David Natan, one of the champions of Hapoel Ramat Gan's fabled "wonder season" of 1963-64, has died at the age of 86. According to a report by ONE on Friday evening, he was laid to rest at the Yarkon Cemetery, mourned by family, former team-mates and generations of the club's supporters.
The team he belonged to occupies a singular place in Israeli football history. Newly promoted from the second division, Hapoel Ramat Gan swept to the 1963-64 championship — the first club in the country to take the title in its first season back in the top flight.
A side anchored by the veteran goalkeeper Yaakov Chodorov, captained by Reuven Cohen and sharpened by the goals of Shlomo Levi stunned the established powers of Tel Aviv and Haifa. That championship remains the only one the club has ever won.
Natan, a product of the club's own youth ranks, was a squad man rather than an ever-present, making five league appearances in the title-winning campaign. Yet the club's archived match records show how much those minutes yielded.
He struck a 90th-minute winner in a 2-1 victory over Bnei Yehuda at the Makhtesh ground in Givatayim in November 1963, and the decisive third goal in a 3-2 away win against Maccabi Haifa the following February. One of his two goals came from inside the area; the other was a header.
The report announcing his death dwelt above all on his pace, recalled by contemporaries as remarkable even in a dressing room of bigger names, and on the wholehearted way he played. After his years at Ramat Gan, he continued in the regional game, turning out for Maccabi Ramat Amidar and later Hapoel Givatayim.
His passing carried an ache of timing. Natan's son, Tal Natan, is head coach of Israel's women's under-20 national basketball team, which on 13 July won a historic silver medal at the European Championship in Lithuania — the first medal ever claimed by an Israeli women's national side — after a 79-66 defeat to France in the final.
Per the report, he returned home from the tournament in time to part from his father.
The farewell also arrives at a moment of renewal for the club Natan helped crown. Hapoel Ramat Gan sealed promotion back to the Israeli Premier League in May, coming through the Liga Leumit play-offs to book a return to the company his generation once kept.
No cause of death was reported. With Natan gone, the circle of men who delivered Israeli football's most improbable championship grows smaller, yet the names on those 1964 team sheets — Chodorov, Heiman, Levi, Natan — remain, for supporters in Ramat Gan and Givatayim, the measure against which every side since has been read.
