Uwe Seeler passes away at 85

No other player is as synonymous with Hamburg as Uwe Seeler. The Hamburg native played for his hometown club from 1953 to 1972 – first in the Oberliga-Nord, the top-flight division in the north of West Germany - before the Bundesliga was founded in 1963.

Beginning in 1953, Uwe Seeler made a total of 476 appearances and scored 404 goals for Hamburg in the Oberliga-Nord and the Bundesliga. He was the Oberliga-Nord's top goal scorer seven times, including in 1954-55, when he shared the honor with teammate Günter Schlegel. He was also the top scorer in the first season of the Bundesliga, 1963-64.

While Seeler enjoyed a lot of individual success – he was named West Germany's player of the year in 1960, 1964 and 1970 – Hamburg only managed to win two titles with him in the lineup; the German championship in 1960, and the German Cup in 1963.

In a match against Eintracht Frankfurt in 1965, Uwe Seeler sustained a torn hamstring. In those days, such a serious injury would normally have ended a player's career. No player before him had ever comeback from a torn hamstring. However, Seeler did just that, with the help of a special shoe provided by equipment supplier Adidas.

Seeler spent his entire career in Hamburg, turning down lucrative offers to move abroad. Inter Milan even offered the German club more than a million deutschmarks for him – a fortune at the time. In 2005 this bronze statue of his right foot was unveiled in front of Hamburg's Volksparkstadion, in honor of his service to the club.

For much of his career, Uwe Seeler was also one of the first names on the lineup card for the national team. West Germany coach Sepp Herberger first called him up as a 17-year-old. He would go on to play a total of 72 games for West Germany, scoring 39 times. He appeared in the same four World Cups as Brazilian legend Pele from 1958 to 1970, scoring a total of nine goals.

The best-remembered of his goals for West Germany was this one against England in the quarterfinals of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Seeler struck the ball with the back of his head, beating England goalkeeper Peter Bonetti to even the score at 2-2. West Germany went on to beat England 3-2 and advance to the semifinals, where they would lose to Italy in extra time.

Seeler was also known for his sportsmanship – in victory and defeat. His sportsmanship did not go unnoticed by the English fans, who applauded not just Seeler but the rest of the West German team for how they conducted themselves after losing the 1966 World Cup on a disputed goal at Wembley.

In 1972, the German Football Association (DFB) named Seeler the second honorary captain of the West German national team. Here he appears with the first man to receive the honor, the late Fritz Walter (left) and Franz Beckenbauer (middle), who became the third in 1982. Here, Beckenbauer was about to take part in a charity match for Hamburg that same year.

After his playing career ended, Seeler worked as an ambassador for Adidas and for a short time he owned a petrol station. From 1995 he to 1998, he served as president of Hamburg, the football club for which he had played so many games.

Seeler held a long list of titles bestowed upon him by the city-state of Hamburg, including honorary citizen and honorary police commissioner. The country honored him with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Here is is seen with another of Hamburg's most famous sons, the late former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

Despite his fame, the son of a Hamburg harbor laborer always kept both feet planted firmly on the ground. He married to his wife Ilka in 1959. His recipe for a happy marriage? "I make the major decisions, she makes the minor decisions," he once said. "She decides which are major and which are minor."

"Uwe Seeler stands for everything that characterizes a good person: down-to-earth, loyalty, joie de vivre, and he was always approachable. He is the epitome of HSV," the club's sports director Jonas Boldt said upon his passing.