As a professional rugby player, Jay-Jay Boske (Utrecht, 1986) did not make the most of it. As a YouTuber and entrepreneur, he does. "I think by now we are the very biggest men's platform in the Netherlands," he says.
"Smallest child ever born in the Utrecht hospital! My mother had miscarried twins the year before. Although the chances were high that another child would either be stillborn or born disabled, my parents tried anyway. I came seven weeks early. Dead I wasn't, handicapped they haven't quite decided yet, haha. I was so small that my father could hold me in one hand. I didn't eat and you could see right through me. Still, I survived."
"No, not spoiled, but my mother has always been very protective and sweet."
"Well, I was a sweetheart, but one with a strict sense of justice that got me into trouble on the street very often. Brawling. That combined with a drive to make everything work. To give you an example: My mother once put me on a little bike at preschool, but I couldn't reach the pedals. When she returned an hour later, I was still trying to get my feet on the pedals - I kept trying. My mother couldn't get me off the bike, that's how persistent I was. Maybe I have that fire in me because I had to survive as a baby. Out of everything I want to do the best I can. As a boy of about fifteen, I was the smallest and had to fight against everything. I felt what it was like to be left behind. That wasn't going to happen to me, I told myself. Anyone who was bullied, I was going to help. I always picked on those who targeted the weak. That got me into a lot of trouble. When I was sixteen I almost got stuck. Purely because I was trying to protect others."
"I had once started as a soccer player, at Victoria in Loosdrecht. But I hated schwalbes. Opponents who started rolling out of nowhere and moaning in pain. I couldn't stand that. The soccer field just wasn't the right stage for me. A boy from my street, Guido, once came wearing an Argentinian rugby shirt. Such a fat shirt! Light blue with white stripes and a jaguar on it. "What is that, rugby?", I asked him. He told me all kinds of things about it. I went with him one evening to a training session of Rugby Club Hilversum. There were lots of guys there who knew me. 'Hey Jay, what fun,' I heard everywhere. The trainer, a friend of my father's, let me train with him. Only then did I learn about my family's rugby history and that my father had been an international. The first time I got to tackle someone, I knew: this is it for me!"
"In those days it wasn't so hard in rugby either - in the land of the blind, one eye is king. From the time I was 12, we became undefeated champions every year. We really had a talent team. Even at sixteen I was playing in the first team and came on the radar of the national coach, a New Zealander who had played for the All Blacks. That same year he had me debut in the Orange. Sixteen years old and then against nothing but giants! My first game was against Ukraine, fighting for your life! So yes, I did have some talent. Although I didn't really realize that until later."
"I went with Tim Visser, the best rugby player the Netherlands has ever known. Tim played for Scotland. That's like coming from the Faroe Islands as a soccer player and becoming top scorer at Manchester United. People couldn't believe we were from Holland, that's how impressed we were. If you had been born in England, you would have belonged to the top here, they said. There we could test ourselves against the best players in the world and only found out that we were really good. I never had an idea about how my future should unfold, and I struggled quite a bit with that. But then the dream of becoming a professional rugby player began. I finally had control over my future."
"For that dream to come true, some puzzle pieces have to fall together. It's important to get to the right club and to have a good coach who sees it in you. That was the case, only I had trouble adjusting. Tim went to a private school. For me, that wasn't an option because I was a year older. From one day to the next, I had to take care of myself. With another rugby player I was put in an apartment - just do it."
"Newcastle is a tough city. English, pub culture, rain, cold... And completely not my style of rugby. In the north of England it's cutting edge. I do like ramming and pounding, only I am 1.68 meters and weighed 73 kilos at the time. I'm good in the small spaces, but when you're up to your ankles in mud, can't get away and have to play rugby physically... Give me a bit of sunshine, a hard pitch and I can do anything. But here in England the conditions were different. I had two coaches. One was there for my long-term development: he wanted me not to play rugby so physically. The other was on the field with me almost every day and trained me to hit and pound. My style changed as a result, I had disagreements with the coaches because one wanted to go left and the other right, and I got injured. But it wasn't because of that: my own behavior killed me. I behaved like a stubborn bugger and then it's done for a coach, because there are ten English boys ready to do what he says."
"Yes, maybe because of the fear that you don't know how to deal with it. And then you fall back on what you know: being stubborn."
"I finished high school, at the age of twenty-one at Alberdingk Thijm College. But I had no idea what else to do. That was very difficult. I was brought back by Rugby Club Hilversum, though. And was even offered a contract in New Zealand. Looking back, I regret having turned that down, it would have been fantastic. But I was fed up with rugby. I had given everything in Newcastle and now I had to go to the other side of the world to do it again. Whereas... that's rugby Mecca, I should have gone there. I tried to study Management Economics & Law for another year, but I found out that a school or university is more of an institution that keeps you in line and possibly teaches you some basic skills than that it helps you further in real life. At least that's my feeling."
"I saw an ad from BNN, looking for people for behind the scenes. That seemed like a lot of fun. As an intake I had to make a voicemail recording in which I did something tough. What did I do: I had just had an operation and with one leg in a plaster cast I jumped over the gates at Hilversum station, ran across the platform with the guards following me and jumped into the train, where I hopped down the aisle and tried to stay out of the hands of security. At BNN they thought that was so cool that they chose me out of six thousand entries and offered me a one-year internship in the radio department. Coen Swijnenberg and Sander Lantinga were there, also at the beginning of their careers; it was such a nice place to work then. Everything was possible, everything was allowed. Just do it, it couldn't be crazy enough. I helped behind the scenes and was sometimes allowed to present something online. That's how I came into contact with 101TV, BNN's digital TV channel at the time. It was around the corner and they needed a presenter. 'Don't you want to come and do that?' Even though only my grandparents watched that channel, I thought it was cool to do. That's how I earned my spot there. At 101Barz, the biggest hip-hop platform in the Netherlands, I came to work behind the scenes. I learned how to film, edit, direct... everything that goes into making television. If we had five hundred views in the weekend, then it was party time on Monday. Then we were at eight o'clock in the morning with shots of Jägermeister."
Curious about the rest of the interview? The winter issue of MASTERS was created in collaboration with Jordi van den Bussche. Many will know him as YouTuber Kwebbelkop, yet he has been working hard as an entrepreneur for some time, as he reveals in the Big Interview. What's new is that his company JVDB Studios is offering to do social media marketing and short-format content marketing for other companies. "They can also go and figure it out themselves, but we cracked the code." Jordi gives a stage to like-minded entrepreneurs such as Jay-Jay Boske, Demy de Zeeuw, Chahid Charrak and Marcella de Bie, and discusses developments around games, crypto and NFT: "Just as bitcoin turned the financial system upside down, the same will happen with gaming." This extra-thick winter issue also features Lengers' first own ship, an interview with Corendon chief Atilay Uslu, specials on the new BMW 7 Series and Samsung foldables, and - exclusively for MASTERS! - an interview with Max Verstappen.
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