All hail Marcus Rashford, the gangling attacking playmaker of Manchester United football Club, on being tipped for a Honorary Doctorate degree by the University of Manchester.
It is honour richly deserved. As we have said in this column many times, the British society knows how to reward and honour its outstanding and heroic citizens.
In all likelihood the Black footballer is being honoured not for his distinction on the field of football but for his large, noble heart and immense contribution to the deepening of equality in Britain and the world at large.
It will be recalled that Marcus Rashford recently came to global attention for his stout and soul-stirring advocacy for free feeding for students from deprived background in British schools.
Rashford walked his talk, volunteering to singlehandedly bear the cost from his pocket if no help was coming from officialdom.
Watching the chap on television and his declaration that as a youth he also felt the pains and pangs of hunger, one cannot but be deeply moved. Despite his rise to soccer stardom, Rashford never forgot his humble origins.
Please recall that the ruling conservative government at first pooh-poohed the idea, dismissing the whole project as starry-eyed idealism and a fiscal impracticality.
But when the gale of public opinion rose against this narrow, tight-fisted monetarism, the government succumbed and promptly surrendered.
This ennobling and enriching episode demonstrates the power of the lone visionary individual to influence the shape of governance and the trajectory of humanity.
Generations of unborn British children will forever be grateful to Marcus Rashford. In a befitting soccer metaphor, a leading British newspaper dubbed the duel: Marcus Rashford 1; Boris Johnson 0.
This column admires athletes who stand and pitch for something outside their field of play.
Among these heroes are the late Germany-based Sam Okwaraji who fell in 1989 while playing for his beloved country and our own Patrick Olusegun Odegbami ,aka No7, who has been quietly running a successful Football Academy in his Orile Wasinmiancestral homestead even while serially, albeit unsuccessfully, running for political office.
So get on the field and dribble the hell out of ‘em, Dr Marcus. The only other playing doctor we can remember is Dr Socrates, full name Socrates Brasilei Sampaio de Souza Viera de Oliveira, guitar-strumming, contraband-smoking, soccer-playing medical doctor and attacking mid-fielder.
Outside the football pitch, the tall, lithe, elegant and charismatic Socrates pitched for higher and popular causes.
The iconic soccer star was the captain of the greatest Brazilian football team never to win a world cup. Snooper will never forget Socrates’ goal against Russia in the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
A magical pile-driver which dipped and looped into the net, leaving the outstanding Russian goalkeeper completely stranded and bemused to the bargain.
And talking about the deployment of soccer for hyper-nationalist causes, no one can beat the impish master, Diego Amanda Maradona.
When the greatest Argentine soccer legend and former pickpocket from the slums of Buenos Aires was asked which of his two goals that ended English ambition in the 1986 World Cup he liked better, the old contrarian rooted for the first one.
According to him, it was akin to picking the pocket of the English.
Remember that the Falkland Island is still known as Las Malvinas in Argentina till date? Soccer is the continuation of war and politics by other means. Well done, Marcus.
