Sporting activity has become a major part of people’s lives in modern global society. Global communication capabilities have expanded the bandwith of broadcasting and the competition for broadcasting rights has made professional sports far more lucrative for owners and for players.

On another level, there is the soccer mom or the Little League coach who contributes at the village level and plays an important part in civil society and the development and socialisation of a whole new generation.

For a nation of 2.7 million people, Jamaica has achieved more than gold in the world of track and field. In addition, the Jamaica Reggae Boyz did make history in 1998 when they qualified as one of 36 teams to play in the World Cup. Just a few months ago, the Reggae Girlz qualified for the Women’s World Cup that will be held in France in 2019.

The pivotal role of the coach has become indispensable for teams and individuals achieving greatness. In the case of Jamaican soccer, the Jamaica Football Federation contracted the Brazilian coach, Jorge Penna, to train the Jamaica national squad for the Pan American games of 1962. Penna transformed football as it existed in Jamaica. When he made his departure there were a few aspiring coaches, including Winston Chung Fah, who learned from him and sought to emulate his brand of Brazilian football.

Unquestionably, Jorge Penna left an indelible impression on Winston Chung Fah, who passed from this earth on November 8, 2018 and was memorialised in Miami, Florida, on December 8, and in Kingston, Jamaica, on December 15, 2018.

In a career spanning over 50 years as a pioneering figure in Jamaican soccer, even before his death, Winston Chung Fah was recognised as a soccer coaching legend in the annals of Jamaican football.

I knew Winston Chung Fah as a child growing up in the working class neighbourhoods of Eastern and Central Kingston. My fond memory of him, in the days when we were still in school pants, is he always had a team. From childhood he was fiercely competitive. In his early days he joined the Young Men’s Christian Association and made their soccer team as a goalkeeper. As a player he displayed that “true grit”, but that was not his forte. He would make his mark not as an aspiring goalkeeper but as a legendary coach.

At the early adult age of 22, he was instrumental in forming a soccer team based in Central Kingston that was called Doncaster Rovers. Because of differences with the other founders, he made his exodus from that endeavour. In 1964 Winston Chung Fah formed Santos Football Club, named in honour of the great Brazilian, Pele, who for most of his stellar career, played for Santos Football Club in Brazil.

As a child and as a young man growing up in Eastern and Central Kingston, Winston Chung Fah was awed by the wealth of talent that existed in poor communities. Many of these players were not playing in top leagues of Jamaican soccer. These lads did not have the means to pay dues and to become members of elite or middle class clubs. The creation of Santos enabled that wealth of talent to be harnessed and to level the playing field for so many who traditionally had been locked out of Division One soccer.

Chung Fah started Santos with a dearth of resources but with a singleness of purpose of changing the class nature of football in the country of his birth. At the inception, Santos had no place of abode and bounced from field to field. Subsequently, Major Ken Barnes of the Jamaica Defence Force gave them a field in Up Park Camp to hold their training sessions.

By the late 1960s this grass roots club, under the tutelage of Chung Fah, rose to become the dominant soccer club in Jamaica. It was a Kerculean accomplishment and is a tribute to coach Chung Fah’s organising capabilities and his coaching prowess. Santos was comprised of players from Rae Town, Brown’s Town, Franklyn Town, Bridge View, etc.

From his years with Penna and even before, Winston Chung Fah was a serious student of the game. He studied the Hungarian World Cup team of 1954. He learned from the Brazilian World Cup team of 1958. He never stopped learning his craft. He took coaching courses in Jamaica, he travelled to Bermuda to take a FIFA coaching course, he journeyed to England to taka an FA coaching course.

What is not widely acknowledged is the special leadership skills that he had acquired at a young age to manage difficult and complex personalities. Young men socialised in inner-city communities require deft understanding. A critical factor in comprehending his success as a coach had a lot to do with a complete identification with the humanity of people who were marginalised. They became aware of his generosity and magnanimity as a human being. There was mutual trust and love.

To observe Chung Fah at a training session was like watching a master painter at work, insisting on a greater effort. The level of concentration was extraordinary. Chungie was never satisfied with mediocrity. At every session nothing but maximum effort was demanded. Every fibre of his being was about the business of getting to the mountain top, about achieving excellence through discipline and hard work.

A team that Winston Chung Fah coached exuded confidence and exercised the right chemistry. When his team took the field, they performed like professionals. When they returned to the dressing room at half-time, when Chung Fah spoke and delivered his inspirational message, the team returning to the pitch invariably found another gear. He certainly had natural coaching ability but what was the distinguishable feature about his success was his depth of understanding of the game and prodigious capacity for tireless work.

After coaching Santos to the pinnacle of Jamaican football, Winston Chung Fah in the 1970s went on to make his mark on the national stage. He was the Jamaica Youth coach for the Under-19 team in the 1970s. He took a team that played in the Concacaf tournament in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, that played outstanding football and would have qualified to play in the Youth World Cup were it not for a glitch in who was eligible to play in the tournament. Quite belatedly, in the last weeks of training, he had to make adjustments on who was eligible to play.

After coaching Clarendon College for a few years, in 1977, they won the daCosta Cup and the Oliver Shield. Clarendon College has remained forever grateful and pundits have insisted that the 1977 Clarendon College schoolboy team is undoubtedly one of the best in the history of schoolboy football.

Winston Chung Fah was appointed Technical Director of Jamaican football in 1991 and alighted from that position in 1993. During that short stint, he established a coaching school and brought to the fore a Women’s National Team.

For much of the 21st century, he was the coach of Scholar’s Football Club in Grand Cayman. In that endeavour he had a profound impact on the game in the Cayman Islands. From his years as a coach and organiser in Jamaica, he stressed the importance of education. In Cayman he was proud of the amount of scholarships that he was able to obtain for those who came under his guidance.

Winston Chung Fah’s life was marked by an unwavering commitment to uplift the poor and to use soccer as a liberating tool for young men caught in the throes of poverty. He had the vision in his later years to see the importance of building academies in Jamaica if the country would be in a position to compete on a global stage comparable to our performance in the world of track and field. He had managed to acquire the lands to erect a soccer academy but could not successfully procure the capital to make that dream a reality. There is already a soccer academy functioning in Mount Pleasant, St Ann, and other not-so-well resourced academies.

Chung Fah was quite a trailblazer and wherever he put down roots, had a lasting impact on people’s lives. His life personifies how one colourful and charismatic personality can profoundly impact civil society. He was an exceptional soccer coach and even, moreso, a remarkable human being.

Professor Basil “Bagga” Wilson, a former Kingston College Cup footballer and Sunlight Cup cricketer, is retired provost of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.