Isaac ‘Shakes’ Kungwane: Footballer turned TV pundit
1971-2014
WE were sitting down, getting ready to rehearse for the TV programme Soccer Laduma.
“Have we just been hit by loadshedding?” asked Isaac “Shakes” Kungwane — who died on Wednesday, aged 43 — staring straight at me.
He was my partner for that afternoon’s analysis of a soccer match alongside anchor Kwena Moabelo. His load-shedding remark was a reference to my seven-midnights-put-together shade of blackness. The whole crew on set collapsed in collective rolling-onthe-floor laughter.
“Welcome to the SABC, madala. I run this place and I’ve just instructed them to put on extra lighting, otherwise the viewers won’t see you and will only hear your voice.”
Everyone present laughed their lungs out.
The joke was on me, courtesy of the joker in the pack, Kungwane.
Serious was banished from his vocabulary — he thought nothing of wearing a suit, tie and sneakers.
Blessed with an infectious personality off the field and an imperious left foot on it, he brought a light touch to TV and had no fear of breaking into township soccer scamtho (parlance), which endeared the former footballer turned pundit to multitudes of viewers.
A son of working-class parents, Shakes was born in Alexandra clinic
He confusing my player! He passing the ball this way and he looking that way
on February 2 1971, the first-born of six siblings, brothers Aaron, Mpho, Chippa and two sisters, Rebecca and Lebo.
“There’s four of us left now. We buried our sister Rebecca last June,” said Aaron, who recalls that “all Shakes ever wanted was to be a footballer”.
So much so that the Kungwane we saw as a professional footballer was nothing compared to the amazing skills his younger, slimmer self displayed in his amateur days.
The house he grew up in at 11th Avenue was a stone’s throw from the Alex Stadium situated on 12th Avenue, where he honed his skills.
He attended Carter Primary and proceeded to Alex High.
Mandla Mahlangu, a former teacher at Alex High, remembers a 1987 match in which the then student staged a stupendous showing.
“We played against Daliwonga High, who had Doctor Khumalo in their lineup. But Shakes masterfully bossed that match. He was unplayable.”
But the best of Shakes this writer witnessed was in 1992. He was part of a combined Alex and Thembisa schools squad that boasted Brian Baloyi and Jerry Sikhosana, among others. They reached the final of the Super C national tournament and came up against a Pretoria schools squad. Shakes provided the highlight of the tournament: he flummoxed all and sundry by swinging the ball sweetly from the corner straight into the net and helped his side to a 2-1 victory.
Upon turning professional, his stay at Jomo Cosmos was short-lived “because he didn’t get the game time he wanted” recalls Aaron, adding that “Ryder Mofokeng took him to Chiefs”.
Following an injury from a tackle by the late Samuel “Ewe” Khambule, Shakes made fat fit into football — he holds the record as the only rotund player to stay eight years at one of the biggest clubs in African football, Kaizer Chiefs.
His bulk meant Shakes was far from pacy, yet he single-handedly controlled the midfield and made fools of opponents, while his pinpoint passes created lots of goals for his strikers.
He passed with such accuracy I’m convinced the inventors of GPS consulted him, because Kungwane could locate a striker with a sublime long-range pass while looking in the opposite direction.
That calibre of passing — another player who could pass like Shakes is yet to be seen in SA — left one of his former coaches, Frenchman Paul Dolezar, foaming at the mouth.
“Shakes Kungwane, he confusing my player! He passing the ball this way and he looking that way,” bellowed Dolezar in his mind-yourlanguage English.
Since he spent almost a decade at Chiefs, there was a huge outcry on social networks when he was excluded from the Chiefs’ legends team that took on their Liverpool counterparts last November.
“There is a huge hullabaloo on Twitter and elsewhere about why I wasn’t picked, but I’m not a politician, I’m an analyst at SuperSport. “I was fortunate that after playing football I’m doing something with my life, so for me to complain about not being picked for legends doesn’t make sense,” he told Kickoff.com.
Opinions vary about the quality, or lack thereof, of his analysis. But Kungwane never pretended to be a know-all. He developed his own inimitable style, informed by his happy chappy, jolly guy character.
He took the time to engage with the tweeps of Twitterville — that willingness was a hallmark of his down-to-earth, gregarious nature. That’s why everybody loved Shakes.
He was working for SuperSport when he succumbed to diabetes-related complications at Linksfield Clinic.
He is survived by his wife Precious and three children.
He will be buried on Saturday in Brits.
To use the words of world-renowned poet, author and rights activist Maya Angelou, who died on the same day as Shakes: “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.”
We are grateful to your parents for blessing us with your life. See you on the heavenly set of Soccer Laduma, where I hope we will finish our book project. Lights out.
— Bareng-Batho Kortjaas