + TT Nyhetsbyrån
He is one of Swedish sports’ absolute biggest icons.
But Gunnar Nordahl was not only a big star on the field – but a true hero on the sidelines.
Which this incredibly beautiful memory from his life proves and also doesn’t leave a single Swede untouched.
1949 became Gunnar Nordahl Sweden’s very first football professional abroad when he was signed to the big club AC Milan. After winning four straight SM golds with IFK Norrköping, becoming All-Sweden top scorer four years in a row and shooting Olympic gold for Sweden in 1948, he got his big move to Serie A.
Nordahl in Milan
In Italy, Nordahl would continue to pour in goals and became one of the all-time best scorers in the boot country. The Swedish icon won the shooting league a total of five times in the years 1950-56 and scored a total of 210 goals in 257 games for Milan when he formed the legendary trio Gre-No-Li with the pair horses Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm.
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But “Il Bisonte”, as he was called in Italy, was not only a goal king of the highest rank. Alongside his efforts on the pitch, he was also a very caring person who always cared for others and there is a very fine proof of Nordahl’s big heart that we really have to highlight.
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“What a hero”
It was the summer of 1951 that Gunnar Nordahl received a handwritten letter from a young Swede who looked up to the Milan Swede as a great role model and idol.
– It was a little boy who had written to him and there was something about his plea that caught Nordahl. Then he noticed that there was another note in the envelope. It was the mother who had written a few lines about the boy, Uno Sandqvist, suffering from a serious blood disease and being hospitalized. She wrote that it would be extra valuable for them if he had time to send an autograph, says the football journalist Erik Niva in his podcast “When we were Kings”.
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Nordahl was not content with just signing an autograph for little Uno, but began exchanging letters with the sick boy to be there as support in the tough everyday life.
– This was taken to the next level in connection with Milan’s summer tour in 1951, when Nordahl began to investigate with the boy’s mother, with Milan and with the Swedish health care if there was a possibility for little Uno to come along. And it so happened that Uno Sandqvist was part of Milan’s delegation and Nordahl made sure that they had hotel rooms next to each other, with a door that could be opened between the rooms. So basically they shared a room during the entire tour, says Niva in the podcast.
– What a hero, adds the colleague Håkan Andreasson.
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Beautiful gesture
Gunnar Nordahl and little Uno built up a strong friendship in just a few weeks and the football icon has described him as “a little boy with far more sensitive minds, more serious thoughts and thinner skin than sports-minded boys generally have”. When they both parted after the Milan summer tour, Nordahl gave the boy several nice gifts and the nicest of all was a top quality Swiss watch so that Uno wouldn’t be late for any of his upcoming treatments.
Nordahl promised to keep in touch via letter and the great player also invited the boy to Milan to see him play from the first floor.
– Then Uno smiled with a crooked and inscrutable smile by mentally patting big Gunnar on the shoulder. Because just a few months later, Uno passed away and he himself knew this would happen, says Erik Niva and then praises Gunnar Nordahl for this beautiful gesture to a tormented child.
– Without any need to make a point about today’s world-renowned soccer stars, we can only credit Gunnar for a damn humanitarian effort that not everyone in his position would have done.
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