Pelé, who became one of the most commanding sports figures of the past century. Photo / AP
Pelé, who became one of the most commanding sports figures of the past century. Photo / AP
The poet Stephen Spender wrote, “I think continually of those who were truly great.” Yeah, same; many of us do, happily, as fans or watchers of greatness in all its forms – we think continually of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, hardly ever of anyone else in 1D, andthe past few weeks have seen tens of millions of people on Earth, maybe more like hundreds or thousands of millions, giving a great deal of thought to football greatness, to football GOATness. Strange how the beautiful coronation of Lionel Messi at the World Cup has taken place at the same time as the death of Pelé. The two leading GOATs, one consecrated, one buried, both made sacred.
Pelé's funeral was held this week. His body was laid to rest at the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica, a vertical cemetery with space for 18,000 ex-beings; Pelé chose a space on the ninth floor of the building almost two decades ago, according to the newspaper O Globo. It’s a bit on the eccentric side – you expect something more formal, and loftier than the ninth floor of a filing cabinet – but everything else attending his farewell was grand, in the manner of royalty. He was The King (O Rei). All football fans think that. His name will live forever. All football fans think that, too. Uruguayan football writer Eduardo Galleano puts it in his unique way in his book of epigrams, Football in Sun and Shadow, “Those of us who were lucky enough to see him play received alms of extraordinary beauty: moments so worthy of immortality that they make us believe immortality exists”.
Pelé, the Brazilian king of football, inspired countless young fans. Photo / AP
But the preceding sentence in his ode to O Rei brings things back to the everyday business of this brief and irritable experience we call life. Galleano writes, “Off the field, he never gave a minute of his time and a coin never fell from his pocket.” What a thing to say about someone. What a thing to repeat it as Pelé's body is lowered, or hoisted, to its final field. And yet to think of those who were truly great is to think about the truth of the way they conducted themselves. No one is any one thing and the Pelé who played football better than anyone on the planet during his career and possibly ever since, a superhuman, an athletic ideal, is also the Pelé who was as human as any schnook.
Journalism reduces. Its ranks of hacks set out to hack the great down to size, just as a generation of psychopaths in football shirts kicked several shades of hell out of Pelé. And yet the source of the most common complaint about Pelé – his greed, his zealous pursuit of a buck – is Pelé himself.
He told his 1977 autobiography Pelé: My Life and the Beautiful Game to ghostwriter Robert L Fish. It was published during Pelé's epic attempt to bring soccer to the US, by signing with the New York Cosmos and performing incredible feats of PR and not-so-incredible feats of football. He hung with Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and anyone who was someone or other at Studio 54. He wore pastel suits with wide lapels and French-cuffed shirts; he met President Ford at the White House in a peppermint pinstriped suit. He was also fond of fur coats. “They last a long time,” he said. Much of the book is concerned with that most American of subjects: wealth creation.
Fish is a terrible sports ghost. His knowledge of football seems to be around about zero – at the time, US magazines routinely described football players as “booters” – and he transcribes Pelé's recollection of four World Cups as cliche and exclamation marks. But he’s very detailed and confident when describing the two times Pelé amassed a fortune, and the two times he was nearly made bankrupt. Suddenly the voice Pelé can be heard clearly and passionately. This stuff matters to him. Going broke does tend to concentrate the mind.
In 1990, he produced The Pelé Albums, a two-volume set of press clippings. It weighs in at 850 pages. Even there, among the match reports of his years playing for Brazil and his club, Santos, are stories about money – the want of it, the loss of it, the renewed want of it. Headline, 1970: " Pelé's cash demands make Santos gasp”. Headline, that same year: " Pelé asks for new contract to clear debt”. A clipping from two years later is taken from a Sydney newspaper. Santos were in town to play an exhibition match. As 32,000 fans made their way to the stadium, Pelé' and his Santos team-mates stayed inside their Ruschutter Bay motel until the Australian Soccer Federation handed over US$36,000.
There’s a strange and striking honesty in selecting these damaging stories in his quite beautifully published scrapbooks. Pelé, grasping; Pelé; making sure a coin never falls from his pocket. But there’s something more potent or guiding than mere greed going on. The pages of his Albums and his autobiography are worried sick; the theme of his two books is fear.
The root of it is exposed in an extraordinary passage in My Life and the Beautiful Game. It’s a story that Pelé tells about how poor his family were when they moved to the town of Bauru. They lived with Pelé's grandmother. The roof leaked. “But that leaky roof was not poverty,” he says. “Poverty was having my mother worry herself sick, or upbraid Dondinho [his father] for not having a job that could earn the money to pay the rent on that leaky roof.
“Nor was poverty not having shoes, or having all of us sleeping in the tiny kitchen on a cold night, huddled around the wood-burning stove, trying not to sleep on top of one another, and still trying to keep warm (why do people think that all of Brazil is constantly hot?). No; poverty was wondering what would happen if we couldn’t raise the money for the firewood. Poverty was begrudging and even hating each stick of firewood that went into the hungry maw of that stove, and being forced to feed it, anyway.
Pelé, who died on December 29, aged 82, was often haunted by the fear that came with growing up in poverty. Photo / AP
“Poverty, in short, is fear. Not fear of death which, though inevitable, is reasonable; it is fear of life. It is a terrible fear . . . ”
No, he probably didn’t say “hungry maw” or use the stiff Anglo-Saxon word “begrudging”. Fish wrote crime fiction – one of his novels was turned into the 1968 Steve McQueen film, Bullitt – and it is likely he plays up the story of Pelé and the sticks of firewood. The passage is too raw, though, to be invented or weakened by whatever embellishment. You imagine Pelé sitting close to Fish, his loyal ghost, and telling him a ghost story. Fish could place the scene. As an engineering consultant to a Brazilian vinyl plastics factory, he lived in Rio for nine years. You picture him scurrying off from Pelé's side and returning to his home in Connecticut to write it up with dramatic flourishes (“hungry maw”) but staying close to the evocation of poverty, staying close to the truth.
Good on him for devoting much of the rest of his life to capitalist excess. It was smart of him. At the 1958 World Cup, Brazil brought in a psychologist, who instructed the team to draw stick figures. His assessment of Pelé's stick figure was that he was a simpleton and ought not be played. It was very poor advice: Pelé, then only 17, scored six goals in three games. In 1968, according to a press clipping in his Albums, a University of Brazil research team “has found that Pelé, with only an elementary school education, has an intelligence quotient bordering on genius”.
As the famous New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra remarked, “Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical.” The genius claim was backed up by Pelé's lifelong adviser, Julio Mazzei, known to all by the nickname Pelé gave to him, The Professor. “Not many people are aware that he has an IQ over 160,” he once said. “He had a sense of where each player was during the game and calculated where the players would be according to their movements during the game. He did not have to look at the players because he knew where they were. This is one of the reasons he could see two or three steps ahead of other players during a game. Pele has a mind of a computer.”
The Professor knew him better than anyone. They met in 1956, when Mazzei was a trainer at Santos, and he later took care of him when Pelé signed with the New York Cosmos and went about amassing his US$100 million fortune, the fear of poverty well behind him. “Pelé has always been a gentle and kind person,” he said. “His greatness can be attributed to the type of person that he has been on as well as off the field.”
