Football was a dying game in Melanie, East Coast Demerara until Mark Anthony Sutton returned home and gave his life to revive it; he died while playing the game he loved so much last evening.
“One minute I was running next to him kicking ball,” Dexter Grant said. “Then he said I was too close to him and I moved away but when I looked back he was on the ground gasping for breath.”
Sutton had a heart condition, relatives said, but he loved to play football. In 2006 he underwent surgery to clear blocked arteries. The 41-year-old man of 44 Niolopua LN, Wailuku, Hawaii returned to Guyana on January 1 to spend some time. Although Sutton was encouraged to return to Hawaii, he refused, telling relatives that he’d “stay just a little longer”.
Grant, a close friend of Sutton, was among the last people who saw him alive. Sutton, the man recalled, had been working hard since last Friday with members of the community to clean up the Melanie Recreational Ground.
“We been cleaning it since last Friday and is only this morning [yesterday] he come calling me out of bed to help him mark up the ground to play football,” Grant said.
Shortly before 6 pm, Grant explained, residents formed two teams to play a game of “under-30 versus over-30” football; it was the last game Sutton would play. According to Grant, about 15 minutes into the game his friend collapsed gasping for breath.
Friends and relatives who were present rushed Sutton to the Georgetown Public Hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival.
“… I see him lying on the football field gasping for breath,” Grant said. “I saw him grab a clump of grass and that was it…football had died away in Melanie but he returned and revived it.”
Many were at Sutton’s Melanie home grieving when Stabroek News visited last night. Relatives, friends and residents vowed that they would “keep football alive in Melanie in memory of Sutton”.
