Thirty-seven years ago, after suffering a massive heart attack immediately after playing and starring in a National Football League game for Powerlines against Durban City in Nigel, Walter da Silva, arguably the most lethal goal-scorer in South African soccer history, was given a 25% chance of survival by the staff at the old Johannesburg General hospital in Hillbrow.
The brilliant, Brazilian-born striker, only 27 at the time, made a near-miraculous recovery and continued playing for five years in defiance of stern medical advice — before turning to soccer management and coaching an assortment of local clubs that included Soweto’s ”Big Three” — Orlando Pirates, Kaizer Chiefs and Moroka Swallows.
In 1975, Da Silva was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer, again receiving the stark news that his death was imminent.
A nine-hour operation at the Johannesburg General hospital, now at new surroundings in Parktown, once again earned the inscrutable Da Silva a life-saving reprieve.
Then two weeks ago, while walking with his wife from the fast-food outlet he runs in Turffontein to the nearby flat where he lives, Da Silva was accosted by three gun-toting gangsters, one of whom shot him in the temple from point-blank range.
”He became angry when he found I had no money,” said Da Silva. ”My wife escaped to the sanctuary of our flat and she had the day’s takings in her possession. So he shot me. I instinctively jerked my head away from the direction of the gun as he fired and instead of the bullet going straight into my brain, it went into my head at an angle and lodged below my right ear.”
Had he not moved his head with the panther-like agility and intuitiveness that accounted for more than a few of his goals for first division Brazilian clubs Fluminense and America and later for Highlands Park, Powerlines and other South African teams, Da Silva would certainly not be around to talk about it.
Instead, he was rushed to the Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital in a critical condition, where the bullet was removed and he was discharged last weekend.
”I must be a member of the cat family,” joked Da Silva after returning home, ”with nine lives at my disposal. But they are fast running out and the three narrow escapes from death certainly constitute the best hat-trick I ever recorded.”
Da Silva has never been far from danger in an eventful career that took him to the Seychelles and Vietnam in recent years and resulted in his kidnapping by a group of fanatical Moroka Swallows supporters while he was coaching The Birds.
”The team was going through a bad patch,” he recalls, ”and Swallows’ supporters don’t like losing. A group of hotheads campaigned for me to resign, but the club’s management had confidence in me and I believed I could turn things around.
”The group of supporters thought otherwise and so they kidnapped me before a game against Bush Bucks, drove off and kept me in the boot of a car for three frightening hours until the match was over.”
Although Da Silva emerged as a seasoned and knowledgeable coach in the firmament of South African soccer, playing a pivotal role in the revival of The Buccaneers in the late 1980s when they won the BobSave Super Bowl and emerged from a lengthy period in the doldrums, it was as a goal scorer supreme that he truly earned his niche.
These days it is rare for any PSL club to score 60 goals in a season. Da Silva accomplished this feat on his own for the irresistible Highlands Park team in 1966 and hardly ever missed a scoring opportunity while forming a devastating attacking duo with fellow-Brazilian Jorge Santoro.
”Composure is what counts in the penalty area,” he says, ”composure, instant control and a cool head.”
Bafana Bafana, who failed to score a single goal in their three matches at the African Nations Cup, had precious little of any of these commodities, he said after watching their games on TV.
As for the future, Da Silva has lost the hearing in his right ear as a result of the shooting.
”I’m receiving treatment at Baragwanath,” he says, ”and hope it will only be temporary. But the other ear is okay and I can still hear pretty good.”
He was negotiating with a club in Angola to take up a coaching post at the time of the shooting, he says, but will now need time to recuperate.
He has mixed feelings about South Africa. ”I have regarded it as my home for 41 years since I was brought to the country to play for Hellenic” — by wily Chilean coach Mario ”The Godfather” Tuani, but he is concerned about crime.