In Brazil still devoid of a Nobel Prize, Pele became an icon that created a new cultural and national identity through the maximum expression of football ‘bem jogado’, of technical brilliance, rooted in ‘ginga’, the swaying of the body that follows an African musical rhythm. His success was such that, in the American Portuguese tainted by racial prejudices that have survived over time, ‘ser o Pelé de…’ is synonymous with excellence, perfection in any daily sphere.
Born in the Brazil of the excluded, in 1940, in Tres Coraçoes, in the coffee state of Minas Gerais, Edson Arantes do Nascimento He was not educated to face the establishment or lead a revolution. He was a genius and a citizen of order, who cohabited and allowed himself to be exploited by the military dictatorship (1964-85). When scoring his thousandth goal, in November 1969 at the stadium in maracana, at the worst moment of the repression, dedicated the goal to: “children, the poor, the old blind and charitable institutions & rdquor ;, in an empty speech that did not even tickle the powerful. Pelé did not have the soul of an activist, not even in his time as Minister of Sports (1995-99) during the first government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso when he supported literacy campaigns and ended the clubs’ lien.
The legend of Pelé, the ‘Atleta do Século’, is confined to the four lines, where he had a solid career that spanned three decades and which crowned the golden age of Brazilian football with the achievement of its first three World Cups (1958, 1962 and 1970), which set the individual bar where no one else could ever reach it. He was ‘o Rei’ of a sport that he helped to universalize and of which he was the first great global idol.
The stray dog complex
His trajectory of national redemption weaves from the maracanazo from 1950, when he was still 9 years old when he saw his father cry for the first time while listening to the 1-2 against Uruguay on the radio, until Mexico 70 in the considered best selection of all time with the visionary Mario Lobo Zagallo accommodating four ’10’ (Rivellino, Gerson, Tostao and Pelé himself) on a legendary team.
The World Cups of that Brazil of touch, combinatory, cumulative in the generation and management of ‘craques’, of baroque plasticity of dribbling and of opulence of goals buried the so-called ‘complexo de vira-lata’ (stray dog complex), which he coined the playwright Nelson Rodrigues, associated with the deep lack of collective self-esteem due to the inheritance of being an extractive colony.
Implicitly, Pelé dynamited decades of racial prejudice and stigma made explicit in the classic ‘O negro eo futebol brasileiro’, by Mario Filho (the journalist with whom the Maracana stadium was named) and amplified by the 1950 soccer drama that crucified the goalkeeper (black) Moacir Barbosa and that it fueled suspicion towards the descendants of slaves because they did not have the “emotional balance& rdquor; to face the decisive matches.
The Suecia 58 title, won by Pelé at the age of 17, is the founding myth of a way of understanding ‘art soccer’ and Brazil through improvisation. The Pelé-Garrincha duo was born there (personified by Santos, from São Paulo, and Botafogo, from Rio de Janeiro, respectively), who was never defeated in a Seleçao match and who embodied the purity of creative football, and the conviction that Early talent must be promoted and not stopped. Symbolically, the number ’10’, with which he won his first World Cup, is beginning to be designed to identify the best in this sport.
‘O rei’ revered by all his subjects
The conviction and general consensus in Brazil endured that Pelé was the tenth footballer, an adonis, unrepeatable, unbeatable, a genius who dominated all the individual technical fundamentals. He was honored by all the contemporary and future ‘craques’. Without exception.
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Pelé is the three World Cups, but also the first to reach a thousand goals (he scored 1,283 throughout his career), scored mostly at Santos FC, a small club on the Sao Paulo coast that he took to the Olympus of football. The fact that the ‘Peixe’ stopped playing official tournaments, as at the beginning of the Copa Libertadores, to give priority to excursions abroad where European superpowers such as Benfica, Real Madrid, Barcelona or Inter were measured Milan have never diminished their goalscoring achievements.
The criticisms, which were not few, always focused on the figure of the citizen Edson, in an unfolding that Pelé himself promoted to keep his football legacy immaculate. For this reason, his achievements were never stained by the absent father who did not recognize an illegitimate daughter who did not even attend her funeral; or he was exempted from any guilt that his only footballer descendant, Edinho (ex-santos goalkeeper), went to jail for drug trafficking. The ex-soccer player with an easy and contradictory verb, with empty opinions, was summed up in one of the best phrases of Romario that already make up the ideology of the country, “Pelé quiet is a poet& rdquor ;, but that is not incompatible with the feeling that there never was and will never be another player like him.