Obituary: What would football be without Pele?

Football icon Pele has died aged 82. He had been fighting colon cancer. (File image)

There were footballing greats before Pele, of course. But when, at the age of 17, the boy called Edson Arantes Dos Nascimento burst onto the scene at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, football—and sports stardom—changed forever.

Here was a precocious boy—eager, mischievous, explosive and strong—who played with the calm maturity of a veteran but celebrated with the unbridled joy of a child. What’s more, he played in the “beautiful way”—he was dazzling in his close control, fast like no one else, dribbling and passing with the finesse and grace of a dancer, but shooting with the power of a heavyweight boxer throwing an uppercut.

(Source: Twitter/Pele)

Even in the Brazilian team, the phrase “joga bonito” was possibly first used by Pele’s teammate from the 1958 World Cup, Didi, who lived both his playing and long coaching career firmly propagating the belief that the only way to play football was to attack, and have fun while doing it.

Yet, like so many things in his life, “joga bonito” got stuck to Pele’s name, and through him, it became the very essence of what it meant to be a Brazilian football player.

Sometimes, it didn’t matter whether Pele himself wanted something to be a part of his identity—the universe bestowed it on him and he had to accept. Like his name: “I can remember the name Pele really bugged me at first,” Pele wrote in his autobiography. “I was really proud that I was named after Thomas Edison and wanted to be called Edson. I thought the name Pele sounded horrible.”

Pele was fine with his family’s nickname for him, “Dico”, or “Gasolina”, as he was called for a while at Santos, the club where he spent almost his entire career. But the name that he couldn’t shake (and later learnt to love) came from his footballer father Dondinho’s colleague Bile, whom the young Pele idolized. “Because I was only young,” Pele wrote, “I somehow distorted the nickname and said that when I grow up, I wanted to be a goalie like ‘Pile’. When we moved to Bauru, this ‘Pile’ became ‘Pele’.”

Pele was born on 23 October 1940 in Tres Coracoes, which was, back then, a small town by the Rio Verde, to a journeyman footballer called Dondinho, and Celeste, who did odd jobs to make ends meet. Electricity had come to Tres Coracoes a few months before Pele was born, so Dondinho and Celeste named their boy after Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb.

A few years later, the family moved to a bigger town called Bauru, and here, on a narrow street with poverty-stricken houses, Pele began to spend more and more time playing football—just a boy in shorts and nothing else, with a makeshift ball made of rags and paper stuffed into a discarded sock or stocking.

(Source: Twitter/Pele)

“The house was small and overcrowded with a leaky roof,” Pele wrote. “With no regular source of income, I remember that on several occasions the only meal my mum had for us was bread with a slice of banana. We never went without food—like many people worse off than us in Brazil—but for my mother it was a life governed by fear, a fear of not being able to provide."

So, Pele did what he had to—he hustled. He worked as a shoeshine boy. He scavenged through scrap. Pele and his friends bought their first football boots by stealing peanuts from goods trains parked at the railyard in Bauru, and roasting and selling them.

In one of those stories that became an integral part of his myth, the nine-year-old Pele first saw his father cry when hosts Brazil lost the 1950 World Cup final to Uruguay: “One day, I’ll win you the World Cup," Pele recalls telling his father to make him feel better.

By the time he was 13, Pele’s talent on the ball had been spotted and he was part of a local youth team. It was around this time that indoor football—futsal—made its way to Bauru, and Pele found that he was perfect for it. It also developed his close control and his ability to think quickly on his feet while getting crowded out. Soon, scouts were keeping an eye on the boy with a knack for finding the goal. At 15, Pele signed for Santos FC—“it was as though I had been picked up by a cyclone and dropped in an enchanted land…”—a club he would stay loyal to for close to two decades, scoring a ridiculous 618 goals in 636 appearances.

It was here, at this tender age, that Pele’s football career went into immediate hyperdrive. A few months after his first trial with Santos, as he turned 16, Pele found himself a part of the first team, and finished the season as the league’s top scorer. Soon, he got the call to play for Brazil, at the World Cup, no less.

Things would never be the same again for the earnest teenager from Bauru who idolized his footballer father and wanted nothing more but to be able to play the game on the side, even as he thought of finding a “proper job”, as his mother wanted him to, so that he could break his family’s cycle of acute financial insecurity.

The World Cup started, though, on a note of uncertainty for Pele. He had injured his knee in a warm-up game back home, and despite spending the next couple of weeks in intensive treatment, was not deemed fit for Brazil’s first two matches in Sweden. The third match, against the feared USSR, would decide the fate of the teams in the group. Alongside Pele, another player who was warming the benches was Garrincha. Their omission also had something to do with an adverse report from the team psychologist, who had declared Pele “infantile” and “lacking in necessary fighting spirit”, and Garrincha as plain “irresponsible”.

Zito and Pele, then 17, in Sweden, in 1958. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

But for the crucial game against the USSR, Brazil’s coach Feola disregarded his psychologist’s recommendations and put both on the team sheet. When the compact 17-year-old came out wearing the No 10 jersey at Gothenburg’s Nye Ullevi stadium, he was the subject of great curiosity—who is this little black man, the tournament’s youngest player? What can he do against a side of giants like the USSR? From the start, Garrincha and Pele changed the way Brazil had played thus far at the tournament. As Garrincha dribbled and outpaced opponents down the right flank and found telling passes, Pele hit the woodwork, before Didi sent a brilliant pass for Vava to finish. Vava scored again in the second half, and suddenly Brazil was in the quarters, and, once again, deemed favourites.

Two days after the USSR game, Pele had his first breakthrough. In the second half of the quarterfinal against Wales, he received the ball inside the box from Didi with his back to the goal, swivelled with it, and lobbed it into the net in one swift, “beautiful" move. If the world was wondering what a teenager was doing leading Brazil’s lines, they had their answer, and then more, as a smiling, dancing, Pele, with a wild, irreverent Garrincha, tore France apart in the semifinal—Garrincha with such audacious dribbling that the crowds roared with appreciation and joy, and Pele with a stunning hat-trick that, in the space of two games, propelled him from an object of curiosity to a subject of hysteric adulation. Here, then, was Joga Bonito. The largely European crowd was seeing something new, the dismantling of their carefully ordered, paint-within-the-lines approach by a bunch of artists freely going where their imagination and sense of joy took them.

In the final against Sweden, even the partisan crowd on a stormy day in Stockholm succumbed to the seductions of Brazilian football. As a long cross arced in to Pele, the teenager cushioned it with his chest, letting it drop gently as his marker rushed in to make a challenge, flipped it casually over the bewildered defender’s head, ran around the man, and met the dropping ball with a thundering volley that resulted in Brazil’s third goal of the match. The crowd went wild, forgetting their loyalties. They had just witnessed the anointing of a new king (Swedish defender Sigge Parling, who marked Pele in that match, later commented “even I wanted to cheer for him”).

It was also a breakthrough moment for Brazil. They had lost to Uruguay in the final at the talismanic Maracana in Rio in 1950, the year they thought they had the tournament in the bag. They were brutally dismantled in 1954 by Hungary in one of the most notorious matches in World Cup history. Here was redemption. Here was proof that Brazil’s all-consuming love for football was also capable of achieving the ultimate prize in the sport.

Pele at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

From here on, Pele was king, everyone’s favourite, the little teenager with an unfettered laugh who did magical things in front of the goal. Perhaps his catchy two-syllable name played a role in how fast and wide his fame spread.

Post the 1958 win, Pele’s life was consumed by football—he played non-stop, for Santos (who were much in demand for European tours as a symbol of Brazilian football), for Brazil, in exhibition matches—“I could not stop scoring,” Pele wrote. “In one three-week period in September 1961, I scored 23 goals in six matches, a statistic that seems unreal even to me.”

A caveat: one of the controversies of Pele’s career is how many goals he scored. The official count is 732 for club and country, but Pele maintained that he scored over a thousand goals in his career, refusing to make a distinction between official matches and exhibition matches.

But it was not all easy going. In 1962, even as Brazil retained the World Cup, Pele had little to do with it, side-lined after the second game with a strained muscle, the result of the extreme number of games he was playing.

It didn’t get better for him at the 1966 World Cup. By that time, he was the most studied and marked footballer in the world, and defenders did not think twice before hacking him down. As Brazil exited in the group stage, a hurt and frustrated Pele declared that he would not play for the national team again.

It was a decision he rethought, thankfully, because it led to the greatest triumph of his career, the World Cup that cemented his legend forever and which gave us what many consider the greatest national squad ever to play the game—a Brazil made up of Jairzinho, Carlos Alberto, Rivelino, Gerson and Tostao, with Pele leading from the front.

The Brazilian magic was apparent from the very first match, against Czeckoslovakia, where Pele scored with a sweetly timed volley and attempted arguably the most famous non-goal in football history, when he sent a high ball arcing towards the goal from the centreline after spotting the goalkeeper out of position—the ball slid an inch away from the post.

The semi-final was a grudge match against Uruguay who had lodged themselves in the Brazilian national consciousness when they had beaten them to the trophy in 1950, and a personal one for Pele since that defeat was the first time he had seen his father cry and made his childish promise of avenging the loss. It was yet another match where a non-goal from Pele became more famous than anything else that happened. In the minuscule treasure trove of Pele’s playing footage that survives, this is, arguably, the most valuable jewel: of the striker running on to a mesmeric throughball with the goalie rushing out, completely bamboozling the keeper by moving away from the ball at the last second, and then changing direction and meeting the ball again behind the keeper, before shooting just inches wide. The incredible combination of speed, deception, and balance in that move is a thrill that never fades.

Like they had done throughout the tournament, Brazil blew Italy apart in the final, Pele providing an assist in a gorgeous Carlos Alberto goal to seal the deal.

The second half of Pele’s footballing career, and his life after football is less like a fairy tale and more like life. Pele trying to get football going in New York. His affairs and difficult personal life. His willing participation as a symbol for the Brazilian state, whether it was a democratically elected government or a brutal military regime. His refusal to acknowledge a daughter born out of wedlock. His failing businesses and investments. An establishment man ruthlessly and endlessly commercialized. Pele’s legacy post football is, unlike his time on the field, shaded in different hues.

But ever since Pele made his spectacular entry into the world’s consciousness in 1958, he has been more a symbol and less a person.

“He became the symbol of Brazilian emancipation,” said the musician Gilberto Gil, himself an icon of Brazil, in a documentary on Pele. “He made Brazilians love themselves again.”

If there was a peek into his life outside this objectification, a life that was his, it was on his farm in a small town outside of Sao Paulo.

“We have a lake, a river, agriculture, a horse,” he told a journalist when asked how he relaxes. “When I’m tired, I spend a week there. It’s perfect.”