In the 1970 World Cup Pele’s strike partner was Tostao, one of the brightest players ever to represent Brazil. They first lined up together in 1966, when Brazil began their preparation for that year’s World Cup close to Tostao’s home town. He introduced his father to Pele — and was amazed to see his father break down in tears. “It was as if he was meeting his God,” Tostao, still astonished, told me many years later. So the idea of Pele being something like a religious icon is nothing new.
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The entire front cover of last Friday’s Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper was given over to a haunting, iconic, grainy photo of the man in the No. 10 jersey of Santos, accompanied by the headline “Pele has died, if Pele can die.”
Inside, the paper, the theme continued: “Like the Gods of Olympus, Pele does not grow old or pass away. He will always be alive, marked in global memory as the Brazilian who used football to make humanity dream.”
His birth name was Edson Arantes do Nascimento. Pele himself had often made the point — Edson would die one day, but Pele was eternal. He appeared to live the division between man and myth as something entirely natural. His younger sister, Maria Lucia, gave details of their last conversation and said that her brother had gone in peace. “I’m Edson’s sister,” she said. “To be Pele’s sister is impossible to explain, because he was chosen by God to represent Pele on earth.”
It is an interesting spiritual perspective — that someone was given a mission to be Pele, and that someone ended up being a shoeshine boy from small town Brazil who ended up shining more brightly than anyone else in the history of the game.
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One of the first to spot the enormity of the Pele phenomenon was Nelson Rodrigues, a leading Brazilian playwright who was also perhaps the country’s most influential football writer. He saw the game as an epic psychodrama, and the character of Pele was perfect for his myth-making. As early as April 1959, when Pele was still only 18, Rodrigues was writing that Pele “belongs much more to the mythology of football than to the sport itself.”
At the end of 1958, the year in which Brazil won the World Cup for the first time, Rodrigues pondered that Pele “is undoubtedly a genius. I say it and repeat it — a genius, Pele can turn to Michelangelo, Homer or Dante and greet them with the effusive intimacy of ‘how are you, mate?’ Just as Michelangelo is the Pele of painting, of sculpture, Pele is the Michelangelo of the ball.”
