JOHANNESBURG — Though thrilled that the World Cup has come to his homeland, South African soccer great Jomo Sono can’t help but look back to his glory days in the apartheid era and wonder what might have been.
Once a teammate of Pele’s with the New York Cosmos, Sono — and several brilliant contemporaries — never got the chance to play for their country because of the international sports boycott.
“I’m not being cocky,” he said in an interview Thursday. “We would have definitely won the World Cup.”
Well, perhaps. The world champion Argentines were pretty good in 1978. So were the Italians in 1982.
Nonetheless, Sono was part of a generation of South African stars who played abroad, primarily in the North American Soccer league, during the 1970s and ’80s. They included both white and black players — among them Steve Wegerle, Neill Roberts, Webster Lichaba and the heralded midfielder Ace Ntsoelengoe — who might have qualfied for the 1982 World Cup.
“We could have made a big difference in the world,” Sono mused. “But we cannot be sad.”
He evoked the legacy of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, who spent more than 27 years in prison before his release in 1990 and his election as president in 1994.
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“We spent those years outside, playing football, doing what we love most, while he was sitting in prison,” Sono said. “By talking about him and looking at his life, it takes away all the pain and the frustration.”
Though excluded from the boycott-era World Cups, Sono says he, Ntsoelengoe and other black players who went abroad contributed to South Africa’s eventual transformation.
“We carried the torch for the South African people by playing overseas,” he said. “The perception of the white Afrikaners was that the black man can’t do anything. We went out to the other side of the world and showed that black people can play football.”
“We’re also proud to see the World Cup is here today,” he said. “It’s because of people like us, like Mandela, those who suffered.”
Sono was born in the black township of Soweto in 1955, the son of a pro soccer player. His father was killed in a car crash when he was 8, his mother abandoned him, and he was raised by his grandparents.
He played for his father’s former club, the Orlando Pirates, and went to the United States in 1977 to join a remarkable New York Cosmos team that included several world-famous though past-their-prime stars, notably Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia and Carlos Alberto.
“It was like the Harlem Globetrotters,” Sono said. “All the superstars were there.”