But it cannot be overestimated, just how important Hungarys extraordinary Golden Team might have been in developing Les love affair with soccer and in his committing his life to turning Australia into a soccer appreciating and soccer ambitious nation.
Of course, the greatest embodiment of the Golden Team of soccer was its undisputed superstar, Puskás, who ended up with the twentieth century record of scoring the greatest number of international goals with a whopping 84.
It is not in vain that the literal meaning of the word Puskás is gunner in Hungarian. Judging by his scoring record, Puskás definitely lived up to his name.
And Ferenc Puskás did not just remain Les childhood hero of soccer.
Perhaps no other soccer commentator in the world managed to get closer to Puskás than did Les Murray.
Puskás spent time in Australia running a soccer clinic in Melbourne. He would have made an important contribution to developing upcoming Aussie soccer talents.
Les interviewed Puskás extensively for SBS Radio in Hungarian. He was keen to decipher the secrets behind the phenomenal success of the1950s Hungarian Golden Team of soccer. And he did.
He asked Puskás opinion about this.
PuskA?s went into generous details as to how the Golden Team was able to come up with so much magic.
For example, he explained that a number of team players, including himself, had been playing for the same football club, Honvėd. They had so much team experience together that they could read each others minds. Also, the entire National Team, spent huge amount of time training together, so that they could jell into a closely knit team.
For example, PuskA?s talked about how the team visited country towns regularly and had fun games with the best of local clubs there. It was during those games that the team developed its skill of scoring phenomenal number of goals and to relax to really enjoy their games. They set up just about every member of the team to score, including even the goal keeper. It was also during such games where they developed the then novel approach of the whole team moving swiftly forward for an attack and trying to tackle their opponents on their own side if they lost the ball and move back quickly as a whole team into defence after an attack.
Les also managed to get PuskA?s to explain in detail, perhaps for the very first time, how Hungarys tragic loss to West Germany occurred in the final of the 1954 World Cup.
Everyone expected Hungary to win the World Cup, as it was an unbeaten and the first ranking team in the world then and they beat the West Germans 8:3 to move into the semi-finals ahead of the Germans. But PuskA?s suffered a serious ankle injury in that game that kept him out from the next two rounds. He came back to play in the final, but he was a lame duck and the Germans kept roughing him up.
It was raining during the final of the World Cup between West Germany and Hungary, in Bern, Switzerland, on July 4, 1954.
The Hungarians were exhausted, as being the favourites, every opponent they played, tried to make up in bullying them to compensate for what they could not do in skills. The Hungarians still managed to get to the finals, without PuskA?s, through two hardly fought matches to qualify, defeating Brazil 4:2 and then the Word Cup defending champions, Uruguay, 4:2.
God knows what would have happened, if PuskA?s equalising goal, after the Germans lead 3:2 was not disallowed in the Final. It was disallowed because PuskA?s was called offside.
PuskA?s was humble enough to admit that he did not know whether or not he was offside. But the legendary Hungarian soccer reporter, Szepesi, who called the game, swore subsequently, that he saw clearly from his viewing box of the game that PuskA?s
was not offside.
When Hungary lost the World Cup to the West Germans, the bitterly disappointed Hungarian fans staged a riot, which in its fury, anticipated the revolution which followed two years later.
As an 8 year old, I watched from my first floor window in RA?koczi Rd, Budapest, the march of the raging mob, burning the effigy of the Manager of the Hungarian Golden Team and screaming for his sculp.
But alas, the ball is round and referees are not perfect and the heroic Golden Team was unjustly accused of selling out to the West Germans. But the unforgiving Hungarian soccer mobs attitude to the loss was an interesting illustration of how easily even the Golden Team could fall in the esteem of its idolisers from hero to zero. However, that was the only game the Golden team ever lost during its illustrious history.
But the crushing of the Hungarian revolution also crushed the Golden Team and
the pre-eminence of Hungary in soccer, from which it has never recovered subsequently.
Even though several of the virtuoso team members who then defected to the West carved out illustrious soccer careers for themselves individually in rich Europian soccer clubs, they all missed the Golden Team and suffered from terrible home sickness. It got so bad for the teams legendary score header, Kocsis, that he suicided; heartbroken, away from his mother country.
PuskA?s himself, in spite of his play with Real Madrid and subsequently training the Egyptian National Team was never the same again.
One of his few subsequent successes happened in Australia when he led the South Melbourne Hellas to win the National Soccer League title in 1991.
I met PuskA?s around that time in Sydney.
It was one of the saddest moments of my life.
I absolutely looked forward to the privilege of meeting my childhood idol in person. But whom did I see?
A guy as round as a tightly blown up soccer ball. One whose abdomen was so extended that he could barely move and looked no slimmer than a woman about to give birth to quadruplets.
For no matter how successful a person becomes after defecting from a youth, lived in tyranny in his or her mother country, this person is scarred for life, in two ways.
First is the loss and grief in being torn from ones roots in the mother country.
The second and more insidious problem is that deep down one becomes angst ridden.
Because one internalised a sense of terror that was learnt through never being certain what will happen to him and his family from one day to the next, in the unpredictably arbitrary, corrupt and oppressive regime where he has no freedom of expression to question his abusers.
That was the tyranny from which the young Les Murray and PuskA?s himself tried to escape in 1956.
Yet the escape is never complete, because you cannot escape your own scars.
I can testify to this from my own experience, having escaped from communist Hungary to the relative paradise of freedom in Australia in 1964 and having counselled hundreds of refugees in my work as a Health Professional.
So what do you do in an attempt to ameliorate your inner pain?
One of the unsuccessful attempts is to engage in comfort eating to an excess. See the elderly PuskA?s. His premature death from Alzheimer disease was probably promoted by accumulated cholesterol in his brain.
Another Russian roulette like remedy is to reach for a cigarette every time you are anxious and then, because you got addicted.
See our own, dear Les Murray.
Yet it is to Les credit that he stayed overwhelmingly enthusiastic, generously giving and amazingly cool and collected in his demeanour and work.
He dedicated his life to remain Australia-focused in his love affair with football and to repay the generosity his adopted country gave him in accepting him as a refugee, even though deep down he also had his own demons to fight.
