Known for his strength on the ball, his tactical awareness and spectacular strikes and volleys, Van Basten was named European Footballer of the Year three times ( 1988, ' 89 and ' 92 ) and FIFA World Player of the Year in 1992.

Van Basten was voted eighth in a poll organised by the French weekly magazine France Football consulting their former Ballon d ' Or winners to elect the Football Player of the Century.

In 2004, a nationwide poll was held for the 100 greatest Dutch people ( De Grootste Nederlander ) and Van Basten was number 25, the second highest for a football player.

In March 2007, Sky Sports ranked Van Basten first on its list of great athletes who had their careers cut short.

Van Basten was born on 31 October 1964 in Utrecht.

Van Basten with the KNVB Cup.

AFC Ajax signed Van Basten for the 1981 – 82 season.

After Kieft left for Serie A club Pisa the next season, Van Basten solidified his position as the team's main attacker.

In 1987, Silvio Berlusconi signed Van Basten for Milan, with fellow countrymen Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard joining in 1988.

In his first season, Milan won their first Scudetto in eight years, but Van Basten played only 11 games and was constantly troubled by an ankle injury.

In 1988 – 89, Van Basten won the Ballon d ' Or as Europe's top footballer.

After Van Basten fell out with Arrigo Sacchi, Berlusconi sacked the manager.

Van Basten scored 25 league goals, and became Capocannoniere again.

Van Basten played exceptionally well in the early part of the season.

At the UEFA Euro 1988, Van Basten scored a total of five goals, including a hat trick against England, the winning goal in the semi-final against West Germany, and a spectacular volley in the final against the Soviet Union.

Van Basten never scored in the World Cup Finals.

The Netherlands reached the semi-final of UEFA Euro 1992 when they lost to Denmark in a penalty shootout, with Peter Schmeichel saving a penalty shot from Van Basten.

Van Basten while manager of the Netherlands.

Van Basten officially left Milan in 1995 and retired from football, stating he would never try management.

On 29 July 2004, Van Basten was named the new manager of the Dutch national team, with van't Schip as his assistant.

Van Basten famously dropped regulars like Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Edgar Davids and Roy Makaay and benched Mark van Bommel, because he believed that they were either past their prime or constantly underachieving.

There were also calls for Van Basten to call up Dennis Bergkamp, who had retired from the national team six years earlier for a final " hurrah " as he was retiring that season.

Van Basten then revealed to the media that he never intended to do so despite Bergkamp's own willingness.

Van Basten had also wanted to include Ivorian forward Salomon Kalou, but was thwarted when Kalou was denied Dutch citizenship by the immigration authorities headed by Rita Verdonk.

Van Basten ( left ) with Klaas-Jan Huntelaar during training prior to Euro 2008.

Or was it her own first ball as mistress of this big house, a Van Rensselaer bride from way upstate near Albany, from Rensselaerwyck.

A member of the IRSAC staff ( E. Van De Walle ) was recently delegated to cooperate with AIMO in the development of demographic statistics in this territory.

Skorich was considered the logical choice after the club gave Norm Van Brocklin permission to seek the head coaching job with the Minnesota Vikings, the newest National Football League entry.

Van Brocklin, the quarterback who led the Eagles to the title, was signed by the Vikings last Wednesday.

Moseley, after discussions with Bohr who was at the same lab ( and who had used Van den Broek's hypothesis in his Bohr model of the atom ), decided to test Van den Broek and Bohr's hypothesis directly, by seeing if spectral lines emitted from excited atoms fit the Bohr theory's demand that the frequency of the spectral lines be proportional to a measure of the square of Z.

At Manzikert, on the Murat River, north of Lake Van, Diogenes was met by Alp Arslan.

Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, " Black Destroyer " ( Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939 ), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin.

Van Vogt was always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge ( akin to modern meta-systems ) -- the characters in his very first story used a system called ' Nexialism ' to analyze the alien's behaviour, and he became interested in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski.

Van Vogt was also profoundly affected by revelations of totalitarian police states that emerged after World War II.

Van Vogt systematized his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved.

Harlan Ellison ( who began reading van Vogt as a teenager ) wrote, " Van was the first writer to shine light on the restricted ways in which I had been taught to view the universe and the human condition.

Despite Van Buren's defeat, Johnson was instrumental in keeping Greene County in the Democratic column.

The name Van Mahotsava ( the festival of trees ) originated in July 1947 after a successful tree-planting drive was undertaken in Delhi, in which national leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr Rajendra Prasad and Abdul Kalam Azad participated.

Although the press reported that he was engaged to vaudeville dancer and choreographer Rose Rolanda in 1924, Hopwood's close friend Carl Van Vechten confirmed in later years that it was all a publicity stunt.

Henry Moseley's work showed experimentally in 1913 ( see Moseley's law ) that the effective nuclear charge was very close to the atomic number ( Moseley found only one unit difference ), and Moseley referenced only the papers of Van den Broek and Rutherford.

Gus Van Sant's 2000 Finding Forrester was quickly billed " Good Will Hunting in the Hood.

Mike Judge has stated Van Driessen was his favorite character, after Beavis, to voice.

" Later, a Lady Gaga video convinced Van Toffler of the tenability of a Beavis and Butt-Head revival: " I felt like there was a whole crop of new artists — and what the world sorely missed was the point-of-view that only Beavis and Butt-Head could bring.

Slavoljub Eduard Penkala invented a solid-ink fountain pen in 1907, a German inventor named Baum took out a ballpoint patent in 1910, and yet another ballpoint pen device was patented by Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916.

She then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who offered lessons in perspective and drawing from casts during the time that the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction.

It is not clear, however, if Van der Heul exercised this degree of responsibility because Kidd was nominally a privateer.