KOCHI: During his visit to Kannur two years ago, Diego Maradona refused to cut a birthday-cake shaped like a football. The Argentine maestro’s love for football is manifested in a different way in Kochi’s own ‘Football Uncle’ Rufus D’Souza.
A versatile genius who drew applause in equal measure with a football at his feet and a hockey stick in his hands, D’Souza simply refuses to kick a football without playing boots on. For him, kicking with bare feet, or wearing anything other than football boots, amounts to insulting the “object with life” - as he calls a football.
Having played top flight football and hockey in the country for more than two decades, between 1951 and 1972, he continues to live football, training kids. The pain remains, though, that he could not don the Kerala jersey in Santosh Trophy, which he did for Tamil Nadu. However, he captained the Kerala hockey team in 1972, after having rubbed shoulders with the very best for TN.
These days, at 84, he rises hours before the sun. After a bath, prayer, breakfast and a two-hour session of reading newspapers, he heads to the Parade Ground in Fort Kochi. There, he melts into being one of the kids — dribbling, kicking, shooting and running with a skill and energy that defies his age.
“You cannot teach a boy to shoot if you cannot do it yourself. If you are a coach, you should not preach football, but teach it,” he says.
Rufus, who trains close to 100 children every day, follows a ruthless regime to keep himself fit.
Of Goan lineage but born and brought up in Fort Kochi, he started playing football at the age of seven. After perfecting his skills at the Parade Ground, he found a place in the Indian junior hockey team for an overseas tour in 1950. Sadly, it did not take off. A year later, he was picked to the hockey team of Travancore-Cochin, playing for it till 1956.
The next year, he went to Chennai to play football for the Netaji Sports Club. At the same time, he played hockey for the Imperial Tobacco Company. In 1962, he joined the Wimco Sports Club.”
Having retired from State Bank of Travancore, as head clerk, in 1995, he still holds his football philosophy close to his heart.
“It is not the player who scores a goal. It is the ball that decides to go into the net. For the ball to do so, you need to treat it with love,” says D’Souza, who chose to remain a bachelor to look after his epileptic brother.
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