‘An outstanding player and an outstanding person’
RIP Cedric ‘Sugar Ray’ Xulu
Ask Clive Barker to single out the greatest player to grace South African football. His answer is not Kaizer Motaung. It is not Jomo Sono. It is not the late Patrick “Ace” Ntsoelengoe, names from the pantheon of South African soccer. It is instructive that Cedric “Sugar Ray” Xulu, who died this week aged 80, was the best player whom the best Bafana Bafana coach had laid eyes on.
You get a measure of the man when you read what Barker recorded for posterity in his book, Coach: The Life and Soccer Times of Clive Barker.
“An often-asked question of me is to identify which players I would turn to in a crisis. Sugar Ray Xulu would be the one from the 1970s while Calvin Petersen and Professor Ngubane were invaluable during the 1980s. In the 1990s, John “Shoes”
Mosheou, Doctor Khumalo, Neil Tovey and Lucas Radebe were pillars of strength. But for setting up chances in a game, the best player I have ever worked with is the incomparable Doctor Khumalo. There is a hit song by Tina Turner — Simply the Best. That’s Doctor Khumalo,” wrote Barker.
Xulu’s name is the first Barker mentions because while Khumalo was the heartbeat of what represents an epoch and the defining moment of Barker’s career — winning the Africa Cup of Nations in 1996 — Xulu was a formidable figure of the formative years when Barker cut his coaching teeth.
Unmistakable are the ties that bond the men. AmaZulu was the first professional team Barker coached. He did so between 1974 and 1976. Xulu, born to lead, skippered the side and played a hand in
Barker breaking the racial barrier by crossing over to Usuthu.
Even over the phone, the passion and affection in Barker’s voice when he speaks about Xulu are palpable. His emotions reveal a reverence.
“I was involved with Benson & Hedges when I met him and he asked me to come over. He was the best all-round player. He had a class about him that none of us had. He could have played in any league at any given time anywhere in the world. He could pass the ball better than anybody I ever saw. A man of superlatives,” Barker said this week.
“He was an elegant footballer with a very deft left foot. He protected the ball arrogantly and passed it with panache. The way he dominated a lot of top teams was out of this world. He was very good at holding AmaZulu together when they played Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates. It was a marvel to watch. He would have been signed by any of those teams, but he was very loyal to AmaZulu,” said Barker.
“I was very privileged to coach a man who was composed as a footballer and a person. Sugar Ray was my father. He was classy. I loved him.”
‘Everything was messed up’
Echoing former president Thabo Mbeki’s two-nations-one-country speech, Barker noted in his book that “two nations existed in SA and the 1970s and ’80s were dark times, especially if you were black. Everything was messed up. I couldn’t even drink out of the same cup as someone like Sugar Ray Xulu, who was a much better person than I could ever have been.”
A player’s player who never hesitated to pick up the cudgels for his teammates when they were denied what was due to them, Xulu went to great lengths to ensure justice was done. Not one to suffer fools, he was at the forefront of what almost became a player revolt. The source of their fury was Arthur Nxumalo, then club chairman, notorious for paying players on the 32nd day of the 13th month, if he paid at all.
Barker admired Xulu’s principles as well as his soccer skills. “Sugar Ray was an outstanding player and an outstanding person. He took me to the townships for the first time in my life. That opened my eyes about the realities of SA back then.”
Xulu is at the top of the tree of the world’s greatest soccer players. With his feet, he could produce something extraordinary, something brilliant.
Born in 1939 in Ndunduma, Clermont, Durban, the young Xulu grew up herding his father’s cattle. He also spent time on a farm in Wasbank near Ladysmith.
Using a tennis ball to sharpen one’s soccer skills was part of education in the black community. Xulu, who obtained his JC (junior certificate) at Ohlange High School, was no exception.
“My father told us that he loved boxing,” said Xulu’s son Thami this week. “He boxed for no longer than a year. He said his father pushed him out of boxing and made him cross to football. He said he used to play intuma [soccer with a tennis ball]. He loved education and encouraged us to study.”
Xulu’s football fire was ignited by Stadag Makhathini, who played for Union Jacks, and Darius Dlomo of Baumans City All Blacks, who he watched as a youngster in the slaughterhouse of Msizini.
He honed his skills at Clermont Home Defenders and continued his apprenticeship at Avalon Athletic, followed by a foray into Eswatini for a stint with Mbabane Swallows.
AmaZulu, however, was his home. His heart was there. Such was his loyalty that he never joined the great trek to Gauteng.
Like Dlomo, a man of many talents who was equally adept at tennis, boxing and music, Xulu was also a boxer. He had a few fights and was so good a pugilist he earned the Sugar Ray moniker, after the legendary American boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.
A reserved midfield maestro who never spoke much, Xulu was modest and loved peace and tranquillity.
His wife of over 40 years, Nancy Flora, died in 2016.
“That’s when we started to see that he was no longer fine health-wise,” said Thami. “He started losing weight. He hid the cancer from us. He only told us just before our mother died. When the cancer was diagnosed, he was supposed to have an operation down the line. But my father refused, made an excuse that his wife was sick and discharged himself from hospital.”
An indelible moment, which underlined Xulu’s status as a supremo, played out on the occasion of one of the clashes between the SA Black XI and White XI.
“I think the match was at the Rand Stadium,” remembers Vuma Mfeka, younger brother of Frederick Mfeka, who kept goal for the Blacks.
“Xulu was left out of the initial squad. He was flown to Joburg on the day of the match. That is why he started off on the bench. He came on and scored a free kick. The Blacks lost 3-1 but there was a big celebration because that was the first-ever goal to be scored against Whites.”
Thami said his father remembered that game with fondness. “He told us that he worked in a bottle store. After the Blacks lost the first game, there was an uproar about his exclusion. A man came to the bottle store and told him, ngizokulanda, siyahamba siya eGoli manje, liyakudinga iqembu [I’m here to fetch you. We’re going to Joburg now. The team needs you].”
Mfeka, who also played for AmaZulu, agrees with Barker that Xulu was an unassuming genius who was not after fame and quietly commanded the respect of his peers.
“We used to camp at the Planet Hotel. We would arrive there and find Kaizer Motaung waiting for him. He was respected by Kaizer. When Chiefs played in Durban, they would phone me and ask me to come collect presidential-suite tickets for Sugar Ray,” said Mfeka.
‘Fast — and knew how to score’
Mutual admiration was the hallmark of the relationship between Xulu, who succumbed to prostate cancer on Monday, and fellow leftie Motaung.
“He was left-footed, just like me. He was fast and knew how to score,” Motaung said on the Chiefs website, adding: “He was a brilliant player, a true legend of the game of football.”
One of the greatest sporting tragedies of the bad old days was that apartheid deprived a galaxy of golden greats from gracing fields afar.
Some got a chance. The hallowed football grounds of Holland were home to the hypnotising skills of Steve “Kalamazoo” Mokone. Darius Dlomo also went to display his dexterity for the Dutch. Motaung, Sono and Ntsoelengoe showed their skills in the North American Soccer League.
But many more didn’t get the opportunity: Petros “Ten Ten” Nzimande, Ephraim “Shakes” Mashaba, Gerald “Jazzman” Dlamini, Frederick Mfeka, Joseph “Banks” Sethlodi, Mthunzi Kota, Richard Ngubane, Lucas “Masterpieces” Moripe, Percy “Chippa Chippa” Moloi, Johannes “Shaka” Ngcobo and Michael “Bhiza” Dlamini.
Those men who made up the Black XI were captained by Xulu.
The younger generation are only now becoming exposed to the prodigious talents of the abovementioned stars, thanks to the rich archives that
SABC Sport started showing to mitigate the absence of live football — suspended because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Bafana class of 1996 remains the only group to bring glory to the country. Xulu and his generation were left to wonder what they might have achieved had SA not been a pariah state because of its apartheid laws.
In 2019, Xulu was honoured with the Chairman’s Award at the PSL end-of-season shindig. But he could not climb on stage to collect his R250,000 cheque. He suddenly took ill before the ceremony commenced. An ambulance was summoned to the Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre to rush him to hospital.
“He was a fit man in his heyday,” said Mfeka. “When you think about the quality of players of yesteryear, they were really talented people. Fitness was their hallmark. He never spoke on the field and made telling passes so accurate it was as if he threw the ball with a hand. When it came to free kicks, he was a master.”
Mlungisi Ngubane testifies like a happy-clappy evangelist, telling anyone within earshot that he developed his knack for firing accurate free kicks just from watching Xulu.
Moripe, also nicknamed Modimo wa Bolo (God of football), has a stadium that bears his name in Atteridgeville.
A similar honour was bestowed on Xulu when the renovated stadium in Clermont was renamed the Cedric Xulu Stadium, a venue that AmaZulu call home.
Xulu was buried yesterday at the Heroes Acre section of the Ezinkawini cemetery in Chesterville, eThekwini. He is survived by his three sons, Mandla, Thami and Sandile.
“As the family, we are touched by all the messages of support and by all those who have come to our home to pay their respects to our father,” said Thami.
‘He was an elegant footballer with a very deft left foot. He protected the ball arrogantly and passed it with panache. The way he dominated a lot of top teams was out of this world. He was very good at holding AmaZulu together when they played Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates. It was a marvel to watch’
Clive Barker
Veteran coach