Gordon Braithwaite wears the expression of a man who would relish a rolling back of the years… to a time when football was uncluttered by its contemporary off-the-field administrative headaches, when the playing field was an amphitheatre of robust gladiators; when "hard men" ruled the game.
That was the era of his own glorious heyday, the time when his own unrivalled status as the supreme defender, the king of the "hard men" earned him the accolade - The Ultimate Warrior.
At 50, pride in his playing days still burns fiercely in eyes set deep inside a thoughtful, dreadlocked head; and he concedes the nostalgia, the longing for an earlier time, with a generous grin.
The competitive spirit, he says, is as fierce as ever. He is, however, a sufficiently accomplished student of the game not to have come to terms with the fact that time and the sport's exertions, cumulatively, exact their own price. They take their toll on the body first, leaving the mind in a state of detachment, immersed in fanciful longings that ageing legs are no longer able to accomplish.
A great deal has changed since the end of his career as a national player in 1985 at the tender age of 27. In retirement his loyalty to the game has been unreciprocated. A brief stint as national coach in 1991/92 is probably the best that the sport has offered him during the better part of a quarter of a century. Since then he has laboured over lesser coaching assignments, indulging all the time in an intense but good-humoured brooding over being all but cast aside by the sport.
Currently the unsalaried Head Coach of the Georgetown senior team he also works with players at his own unheralded club, Uprising. Gordon Braithwaite believes that he is worth much more to the sport to which he has given so much of himself.
A record of 34 caps over eight years as a senior national player is probably as good as any in the history of the local game. It began with a fixture against Trinidad and Tobago in 1977 at the age of twenty. He has worn Guyana colours against various Caribbean teams and captained the national team in 1985 in Guyana's first and only fixture against India.
He declines to compare himself with other players of his time though, for much of the 70s and 80s his name was mentioned among the best defenders wearing the national colours. And, he points out, over almost a decade as a national player his place on a team of highly talented players was never really seriously challenged.
He still idolizes the generation of "tough" men of which he is a part, men, he says, who played the game with pride and passion and without material reward. His own sobriquet was bestowed by players and fans alike and earned over years of steely determination and tough tackling that kept his defence mostly free of the menace of opposing strikers.
Ask him to compare the state and standard of the game today with those of three decades ago and his face assumes the studied expression of a man on the verge of a profound utterance. Upon reflection, however, he declines a direct comparison, addressing instead "the indiscipline of the contemporary players" who train only when there is a fixture just ahead of them. And, he says, the game has changed in various other ways. There are more sponsors, more tournaments, more opportunities to play domestic and international football.
Of the players of his era he rates two other local defensive legends, Maurice Enmore and Earl O'Neil, as being among the best of his time. The two, he says, are also "graduates" of the school of "hard men," tough, uncompromising footballers who played the game as much with their hearts and minds as with their bodies. His all-time favorite international players are the legendary England and Leeds defender Jackie Charlton and the German midfield maestro, Franz Beckenbaer. The two, he says, typified his own style of play. Among contemporary offensive players he believes that the Brazilian midfielder Ronaldinho has no equal.
The son of a policeman - Inspector Whittington Braithwaite who lost his life in the 1969 Rupununi Uprising - and an old boy of Queen's College, Gordon views the contemporary game with mixed feelings. He believes that deficiencies in the administration of football place limitations on its "forward movement" as a national sport and denies the local game a higher standing at the regional and international levels. As for himself, the own returns from the game have been meagre. The contemporary game, he says, appears to offer more to the less deserving. Still, he longs to remain relevant to the sport.
Over time, he has found ways of sharing his skills with succeeding generations of players through his various coaching assignments. Still, recognition and reward elude him. Occasional acknowledgement of feats The Ultimate Warrior is far from adequate compensation for a life dedicated to serving the game and when you raise the subject his broad grin bares no trace of resentment or bitterness. Then the smile recedes and he sighs. "Its been tough and thankless," he says. At that moment you cannot help but wonder just how much more The Ultimate Warrior has got to give.