Home ›› 31 Dec 2022 ›› Sport
Edson Arantes do Nascimento was what he was named. But four letters etched him in the history books and the eternal story of football.
Pelé, the eternal King of football, has passed away. The factoids will speak that he passed away in 2022, but as long as the round ball is kicked in that rectangular field of grass, his name will be spoken, the fairy tales will be told, and the magic will keep mesmerising.
In Brazil, they call him ‘O Rei’, which translates to the King. Probably, in the history of football, there has not been anyone else that has been suited to that nickname better.
Pelé’s numbers in the game, one of which states that he went into four digits for goals, is probably the least significant milestone in his legacy. What the Brazilian did on the field was unforeseen, and unrepeated. It is called the beautiful game, and Pelé was the manifestation of exactly that.
With his magic feet, Pelé transcended the game, becoming the first-ever global superstar of the beautiful game as his name echoed from the favela in Brazil to the noises of New York, from the villages of Africa to the distant Dhaka, from the aristocracy of Europe to the Tasman Oceania. Pelé was included in the school books in Bangladesh and that sort of impact only comes from not just the best in the game, but from the one that eluded the limits of those chalked lines on a football field.
But how good was Pelé as a player? Numbers do indicate that he was quite, pretty good. But once those words from people who watched him play come ringing, it’s hard to escape the fact that he was born to rule the game.
“Pelé was the only footballer who surpassed the boundaries of logic,” Johan Cruyff said. Ferenc Puskas went beyond, “The greatest player in history was Alfredo Di Stefano. I refuse to classify Pelé as a player. He was above that.”
Tarcisio Burgnich, the dreaded Italian defender given the duty to man-mark Pelé in the 1970 World Cup final, in which Brazil won 4-1 and the Brazilian great scored the opener, said this after the match, “I thought Pelé was made of flesh and blood, like me. I was wrong!”
Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade probably summed up to what extent Pelé’s greatness reigned, “The difficulty, the extraordinary, is not to score 1,000 goals like Pelé – it’s to score one goal like Pelé.”
“There’s Pelé the man, and then Pelé the player. And to play like Pelé is to play like God,” Portuguese legend Eusebio claimed.
But yet, all that scratches only around the periphery of Pelé’s greatness. During the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, there was a poster that said, ‘Today, we are not working because we are going to watch Pelé.’
A year before that, O Rei stopped a war in Nigeria when his side Santos travelled to civil war-ridden Nigeria for a friendly, and that triggered a ceasefire between the two parties.
There are tales that Muhammad Ali, considered one of the greatest athletes of all time, was in child-like shock when he met Pelé.
The Brazilian was a connoisseur of peace, and his image and greatness as an icon ensured that he could spread the message throughout the world.
And upon his departure, the whole world saluted him. The Christ De Redeemer in Brazil lit up with the yellow and green of the Brazilian national team, and so did Wembley in England. The Maracanã, Pelé’s hunting ground, lit up with golden light to match the golden aura of the great who was leaving the mortals, and every game since the news broke has paid their tribute to the great man.
When Diego Maradona, Pelé’s long-time rival on the subject of greatest ever, passed away, the Brazilian said that he hoped to play football with him in heaven.
Two years later, Pelé left to keep his word. And he will be welcomed to the gates of eternity like he deserves, like a King, like O Rei.
