Liberian George Mcdonald Sacko dies homeless in US
By Shout-Africa.com – News coming from UPI.com, Newark, NY, has it that George McDonald Sacko the one time star on the Liberian national soccer team of the 1950s and 1960s, died homeless in Newark, N.J. a few months ago.
George Mcdonald Sacko
His death was first announced in a brief legal notice seeking information on his next of kin, The Star-Ledger of Newark reported. Saint Michael’s Medical Center placed the notice after Sacko died of natural causes at the hospital on Sept. 17.
Sacko grew up in Monrovia, the son of an indigenous Liberian father and a mother who had been born in Georgia. While his family was relatively prosperous, he learned soccer playing on the street barefoot. He became a star midfielder for the Lone Star, the national team. While Liberia had little international impact, the team was a source of national pride.
Benedict Wisseh, a star in the next generation of Liberian soccer players, said Sacko’s mixed heritage was important in a country that was starting to divide along ethnic lines.”Sacko was very, very important to our national pride, because he brought us together,” Wisseh told the Star-Ledger. “He made us forget our differences.”
One of the women Sacko dated was a future president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Sacko moved to the United States in 1971 to join his wife and two brothers. By that time, a knee injury had interrupted his soccer career.
Garretson Sacko, who was also a star on the Lone Star, said his brother’s life started to unravel when he lost his job at a metal-working plant. His wife moved to Rhode Island with their sons, and for the last 10 years Sacko apparently lived on the streets, sleeping in the train station addicted to heroin and alcohol. When he turned 75 in May, the Liberian community threw a party. Guests came from Washington and Johnson Sirleaf sent a commemorative pin.
“I’m sick,” Sacko told his brother. “Pray for me.” Also the legal notice ran in this newspaper’s back pages, tucked between a name-change announcement and a court summons.
“George Sacko has died at Saint Michael’s Medical Center,” it read.
Within 17 short, clinical lines, it catalogued a few other facts: Sacko’s birthplace and birth date — Liberia; May 19, 1936 — and his last known address.
It asked that anyone with information on next of kin call the hospital.
Sacko, 75, had died at St. Michael’s, in Newark’s Central Ward, on Sept. 17, homeless, penniless and almost anonymously.
But a half-century ago and an ocean away, George McDonald Sacko, aka “Wizard,” had a country at his feet.
An elegant and agile midfielder, Sacko had captained the Liberian national soccer team into the 1960s, when the nascent squad supplied the unifying thread to a country fraying at the serrated edge of tribal and political strife.
He had groomed his game barefoot, kicking tennis balls with older boys in the dusty streets of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. He attended a prestigious high school and befriended government ministers. He had a future president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate as a girlfriend, and played for the country’s best club teams. “He was flashy,” said June Nwanna, who became his wife and the mother of his two sons. “He was very popular. All the women wanted him.”
Within two decades, those strands of glory and adulation would unspool like so much gossamer. In the end, Sacko was wandering Newark’s streets, and spending his nights at Penn Station.
A UNIFYING FORCE
Sacko had grown up in Monrovia’s Crown Hill neighborhood, the son of an Americo-Liberian mother born in Georgia and an indigenous father from the Grebo tribe, in the country’s southeast. Although his father, a government budget director, lived away from the family, he and six brothers and sisters were raised in relative comfort by their mother, a customs inspector, relatives and friends said.
Numerous interviews, along with news accounts and essays about the team’s history, filled out Sacko’s life story, from his childhood in Monrovia to his demise at St. Michael’s.
By his 20s, as Africa entered its headiest epoch, with most of the continent’s nations gaining independence from their colonial overseers, Sacko was carving a piece of his own country’s history.
Playing on a dirt field in a stadium built for political rallies, the team attracted overflowing crowds. Because of his mixed heritage, Sacko helped to collar Liberia’s otherwise disparate political passions.
“He was the glue,” said Sacko’s younger brother, Garretson, a star forward on the Lone Star, as the team was christened around that time.
On game days, Americo-Liberians — descendants of emancipated slaves who founded the nation in the 19th century — and indigenous Liberians put aside their festering discord, said another of the team’s all-time greats, Benedict Wisseh.
“Sacko was very, very important to our national pride, because he brought us together,” said Wisseh, whose playing career followed the Sackos’ by a generation. “He made us forget our differences.”
