_{Photo: Veteran Milpros striker teammates, Turo Leslie & Maurice Jones (circa 2015)}

by Chilor X

Saturday, December 22, 2024

Reesho said he’s coming to town tomorrow, on some medical matters. No football confrontation in the offing. Those were “dem days”. Now, we’re all veterans from that glorious era of the 1970s.

Thinking about Reesho always brings to mind that epic clash on the MCC for the Belize City football championship in 1976-77. Those were the heart of the glory days of Maurice Jones, who, like one Harry “Straddle” Cadle, had made his spectacular entrance into Belize City 1st Division football a few years earlier as a new figure on the then beleaguered C.A.A. (Centro Americano Atletico, led by Victor, the jeweler, known for once receiving a record 17 goals from perennial champions Landivar). Ever since then, the name of Maurice Jones was one respected and feared by goalkeepers; and of course, he was one that was sought after by a number of top teams.

But that is a long and glorious career story that Reesho will hopefully share with us one day, soon.

Soon is important, because, strangely, many of our greatest strikers or stars in different positions from that era of the 1970s are leaving us very early, many still in their early or mid-sixties. Sometimes I wonder if the effects of Covid, or the vaccine, which was itself an experiment, have anything to do with it. In the last couple years alone, we have lost Tash (Jacinto) Gutierrez, Peru (Rudolph) Olivera, Turo (Arthur) Leslie, Coro (Gilroy) Usher, and Ricky (Enrique) Gongora, all monstrous stars of the late 1970s into the 1980s.

But, back to Reesho coming to town, battling some health issues. In fact, he shared with me that he has not worked for nearly five years now (in the construction industry), since his heart issues began. Not cancer, thankfully, and his lungs are clean, he says, having been a lifelong non-smoker; but a warrior with the heart of a lion may still become a victim of too big a heart sometimes. He says he is taking advice from his doctor. He also has an operation (not heart, but a routine male procedure) scheduled soon at the KHMH; and, despite the P.M.’s boast in his New Year’s address that “all fees and costs at every public health clinic in the country have been eliminated,” Reesho still has to come up with funds to pay a bill of some four thousand dollars. Like his once super-striker teammate on White Label, Reesho, self-employed for many years, does not have much to fall back on at this stage, neither pension nor social security, and we will see if his real fans can help shoulder his burden, as Hogman’s have been doing on the P.O.S.T. team since September of 2020. When capitalism fails, brotherhood and team spirit should fill the void.

But that Belizean era of the 70s and 80s to which Reesho belonged (he played up into the mid-80s), was marked by a high level of dedication and commitment to “di bola”. It’s almost as if we ‘ballers somehow dreamed that inside the sacred game of football lay our future in the big wide world. We were all hooked on “the game”, and everything else in life took second place. After school or work each evening, our adrenalin rush was all directed towards the ball park. We were a healthy generation.

So, it completely blew me away, decades later, when I learned that Maurice Jones was not in the White Label line-up that memorable Sunday afternoon, when it was the beer vs the whiskey, Charger vs White Label for the Belize City football championship 1976-77.

We must have been tied in points, because there was no suggestion of one team only needing a draw. I was a total “bench warmer” on Charger at that time, with legendary Oliver “Raku” Craig as coach; but Charger had jumped to a 2-nil first half lead, and it didn’t dawn on me then that Reesho, who along with teammate Wayne “Hogman” Olivera was one of the leading goal scorers that year, was not there. Perhaps it was fate that Label would pull off a spectacular 4-2 win for the championship. As exciting as Charger was, hands-down, White Label was a more powerful team; and it showed that, even without Reesho, they had enough artillery to handle Charger.

But such a big-game star—a “money player”, if ever there was one—how on earth could Reesho not be on the Barracks for this monster match-up for the championship? The thought had never entered my mind that such was possible; and if there was a major accident making Reesho unavailable, the whole football community would know.

They say that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

On a Krem TV show a few months back, “Hail the Man”, Rudolph “Sir Andie” Anderson, the ‘Label manager at the time, mentioned his surprise and dismay that Sunday morning at his team meeting, when he informed them that both Reesho and “Gas” (Anthony McField), a regular starting forward and a regular starting defender, would not be in town for the championship game that afternoon.

Reesho’s teammate, Hogman, confirmed it to me a few weeks ago. His older brother Peru scored a spectacular goal to tie the game, after Cherry’s (Eugene Cherrington) long free kick from deep inside his defensive area had caught Faggi (Noel Ferguson) way outside his goal for the first White Label score in their come-back 4-2 win. The go-ahead goal was by Sammy Gentle (who played for Charger the previous year), and then a header by Dingo (Earl “Mandingo” Barnett) off a corner kick.

I can only suspect that nobody expected a game to be played that Sunday. The regular season schedule must have finished, and according to the schedule, the team with the most points would then be declared the champion. That’s the only plausible explanation I can think of for why a couple months earlier, the Sunday immediately following the season’s scheduled end would have been the date set, with all the arrangements made, for wedding bells to be rung for bridegroom Anthony “Gas” McField up north in Corozal Town, and the best man was none other than his teammate and best friend, Maurice “Reesho” Jones.