MAY 30 ― Every Saturday evening, the children in my Ampang neighbourhood would descend upon a clay pitch, with its crude wooden goal posts, for our weekly World Cup event. Screams, cheers, and cries of glee would rise up out of the field, and at the end of it all, we would head home with our scraped knees and smiles on our faces.

At the time, none of us thought about ethnic backgrounds along the hard racial lines contemporary Malaysian politics likes to assume are somehow hardwired into our DNA.

With my hindsight eyes looking back on those kids ― myself included ― running around kicking a football, I am hard pressed to identify anyone as strictly Malay, Chinese or Indian. We were all kind of “other” ― kids of mixed parentage, expats, locals ― but what mattered most wasn’t what our genetic code might look like under a microscope, but rather who was the best player on the field.

There was the girl whose mum was Malaysian and dad Australian who was the fastest runner out there under the hot, afternoon sky; there were the three brothers ― each built like a brick wall ― whose thick legs were like tree trunks; there was the boy, a bit older than I was, who had the very best soccer boots and shorts; if I remember correctly, I think there was even a kid or two from America, the fabled land of TV dreams.

Our neighbourhood bordered a kampung; so the football stars of the village played in these epic World Cup games. To be honest, most of them were fast, skilled, and stylish. They often put me to shame, out-dribbling me and seemingly able to score at will. They were football gods.

Among the pantheon, one stood out as the best of the best: “Ijan.” I never knew his real name. He was enigmatic and would appear only now and then. Everyone knew he was good, better than good. He never wore any shoes, let alone football boots. He was a master of the game in our eyes and in the eyes of his peers from the kampung. While Maradona lit up the professional pitches the world over, we had our own “Great One.” There was no doubt that when Ijan appeared on the field, he was a man among children.

A few times I had the good luck of playing on the same team as Ijan. He barely spoke. But that was fine. Who needs language when you have skill?  He constantly fed me the ball at opportune moments, signalling and communicating with his eyes or an arm gesture. In fact, I scored goals because he knew just how and when to pass me the ball having directed me to the right spot to put it in the net.

He could have run circles around us; he could have passed the ball to himself; he could have scored all the goals as we gaped with wide eyes and too-slow arms and legs. But he didn’t. He was a playmaker who could tap the energies and potential of his much lesser teammates. He made me a much better football player than I was otherwise entitled to be.

Ours was a group of children of different socio-economic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. While we played, we didn’t necessarily hang out with each other outside the football field. And in some cases, there was not even a common language.

Perhaps the only common language was a shared understanding of the rules governing the game of football. This shared understanding was sufficient to enable co-operation between us in the waning late afternoon sunlight of those epic games.

Ijan, I think, understood this deep truth about the possibility of social co-operation between different people. He could simultaneously maximise the potential of each team-member while getting the team to work as a coherent unit. He could rely on the fact that we all understood how the rules of football worked; he could form reasonable expectations about how we would behave while playing, expectations that he could also shape to encourage that behaviour. None of this required any explicit teaching or policing. There were no referees or linesmen. We just “got” each other because we all understood the rules of the game. It was this fact that allowed Ijan to bring us to our best in a way that went beyond our individual skill levels.

With the red clay of the field marking our sweaty children’s bodies under the hot sun as we ran and played ― dribbling, kicking, passing, and scoring ― Ijan was able to work magic and make the sum so much greater than its individual parts.

I don’t know where Ijan is today. But I think Malaysian politicians could learn a few lessons from his stature on the field. He understood full well that social co-operation depends on shared rules, but that these rules need only be adverbial ― they need not prescribe particular ends and only prescribe the means by which individuals may pursue their chosen ends.

Social co-operation is best achieved when those who lead do not try to control what people think or believe in order to control how they will behave. True leadership derives from the ability to inspire and to facilitate the citizen’s purposes, not the purposes of elites.

Ijan could have taken all the glory himself, but he didn’t; he made us all shine, and in so doing, shone so much brighter himself.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.