Some time during the 2015/16 season, the thought of selling off his team, JDR Stars Football Club, occurred to Nditsheni Nemasisi.
If he were to sell JDR, it would not be a decision he would take lightly.
After all, up to that point, Nemasisi had put in the hard labour as he pursued his dream of one day bringing a side from the SAB League to the PSL.
First, he parted with R30 000, at the advice of a close confidante Livhuwani Madzuvhe and established a side in the Pretoria Social League. A year after that investment in 2011, he bought the SAB League status of Mamelodi side Mams Teachers, thereby taking the first step in what he knew would be a long journey to the upper rungs of South Africa football.
In the ultra-competitive and unpredictable SAB League, the JDR story began in earnest. With Nemasisi as both coach and owner, their climb up the tiers of South African professional football was as rapid as it was impressive.
Under the tutelage of a then 29-year-old Nemasisi, they clinched the Tshwane Region SAB league with their first attempt during the 2011/12 season. In the 2015/16 season, they stood on the cusp of further glory, rising to the Gauteng ABC Motsepe League standings.
However, even in that glorious 2015/16 season, Nemasisi knew that all he had worked to achieve was in jeopardy.
After bankrolling JDR from his pocket since its birth, Nemasisi was now running on fumes. He had red on his ledger, and the continued upkeep of the club seemed beyond his means. After robbing Peter to Paul for a while, he was now running out of financial tricks, and the future looked bleak.
“There was a time I contemplated selling it, and my wife told me, ‘don’t even try to sell it because you’ll end up becoming a zombie,” Nemasisi tells FARPost.
His business had taken a knock. Things – financially, that is – were not looking pretty. “I got into debt to keep the team running in 2015/2016; we ran on a minus for a whole season. The thought to sell came, but I could not execute.”
One of the first few JDR recruits, Tshivhase ‘Bashin’ Khathutshelo, remembers those dark days when it looked like the attorney would give up on a dream that had begun to take shape.
“We sat down, and he was honest to say he won’t afford to pay me. That is when I thought he would give up on the team,” Khathutshelo tells FARPost.
However, even as he tightened his belt with coffers drying up, the decision to sell was not an easy one. For one thing, his pillar of strength would not let him give up so easily on something she knew he cared so deeply about.
Mrs Nemasisi, also a practising attorney, knew that selling JDR would have been like selling a priceless piece of his soul for her husband. She also knew that losing the team would leave him a shell of man, hollow and unfulfilled. Simply put, for the enterprising attorney, placing the club on sale would have been the equivalent of losing one of his children. After all, it is not a coincidence that JDR is named after Junior Donald and Rolivhuwa, the two children Nemasisi already had when he founded the club.
“It’s as good as selling my kids; they represent who I am,” he says.
On and off the field, Nemasisi and his charges weathered the storms. Soon, promotion to the GladAfrica Championship beckoned, and now, in the 2021/22 season, things are looking up for JDR. The ‘Hammer Boyz’ look in prime position to stake a claim for promotion to the PSL. The dream appears closer than ever.
“I want to complete the dream of becoming the one and only coach to have promoted a team from SAB to PSL – that will only be me in South Africa,” the JDR supremo says.
One person who would not be around to see him fulfil his dream should it happen is his father, a man who fostered in Nemasisi not only a love for the beautiful game but the desire to own his team. A club owner, although perhaps of lesser ambition, he is one man who would understand his son’s dream, a dream some would have dismissed as crazy when it began forming in his head.
“I needed to get more answers from my dad about why we love football so much. Unfortunately, he passed on last year,” the 39-year-old adds.
A love for the game certainly seems to run in the Nemasisi DNA. At 11, Junior Donald appears to be a chip from the two old blocks, his father and grandfather.
“My son tells me he is the captain of the football team at school,” reveals Nemasisi.
His fixation with education is understandable. After all, it is highly probable that he might never have come close to even pursuing his dream without his academic gifts. When all is said and done, he is no Jomo Sono, a bonafide football legend who leveraged his standing in the game to own and run a club. His playing career was, at best, very modest.
“I was always good with academics, and my mother always emphasised the importance of school. At some point, I was torn between law and being a doctor. But I don’t regret choosing law because it is a noble profession and flexible. I don’t think I would have survived doing any other thing,” explains the founder of Nemasisi Attorneys.
It was from his law practice that JDR would be born. Despite his intelligence and qualifications, even this was not handed to him on a silver platter. As a young lawyer pulling himself by the bootstraps, Nemasisi found things hard in the dog-eat-dog world of law practice. Only after the intervention and benevolence of veteran practitioner Pule Pule, he started to find his way.
“I met him when he was about 24 or 25. He said to me, ‘I’ve got a problem, I have finished my articles, I don’t have money to set up an office to start my firm. If I had the money, I’d immediately start my firm’.
“I said, ‘ok, I know you can make it. If I were to get you an office and pay for it, will you be ready?’. You could see he was surprised. He said ‘yes’. He went and came back to say I got the office,” Pule tells FARPost.
That office where it all began was in downtown Pretoria. It was just enough for Nemasisi and a secretary.
Pule remembers signing off a cheque for three-month rentals. But that came with a strict instruction. “I said, ‘If you don’t make it in three months, you’re on your own’. He said, ‘I’ll make it.”
Dropped in the middle of the sometimes tumultuous waters of law practice as a relative novice, Nemasisi began to swim. He had the tenacity, drive and ambition – key ingredients one needed to succeed in a challenging field for unknowns. As he began cementing his standing in the legal profession, his dream of establishing a football club also began to take shape.
Nemasisi takes as much pride from the successes of his law firm as those enjoyed by JDR on the field of play. To him, a source of particular pride is the number of young people Nemasisi Attorneys has nurtured into accomplished professionals in a challenging field.
Whether in law practice or football, the identification and nurturing of young talent comes naturally to him. That eye for talent has been the backbone of the two different but inseparably linked entities that define his life.
“He’s good at scouting players,” says one of his former charges Khatshutshelo. “Look at players like Phathutshedzo Nange [Kaizer Chiefs] and Khuliso Mudau [Mamelodi Sundowns]; they all came through him.”
Now at Amakhosi, Nange has become perhaps one of Nemasisi’s most successful products. As he searches for glamour and glory with the Soweto giants, he has not forgotten the man who made it all possible. To Nange, Nemasisi was not just a coach but a life mentor who gave him the building blocks to construct what is turning out to be a pretty noteworthy professional career.
Nange is now in the big leagues, and as his star continues to grow on the local football landscape, so will the trappings of fame that life in the spotlight brings. Luckily for him, he has nuggets of wisdom shared by Nemasisi to guide him as he navigates life at Naturena. It is this same kind of life coaching that Nemasisi gives to young footballers at JDR today.
As an honest working professional and businessman, he has never relied on bagfuls of cash to motivate his players. Instead, he has had to rely on his people skills to convince his players to soldier on for him, even when things were bleak.
“I’m fortunate to have players who understand that we need to push the team to DStv to earn good salaries,’’ he says.
Although he was forced to move on from JDR at the height of its troubles, Khathutshelo is still a staunch believer in the utmost dream years later. He is one of many current and former players who would die on the pitch for their boss if asked of them.
“When I left, we agreed that when things are settled, I’ll come back and help. I pray that he’ll bring me in one day when things are okay. Even if it’s to carry the balls, I wouldn’t mind,” says Khathutshelo with striking passion.
When people hear of Nemasisi, the lawyer, many cannot help but wonder how he does it all. Law practice is demanding, mainly when one is a partner and director of a law firm.
Football is also demanding, mainly when one is both a coach and owner of their club. However, those who know Nemasisi intimately will tell you that he is a man who has no problem trading his well-tailored suits for sports gear at any time of the day.
“Nemasisi is in court in the morning and at the gym in the afternoon training his team,” fellow lawyer, Pule, observes.
Despite his unenviable list of responsibilities, Nemasisi insists he is as hands-on in the office as he is on the touchline of a football pitch, where people are more accustomed to seeing him bark instructions.
“I do much work after training and after hours when everyone else has gone home,” Nemasisi says.
While there can be little doubt that Nemasisi is a hard worker, Khathutshelo says some of the credit should go to his wife, a rock that has stood steadfastly behind him when times were most challenging.
With his charges marching to second on the log halfway through the season, some would say it is not too early to dream about life in the top flight. As the dream that began a decade ago draws ever nearer, Nemasisi, a strategist and a planner of note, is already contemplating the future.
“I only have a D-License, but the intention is to do the European one if I’m to stay and coach in PSL. Many things I do just come naturally,” Nemasisi says.
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