Pele, the jewel in sport’s crown

Rohit Mahajan

The second-greatest Edison of all time, a man luminous and electrifying on the football pitch, was never known by his real name — he was known simply as Pele, a label which has obscure and disputed origin. But ‘Pele’ suited him well. Edson Arantes do Nascimento is too much of a mouthful, and the word Pele has a lyrical, mythical quality. Pele, who played the last of his four World Cups in 1970, had become a sort of mythical figure in the last decades of his life, famous among the young for being famous, and for being the hawker of credit cards and soft drinks, not for being indisputably the greatest footballer of all time.

Pele’s international career ended 51 years ago, and several generations of footballers — whose playing ‘lives’ rarely last 15 beyond years — have gone by. If you conducted a poll on the greatest of all time — GOAT — today, Messi and Portugal’s Ronaldo are likely to end 1-2. The superstars of the even the most recent decades would be forgotten — men such Zico, Platini, Brazil’s Ronaldo, Zidane. And what of Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Eusebio, Garrincha, Di Steano? No chance!

Tide of time

With time, idols change — people with memories of old times and old stalwarts fade away and die, and young people adore contemporary heroes. The act of extolling our own favourite is touched by our own egoism — we want to be on the side of the all-time winner, and we want to be the ones who saw and recognised the greatest-ever.

Statistics are the only sure measure of excellence, but they are extremely inadequate, especially in football – Messi may make a hundred exquisite touches on the ball in a game, but none of them may actually end up in contributing to a goal.

Before cable TV brought European football to our living rooms, most Indian fans experienced top-quality football in four-year cycles of the World Cup. But with the advent of cable TV and the internet, fans started following players on the basis of their club rather their country. For some fans, their favourite player not ever winning the World Cup became irrelevant in the GOAT debate — their view was that scoring and winning trophies in Europe was good enough.

World Cup medals

If you were watching and reading about football for the first time in the mid-1980s, just before Maradona burst through like a breathtakingly luminous star on the firmament, you’d remember that the GOAT debate was settled. There was only one answer — Pele. Pele, the winner of three World Cups, the scorer of a thousand goals, the short and muscular man who had electrifying pace and leapt high to beat taller players in the air and shot with both feet — the man who played with the intelligence of a genius and the joy of a child. In our consciousness, he was among the untouchables in sport, standing alongside the likes of Dhyan Chand, Garry Sobers and Don Bradman.

There was more. When Pele first became famous, in 1958, many colonies of European countries were still shackled and the people of Asia, Africa and the native populations of the Americas nurtured a much stronger sense grievance against the white man. Racial segregation was mandated by law in the USA, the cruel policy of apartheid was practised in South Africa, and people of countries such as Algeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe were under the yoke of European colonialism. Then came Pele in 1958 — a 17-year-old kid, a black man from a slum, shorter than the blondes from Sweden, yet faster and more skilful, part of a Brazilian team that had men with different shades of pigmentation, all playing as one! It was a dream team for the humanist, and it was a dream team for the aesthete — the Brazilians played with beauty, with delightful ball control and precise passes, eschewing dull back-passing or opportunistic high balls. And Pele was the brightest jewel among this blindingly coruscating bunch.

Such was Pele, son of a failed footballer called Dondinho. Pele, who came from the slums, named Edson in honour of the inventor of electricity because his town, Tres Coracoes, got electricity not long before his birth. Pele, who scored six goals in the last three matches in the 1958 World Cup, and led the fantastic team of 1970 to the title.