He’ll never walk alone
This week 33 years ago, 39 fans died in the Heysel Stadium disaster. A South African who was there with the late footballer Isaac ‘Shakes’ Kungwane — who died this week four years ago — remembers both his friend and the frenzy of Liverpool fandom
The terrifically high stand at Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium was named “The Kop” in memory of 300 young soldiers, most of them working-class men from Liverpool, who fell at the battle of Spion Kop in 1900 during the second Anglo-Boer War. On match day it is a long, wide human highway of flags and scarves in the sky. Standing beneath this great human throat of will and hope, as I have been fortunate enough to do, honestly makes you feel that “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.
The best-known sports anthem in history was adopted by Liverpool FC during the reign of manager Bill Shankly in the 1960s. Shankly won Liverpool their first European trophy and created, in the club’s success, one of the first international sporting brands, setting in motion the phenomenon we know today as “English Football” — a sporting culture of workingclass ardour and warrior-like endeavour, religiously followed from Delhi to Vladivostok.
Shankly was famous for his wit, best summed up in his much-quoted “Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s far more important than that.”
The chutzpah route to success
In the late 1970s, my father would wonder aloud how a middle-class Jewish kid from Joburg came to be obsessed with these Englishmen who battled it out on the football pitch every weekend for this working-class institution called Liverpool FC.
It was simple: Liverpool were winners. I supported them because they won. When you’re a kid and you want to support a team, you look to the top of the table and take your lead from there.
English football, like English music, had been brilliantly marketed throughout the world with fanzines, sticker books, posters and a weekly roundup called Match of the Day, which we saw in South Africa the following week. There we could track our favourite players, get to know the names of the grounds, the songs and the various tribalised forces that drove the game.
At the age of six, I started playing for a junior side at my local club Highlands Park, one of the leading local teams. The juniors were known then as Balfour Park, and our particular group, under the guidance of two fathers who had played as amateurs, Sam Feldman and Mike Fox, gained a formidable reputation, winning almost every league and cup game for the better part of a decade.
In 1980 we went as guests of the New York Cosmos to a training camp in the US and met Pelé himself, who had been employed to raise the profile of football in the US in the last days of his career. (Another of our fathers, Derek Hannan, who ran WEA Records, made this possible through his connections to Warner Bros, who owned the Cosmos.)
Later the team were sold to Jomo Sono, who himself had played briefly for the New York Cosmos. In their honour, he turned Highlands Park FC into what today is Jomo Cosmos.
Around 1983, I remember a late-afternoon practice session at our new grounds: two rather short pitches fenced off from the intense traffic of Louis Botha Avenue by high and shiny steel fencing.
Two young black guys joined our mid-session team talk; maybe because the fields were now more visible, maybe because Sono had raised the club’s profile in the black community. The more vocal of the two introduced himself as “Isaac” and announced that they wanted to join the team. Somewhat aghast and somewhat amused at the audacity of this stocky youngster, and having grown up in a deep Yiddishkeit, Sammy told me years later: “It was chutzpah only a Jew could admire.”
Mike and Sammy put these two lads out on the pitch. Within 20 minutes they had both scored goals. Within an hour it was clear that Isaac was almost impossible to tackle. At the end of that first practice, Isaac told us to call him “Shakes”. We sniggered a bit at this, but the next weekend he and Richard Sibanyoni played a match with us and within a month they were tearing up the other teams.
Balanced like water
Isaac “Shakes” Kungwane was the cocky kid from Alexandra township, just 5km down the road and hundreds of miles from us in every other way. He could hold a ball up with the slightest lilt of his left leg and send a through ball so well weighted that it looked balanced by water.
Shakes and I played together for seven years in that team. At the time, most junior football teams did not have any black players. Football in South Africa was still divided on racial lines and taking a very long time to change.
There were different kinds of hate. Being slight and effete middle-class Jews from the wealthy northern suburbs who were well organised and played modern winning football, we were easy targets for the roughnecks we engaged with in places like Mayfair and Florida. And that was even before we added a couple of black guys to our profile.
But during the time we played together, I saw Shakes withstand some of the most aggressive racist heckling I’ve ever witnessed. I am ashamed to say that I turned a blind eye to many a shove and terrible word.
He answered this inhuman abuse with the only weapon he had — his magical talent. No matter what he was subjected to, including the very real threat of serious physical attack, Shakes smiled wryly, shook his head in bemusement and scored another goal, inflicting a punishment and vengeance on the opposition that no insult or punch could ever match. With every cocky dummy, glancing side-step and casual back-heeled goal, he trivialised their hate, humiliated them and made a mockery of all they said.
With Shakes, we won every competition we entered for seven straight years. That’s the thing about sport — you can never argue with the scoreboard. Bullies get tired of picking the ball out the back of the net and over the years guys who literally had spat on him began to shake his hand after the game. Not that I think he cared much either way by then. Shakes just loved playing football.
It’s hard to quantify the joy that comes from just playing, rather than merely winning. Something of it is encapsulated in the phrase “piano and shoeshine” — the style of township football that Shakes personified. Showy, flamboyant, full of what today we call swag, it elevated the dance in football.
Horror of Heysel
In 1985, our team were invited to play in an international youth tournament in Germany. With that came the promise of going to Brussels to the European Cup final, in which my beloved Liverpool were playing. Going there meant breaking the cultural boycott. But testing ourselves against youth from the rest of the world put paid to any morals 14-year-old football fanatics might have vaguely had.
Along with an older team from Wits, among whom was another South African genius, Zane Moosa, we were there, black and coloured but mostly white, at Heysel Stadium on May 29 1985, when 39 Juventus supporters lost their lives trying to watch a game of football.
They were crushed under the weight of a wall that collapsed when charged by a set of belligerent Liverpool fans. Our seats were in that stand but because we arrived late we were not where we should have been. I remember my first sight of the stadium, looking up at the concrete terraces I had dreamt of standing on, emptied of people. The steel lean-tos had been pulled apart and were being brandished as weapons. It was truly horrific.
Some of the smaller guys in the team, Isaac among them, had been taken to seats in the main stand, where they watched this mayhem for 15 minutes before they too were taken back to the bus by our shocked coaches.
There we sat, watching first the police and then the ambulances and helicopters, as the death toll rose. After 20 minutes of struggling to see the details on a black-and-white TV in the corner of the bus, I went to lie down on the seats at the back.
In the league of champions
I stopped playing football after I left school, but I watched Shakes rise to playing for Kaizer Chiefs and Bafana Bafana. On TV I’d seen him hold the ball up in the centre of Ellis Park in a Mainstay Cup final, and I saw how he was adored by hundreds of thousands. Damn, I thought then, the kid’s as big as Liverpool. Shakes — a local hero!
In 2014, near the 29th anniversary of that tragedy, I had recently returned from working in the UK. One Saturday I turned on the TV and saw Shakes, now rotund and in a suit and tie no less, playing the pundit. Replying to some random statistic thrown at him, he made a crack about Pirates “scoring 83% of their goals in the afternoon”. I sent him a direct message on Twitter and he immediately shot back: “My best goalkeeper! Where have you been?”
We made a plan to meet up for a long drink and dinner. But that very week, on May 28, exactly 29 years to the day that we were looking forward to watching Liverpool at the Heysel Stadium, Shakes suddenly died from diabetes. News of his death was a robbery for me on so many levels. I am shattered that he’s gone, that we didn’t have that talk, that he couldn’t tell me what life had been like from his witty, street-smart perspective.
But no one expects to die at 43.
Tough, gifted, sweet and bold
Shakes, if you were here now I’d tell you that Liverpool have finally made it back to the UEFA Champions League final, and they’re playing this weekend, four years almost to the day since you died. There won’t be a riot this time, I hope, but you never know. The angry England of Thatcher’s ’80s is back with a Brexit and even your old team Chiefs had their fans on the rampage last month, beating up the security and turning this game we love into something more than a matter of life and death.
It’s all so very sad, Shakes, because when I think of you, I think of someone who loved the game in mind, body and soul. Who loved the fans, who continued living in his home township. They closed the streets of Alex for your memorial, kasi flava. The minister spoke at your funeral and even the president sent his condolences.
Shakes, you were tough and gifted, sweet and bold, and man, you could play this beautiful game beautifully. I wish we could be sitting together this Saturday watching the game and talking about our younger selves.
They used to call me “Professor” because “he’s got an answer for everything” but I think they called you “Shakes” because you wouldn’t allow anything to hold you down. You stood up, my friend. You stood up.
* Laurence Hamburger is a filmmaker who now lives back on Louis Botha Avenue after nearly two decades abroad. His book of SA newspaper headline posters, ‘Frozen Chicken Train Wreck’, has just been re-issued by Jacana.