The legal notice ran in this newspaper’s back pages, tucked between a name-change announcement and a court summons.

"George Sacko has died at Saint Michael’s Medical Center," it read.

Within 17 short, clinical lines, it catalogued a few other facts: Sacko’s birthplace and birth date — Liberia; May 19, 1936 — and his last known address.

It asked that anyone with information on next of kin call the hospital.

Sacko, 75, had died at St. Michael’s, in Newark’s Central Ward, on Sept. 17, homeless, penniless and almost anonymously.

But a half-century ago and an ocean away, George McDonald Sacko, aka "Wizard," had a country at his feet.

An elegant and agile midfielder, Sacko had captained the Liberian national soccer team into the 1960s, when the nascent squad supplied the unifying thread to a country fraying at the serrated edge of tribal and political strife.

He had groomed his game barefoot, kicking tennis balls with older boys in the dusty streets of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. He attended a prestigious high school and befriended government ministers. He had a future president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate as a girlfriend, and played for the country’s best club teams.

"He was flashy," said June Nwanna, who became his wife and the mother of his two sons. "He was very popular. All the women wanted him."

Within two decades, those strands of glory and adulation would unspool like so much gossamer.

In the end, Sacko was wandering Newark’s streets, and spending his nights at Penn Station.

A UNIFYING FORCE

Sacko had grown up in Monrovia’s Crown Hill neighborhood, the son of an Americo-Liberian mother born in Georgia and an indigenous father from the Grebo tribe, in the country’s southeast. Although his father, a government budget director, lived away from the family, he and six brothers and sisters were raised in relative comfort by their mother, a customs inspector, relatives and friends said.

Numerous interviews, along with news accounts and essays about the team’s history, filled out Sacko’s life story, from his childhood in Monrovia to his demise at St. Michael’s.

By his 20s, as Africa entered its headiest epoch, with most of the continent’s nations gaining independence from their colonial overseers, Sacko was carving a piece of his own country’s history.

Playing on a dirt field in a stadium built for political rallies, the team attracted overflowing crowds. Because of his mixed heritage, Sacko helped to collar Liberia’s otherwise disparate political passions.

"He was the glue," said Sacko’s younger brother, Garretson, a star forward on the Lone Star, as the team was christened around that time.

On game days, Americo-Liberians — descendants of emancipated slaves who founded the nation in the 19th century — and indigenous Liberians put aside their festering discord, said another of the team’s all-time greats, Benedict Wisseh.

"Sacko was very, very important to our national pride, because he brought us together," said Wisseh, whose playing career followed the Sackos’ by a generation. "He made us forget our differences."

LONE STAR

Liberia never qualified for the World Cup or the continental championship during the brothers’ playing days. But as the team coalesced around George, its playmaker, and Garretson, its finisher, the Lone Star started to shine.

"My brother was priceless. He was born to play. I learned to play," Garretson said in the living room of a home in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood, where he lives. "He was a masterpiece."

George captained the team to its first-ever win, a 2-0 victory over the Ivory Coast in 1960. Garretson, nicknamed "Bulldozer," scored that game’s first goal, on a pass from his brother.

"George was an exceptional player," said Charles Wordsworth, a former Liberian basketball player who lives in Virginia and is writing a history of Liberian sport. "George was bending it before Beckham was born."

George, though, suffered a serious knee injury in 1962, and would never be the same player.

But he was never bitter, Garretson and others said. Instead the Wizard deflected the leftover fame.

"We changed things," Garretson said. "We made history."

COMING HOME

Garretson came to the States in 1968, lured by a contract offer from the New York Generals, a forerunner to the North American Soccer League’s Cosmos. The offer flamed out, though, when the team folded the year he arrived. Garretson went to work in New York’s garment district and broke goal-scoring records playing semipro soccer on weekends.

A third Sacko brother and the youngest, Alwyn, was already in the United States, pursuing an education on a basketball scholarship.

George crossed the Atlantic in 1971 to join his brothers in Brooklyn. June Nwanna, who, along with the couple’s two sons and her daughter, was also already here, having come to New York a few months before.

Nwanna, in her early 20s and 11 years younger than her husband, was intent on a new world, she said. "I didn’t think he planned to come, but I knew I had left," Nwanna said.

George, Nwanna and their children eventually moved to Newark, into an apartment on West Kinney Street. Garretson and another brother, Alwyn, by that time also were in the city.

In a roundabout way, the Sackos had come home: Their mother, Eva Gibson, was born in Atlanta but came to Liberia in her childhood. Her grandfather, Garretson Wilmot Gibson, who would become Liberia’s 14th president, was a Maryland native.

The extended Sacko family had come here during an initial exodus from Liberia, about 20 years before the country would fragment into a brutal civil war.

George got a job working in the foundry of a custom metals firm in Harrison. He made good money, and he, June, their sons and her daughter settled into a spacious apartment on Washington Street.

Alwyn’s daughter, Danielle Sacko, said her family’s First Street apartment hosted frequent family gatherings at the time. The men often played cards.

"That used to be the meeting spot for all the Liberians," said Danielle, 44. "It was almost like one big household."

George was engaging, but quiet and even restrained, she and others said.

Even during his halcyon days and despite his fame, Sacko always stayed grounded, Nwanna said.

"He was very calm, thoughtful," but carried himself with pride, she said.

But although George was a supportive father, Nwanna said, "the love went away for me."

She and their two sons moved back to New York, and then to Rhode Island. George stayed in the Washington Street apartment. Garretson remembers a tidy place with a white rug.

TRIPPED UP

When the metals company shuttered in the late 1980s, George started his slide, often drinking to excess, Garretson said. He began using heroin.

For a time, George lived with Garretson in a basement studio on Chadwick Avenue. A fire drove them out.

"That’s when everybody went their way," Garretson said.

Nwanna said her daughter tried to get George to move to Rhode Island about 10 years ago. He declined and instead took a room, subsidized by public assistance, at the Carlton Hotel on East Park Street. But his refusals to meet with public advocates forced him out, Garretson said.

George could disappear for days at time, his relatives said. Although St. Michael’s chart listed his last known address as the Goodwill Home and Rescue Mission on University Avenue, he did not show up on the mission’s population rolls. Neither friends nor family knew of his death for more than three weeks.

STAR ALONE

In May, Sacko turned 75. The Liberian community, including an official delegation from Washington, D.C., feted him at Little Mai, a restaurant and meeting place in Newark’s University Heights district. He wore a gold-print shirt, a contrast to his close-cropped silver hair and goatee. People who were there say the once-affable Sacko smiled mournfully. His gaze was distant

The flier for the occasion noted that Sacko lived in Newark, and that he was "in excellent health."

He was not.

"I’m sick," Garretson recalls George telling him. "Pray for me."

Among the gifts Sacko received on his birthday was a commemorative pin sent by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, his childhood girlfriend.

Afterward, Wisseh took George to Penn Station. Sacko had told him he had a train to catch.

Sacko, though, was dredging the city’s streets for his next drink, his next fix.

Nwanna last heard from him the second week in September.

"He called me. He said he was not feeling well and that he needed some money," Nwanna said.

A few days later, George made $50 moving furniture. Garretson saw him afterward. "He cried," Garretson said.

According to the death certificate, Sacko died of natural causes. His lungs were acutely diseased, it said. It also indicated that his upper gastrointestinal tract had started to bleed about a month before his death.

But Garretson said he is convinced that the $50 George earned moving furniture paid for his last-ever purchase: the heroin that killed him.

"Something happened in my brother’s life. He just didn’t care anymore," Garretson said. "He was not crazy, but he gave up on life."