Maserati of SA soccer on life support

SOUTH African football great Steve “Kalamazoo” Mokone was on his deathbed in a hospital in America last night.

Mokone’s son, Ronnie, who lives in Alberton, on the East Rand, said the 1950s and 1960s star, the first black South African to play in Europe, had been on life-support machines at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Mokone, 82, lived in America since 1964.

“Everything I’m telling you is via my stepmother, Louise,” Ronnie Mokone said. “I got a call yesterday [Friday] at 5.30am, telling me he’d been admitted to hospital. His brain wasn’t functioning.

“They put him on life-support systems and early this [Saturday] morning a decision was made to take him off the life support. And in fact it’s a question of time now.

“Obviously I’m talking from far away, so I don’t know all the details.”

Mokone had not returned to SA for “about 30 years”, said Ronnie Mokone, who intends to travel to America as soon as he can procure a new passport from Home Affairs.

“When I leave, one of his wishes was for his ashes to be brought to South Africa and scattered on a football ground — I don’t know which one yet.

“My daughter visited him two years ago, and he gave her a picture that he said, should he go, he wanted used in the newspapers.

“It’s unfortunate because my stepmom was supposed to come to South Africa on Monday and stay with me for three weeks, to publicise her book, Living with a Legend.”

Mokone was the predecessor to SA greats of the 1970s and 1980s such as Jomo Sono, Pule “Ace” Ntsoelengoe and Nelson “Teenage” Dladla.

In Europe he was compared to the greats.

After scoring five goals in a game for Torino, Italian soccer writer Beppe Branco famously wrote: “If Pele of Brazil is the Rolls-Royce of soccer players, Stanley Matthews of England the Mercedes-Benz and Alfredo di Stefano of Argentina and Spain the Cadillac of soccer players, then Kala of South Africa, lithe and lean, is surely the Maserati.”

Mokone received the Order of Ikhamanga in its inaugural year in 2003 from President Thabo Mbeki. He had a street named after him in Amsterdam, and a film made in the Netherlands on his life.

He also played for Durban Bush Bucks, Coventry City, and Heracles in Holland.