Remembering to remember a legend

Trinidad and Tobago bids farewell to a captain from a different era.

(Screenshot from TTFA video)

Do you ever realize you have a player totally wrong? Maybe you caught one match in person and a player was playing out of position or had an off night. Or perhaps you thought you were watching the next Rafa Marquez only to realize you’d caught the player on the night of his career.

It’s easy now to correct your mistake. Even without access to scouting services that show every touch or pass or tackle a player made during a match, there is video of most leagues on YouTube or social media, publicly available.

We live in an era in which I share video of a cool move by an 18-year-old forward in Costa Rica and fans of the rival team are in my mentions showing me video of why they think their teenage forward is better.

Sedley Joseph, the former Trinidad and Tobago captain who died Monday at the age of 80 because of kidney issues, played and managed during a different era.

There are no videos (at least not that I could find online) of Joseph picking out a pass in the midfield, putting in the hard work of winning a ball back or even giving a few words before leading the national team onto the field for its first-ever World Cup qualification match.

Instead, we’re left with words of tribute from his friends, former teammates and players who he coached.

“Joseph was remembered as one of this country’s best leaders on the football field, a father figure and a cool customer,” reads the lede of his Trinidad and Tobago Newsday obituary - surely the sign of a life well lived to have ‘cool customer’ in the first line of your obit.

“I never saw Sedley in the middle of a problem as a player, and as manager he was even better,” Alvin Corneal, his teammate for the national team and with Maple, told Wired868. “As a player, he was always so laid-back,” Corneal continued, comparing his role to that of Claude Makélélé. “And then there was his vision of a pass. Sometimes a player might make an accurate pass but it wasn’t the best one—he would always see the best pass.”

We also have Joseph’s own words, thanks to this extended chat with the TTFA’s Shaun Fuentes, recorded just months ago, as he recalls the standout moments of his career.

While they chatted, Joseph held newspaper clippings on his lap, reminders of standout games or times when he was profiled by the local press.

In our digital age, I wonder how we will look back on our earlier days. We have more control over what parts of our lives are documented than ever before, but it’s also difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. And as we continue to lose journalists and storytellers to other industries because of economic hardships and editorial decisions or see the hard work of telling the story of a person’s life increasingly passed on to the writer who can be paid the least, the memory of our heroes may be distorted.

Documentarians’ challenge will at some point shift from finding shreds of information that reveal a bit about the topic to sorting through all the posts, all the videos, all the memes to find what its true essence really is.

As of writing, Joseph’s Wikipedia page says “Sedley Joseph (4 December 1939 – 8 June 2020) was a Trinidad and Tobago footballer.” A biography that is accurate but fails to capture anything more about the man or explain why he’s revered as a local legend and was inducted into the T&T Sports Hall of Fame.

These days when we bring up an athlete’s legacy, we’re often talking about how many titles they won. Joseph won several domestic titles, plus a bronze medal at the 1967 Pan American games thanks to a win over host Canada, but it seems his true stamp was left as a manager and a mentor, as former Trinidad and Tobago international David Nakhid wrote in his tribute:

Captain Sedley was the epitome of the essential gentleman: noble in his endeavours, generous with his time and himself, upright and frighteningly upstanding. Big, huge shoes to fill for any wanna-be captain. I wanted to be like him, I dared for a touch of his greatness.

There always will be cult heroes or local legends, players who are revered in their country or among a certain club’s supporters but are total unknowns to the outside world.

The tributes coming out of Trinidad and Tobago show the “Skipper” won’t be forgotten. In this time when so many are losing loved ones and trying to make sure their memories are kept alive, it’s a reminder that it is up to us to chronicle their lives, to share the times that make us smile and to keep telling their stories.