nice article on former England int'l Ricky Hill. used to watch him play back in the day.
http://www.rowdiessoccer.com/news/detail/uuid/fsfsinvq3m4q17fh14gubxbrd#.Uv08FGJdVPIWhen Albert Johansson died homeless, penniless and abandoned by his family in West Yorkshire two decades ago, almost no one in Tampa Bay paid any heed. But the obscurity of his death cannot negate the global impact of his life. Indeed, Johansson’s trailblazing odyssey on the other side of the Atlantic half-a-century earlier triggered worldwide ripples of repercussions that still, to this day, reverberate through the soccer field at Downtown St. Petersburg’s Al Lang Stadium.
“I was just 5-years-old, watching a small black and white TV. The year was 1964,” recalled Rowdies head coach Ricky Hill. “I still remember it like it was yesterday. I asked my older brother, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’ I was so excited! Albert Johansson was the first soccer player I had ever seen who looked… like me.”
Albert Johansson shattered England’s racial barrier and became the first person of African heritage to play in the FA Cup final. Ricky Hill was – and of course, still is – of African heritage himself.
“Watching that soccer game forever changed my life,” Hill added.
It forever changed Tampa Bay’s sports history as well.
Coach Hill’s story began a generation earlier: “This has never been reported anywhere, but my grandparents were originally from India,” he revealed. “My family name is actually ‘Sukie.’ But after immigrating to Jamaica, they worked the land that belonged to a gentleman named Mr. Hill. Mr. Hill didn’t have any children of his own, so before he died he asked my grandfather to adopt his surname. And that’s how our last name became ‘Hill.”
His father grew-up in Jamaica in a large, sprawling family with four brothers and five sisters. “He was the only one who married a black Jamaican,” Coach Hill reminisced. “All the others married Indians. So even during family gatherings, my household always looked, well, a little different from the rest.”
In the aftermath of World War II, England was in ruins, its population decimated. Third world immigrants flocked to the island nation to help it rebuild. Among the many immigrants were Coach Hill’s mother and father....