Greatness takes a physical toll on all those who achieve it. So it is a testament to Pelé’s courage and indomitable will that this month he will mark eight decades on the world stage after years of being battered by the game’s hatchet men and a series of recent medical issues. Eight by Eight Writer-at-Large David Hirshey who has known Pelé since 1975—and collaborated with him on a memoir—pays tribute to the man who forever transformed the sport in his own joyous image.
A GOD IN WINTER
The Enduring Legacy of Pelé
Dressed all in black save for a garish gold bowtie, each earlobe festooned with diamond studs and each wrist adorned with a bejeweled watch, Diego Maradona arrived at the Kremlin looking like a Bond villain masquerading as a butler. Oozing past a gaggle of earpiece-wearing Russian goons, the argentine icon planted himself first in line to greet that evening’s host.
It was December 1, 2017 and that host was Vladimir Putin, the notoriously bare-chested equestrian, judo sensei, Trump puppet master, and, of course, president of Russia, site of the 2018 World Cup. Putin had invited the “living legends” of World Cups past to this private reception just hours ahead of the tournament’s ceremonial draw.
Up the red-carpeted staircase they went, a cavalcade of aging soccer deities. Some, like Gordon Banks, England’s 1966 World Cup–winning goalkeeper and now a snowy-haired, stooped octogenarian, struggled to make the climb. Others, like the Brazilian wonder boys of the 2002 World Cup, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, seemed as spry as the day they left the pitch. There was a swagger to their gait and a swivel to their hips, although Ronaldo appeared to have spent much of his retirement chained to a buffet table.
At the center of them all was Maradona, who had anointed himself a one-man Putin-fawning band for this special occasion. When the Russian despot finally emerged, Maradona greeted him with whatever passes for “Sup, bro” in Spanish. As Putin raised a glass of champagne to the assembled legends, Maradona grabbed the Russian’s other hand and, weirdly, wouldn’t let go.
Putin’s flinty gaze had already shifted to the opposite end of the room, to someone he seemed eager to greet—or possibly to have arrested, given that he was the only guest not standing in the presence of the former KGB chief. Abruptly, Putin freed his hand from Maradona’s grip and crossed the floor to his seated target. At which point the master of Russia did something wholly unexpected: He actually bent—no, bowed—down and clasped the man’s hand. It was Pelé’s hand, after all. And Pelé, even to Tough Guy Putin, was O Rei, the King of Soccer.
Pelé responded to the Russian’s affectionate greeting with the same warmth he had shown to two Popes, five emperors, 10 monarchs, and 108 heads of state over the course of his incandescent career. Although that career ended long ago, Pelé’s luminous smile, irrepressible bonhomie, and even his hair have remained intact—as jet black as it was in the 1958 World Cup final between Brazil and Sweden, when a scrawny, unknown 17-year-old first blasted off into the soccer stratosphere.
The rest of Pelé, however, had changed dramatically. Those heavily muscled legs that used to whir nonstop while cutting apart an opposing defense were as limp as overcooked noodles. His preternatural gifts—the propulsive speed, the fearsome power, the gravity-defying balance, the feline grace—all gone. The image of Pelé that had long endured in my mind’s eye—body arcing high off the ground, arm cocked in that signature goal salute, head thrown back in jubilation—was suddenly replaced by a frail, old man, unable to walk or even stand on his own. In the past five years I’d interviewed him twice; on both occasions he joked about his “new soccer shoes.” The first time it was a cane, then a metal-framed walker. But watching the video of Putin’s fete, I wasn’t prepared for the visceral jolt of seeing him in a wheelchair. It felt like a gut punch.
Pelé had been the lodestar of my soccer dreams, the reason I fell in love with the sport when all the other kids were besotted with Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. I was lucky enough to see him play in his all-conquering prime for Santos and in the gloaming of his career with the Cosmos. I also spent two years collaborating with him on a memoir, shadowing his every move as he crisscrossed America to spread the gospel of soccer to the last place on the planet immune to its charms. Hell, I even hung out with him (albeit briefly) at the fabled disco Studio 54 the night Grace Jones played Lady Godiva, riding naked across the dance floor on a white horse.
To be in the presence of the beautiful game’s most beautiful player, to hear him say, “How are you, my friend?” sounded like a benediction. I once asked him if he utters those words to everyone he meets. “Not everyone,” he replied, grinning mischievously. “That would be about half the people in the world.”
The other half, I figured, must have been Maradona fans.
Over the decades the two epoch-defining players have often engaged in a petty, sometimes rancorous schoolyard feud (I’m the best ever! No, I am!) fueled by FIFA’s boneheaded decision to honor them jointly as Co-Players of the 20th Century.
In the past few years, though, there’s been a thaw in their relationship based on mutually beneficial shilling—and the shared dread that Lionel Messi may have eclipsed them both. So when Maradona glimpsed Pelé posing with Putin for the snap-happy paparazzi, the Argentine scurried over to his longtime enemy and gently kissed his forehead. Pelé appeared momentarily stunned, his expression somewhere between bemusement and suspicion. Had the former coke fiend and all-around vulgarian—who had once told the Brazilian to “suck my dick”—suddenly become his BFF? Or was Maradona just photo-bombing a sure-to-go-viral shot of Pelé and Putin?
Pelé seemed not to care. He was simply eager to leave the media circus behind. With the aid of his compatriot Ronaldo, he rolled into the Kremlin’s concert hall, where FIFA delegates, B-list celebrities, and Gary Lineker were waiting for the World Cup draw to begin. As as he entered the cavernous room, spontaneous applause broke out. Pelé let the adoration wash over him and waved regally. He was still O Rei, the King, even if his throne now had wheels.
Pelé is well into stoppage time of an extraordinary life; he’ll turn 80 this month. There is, of course, no telling when the final whistle will blow, but after his most recent near-death episode this past April, when he contracted a urinary infection so severe he spent 13 days in the hospital, one thing is certain: The window to celebrate him while he’s still among us is narrowing.
The once seemingly indestructible Brazilian who tormented defenders with insolent ease is now up against opponents whom he can’t turn inside out: a busted hip, which keeps him in constant pain despite two surgeries; a crumbling spine with extensive nerve damage; one working kidney requiring dialysis; both knees shot through with arthritis and devoid of cartilage.
The fact that Pelé has grave physical problems would not surprise anyone who saw him play in his peak years. In those days of wanton shithousery, before yellow and red cards were introduced, he made every defender he ran at look like they were wearing clown shoes. Is it any wonder that his opponents attempted to pull him apart, limb by limb, shredding him like a human piñata? Convinced that he could go around, over, under, or through anybody in his way, Pelé rode those borderline criminal assaults all the way to the hospital.
“Pelé,” he said over the din of the crowd, “is not of this world.”
Pelé’s courage, his refusal not to be cowed by the game’s hatchet men, would inevitably exact a price, and by 1966, the Brazilian knew it. “For me there will be no more World Cups,” he vowed after Portugal’s defenders pummeled him so relentlessly that he was carried off the field on a gurney. “Soccer has been distorted by violence and destructive tactics. I do not want to finish my life as an invalid.”
Yet four years later, Pelé bowed to the pressure of his countrymen to wear the famed canary yellow jersey again. The 1970 World Cup in Mexico would prove to be his apotheosis. At 29, he played the most transcendent soccer of his career, scoring one magnificent goal and making two others in the 4-1 romp over Italy in the final. The game will be remembered for Brazil’s flowing nine-man move that led to the fourth goal, scored by Carlos Alberto, who ran onto Pelé’s no-look, perfectly weighted pass and, without breaking stride, smashed the ball into the net. “Playing with Pelé,” Alberto would say years later, “was like having God on your side.”
The term “unplayable” has become a cliché, attaching itself to anyone who for one game (think Maradona in 1986 against England), maybe even for one season (see Cristiano Ronaldo’s 60 goals in 2011–12), is performing at such a ludicrously high level that opponents are helpless to stop him. But you could say of Pelé that he was unplayable for almost 15 years, starting in 1958 and continuing through and beyond the 1970 World Cup, a run of sustained brilliance unparalleled in the sport’s history—until that little guy in a Barcelona shirt dropped from the heavens.
So who is the best player ever? The GOAT (Greatest of All Time)? I could make a case for Pelé, but that would only spark the MTOASD (Most Tedious of All Soccer Debates) and, frankly, I’d rather chew off my arm.
We live in an age of instant hot takes that measure everything in binary terms—winner or loser, thumbs up or down. There is no time for nuance in the social media era. Ours is a Messi-shaped universe with YouTube streaming his every are-you-fucking-kidding-me goal in real time. Pelé, meanwhile, belongs to a prehistoric era of yellowing newsprint and grainy black-and-white videos. Every four years, the most obsessive watchers of the World Cup might be rewarded with a glimpse of his exhilarating artistry during a historical montage, but that’s it. Forget seeing him in high definition or on TikTok. Pelé exists only in the memories of those who saw him play.
My millennial daughter sometimes invites her friends along when she visits. They are annoyingly pop-culture-literate, and these days that includes being reasonably conversant with quadrennial global spectacles like the Olympics and the World Cup. Recently one of them spotted the signed Pelé jersey framed on my office wall. He asked my daughter, “Why does your dad have an autographed shirt of the guy who does those Viagra commercials?”
Yet for those of us old enough to have borne witness to the Brazilian at his celestial height, Pelé is the benchmark against which all the other supernovas—Puskás, Di Stéfano, Cryuff, Beckenbauer, Maradona, Zidane, Ronaldo, and, yes, Messi—are judged. He was the first global soccer celebrity and the personification of joga bonito, the free-wheeling, joyful style that set Brazil apart from all other national teams, which preached structure and system at the expense of individual creativity. The 1970 World Cup champions with Pelé, Gerson, Tostão, Jairzinho, Rivellino, and Alberto were as close to Soccer Nirvana as we’re ever likely to get.
Pelé won three World Cups with Brazil and was the dominant force in two of them. He scored a staggering 1,281 goals for club and country (OK, a couple hundred of those were against the roadkill that Santos played in the 1960s, when the Brazilian club was soccer’s equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters.)
His misses were often more beautiful than the goals others scored. Against Uruguay in 1970, he stretched the boundaries of logic as far as humanly possible. Racing toward a seeing-eye through ball from the diminutive center forward Tostão that put him one on one with Uruguay’s standout goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, Pelé appeared to have two choices: 1) chip the hard-charging keeper while running at full tilt; 2) drop a shoulder and dribble around him.
He had a fraction of a second to make those calculations. The thing about Pelé, though, the quality that made him sui generis in his day, was that his brain was as quick as his feet. “Pelé is still the only player who can think twice in one second,” the Uruguayan defender Alfredo Lamas once said of his Cosmos teammate.
Pelé dismissed the two expected options, even though either maneuver would doubtlessly have resulted in an easy goal. But where’s the fun in that? In that instant, he had the audacity to reach for soccer perfection and rip a hole in the space-time continuum. Isn’t that what genius does? Make the abnormal look normal, the ridiculous appear routine?
As Pelé and Mazurkiewicz converged at the top of the box, the Brazilian decided not to touch Tostão’s pass, instead letting the ball roll by the keeper’s left side while he circled him on his right. I wish I could tell you that after Pelé left Mazurkiewicz flailing helplessly on his knees and looking behind him at his vacant goal, he then collected the ball and deposited it in the empty net. But the truth is, he missed. His off-balance shot trickled past the far post by a centimeter, making it the greatest goal never scored in World Cup history.
It’s easy to forget that all of Messi’s outrageous shimmies, wriggles, jab steps, shoulder dips, pirouettes, nutmegs, and sombreros that he deploys to effortlessly skip by defenders didn’t just spring full bloom in soccer’s modern age. They are the natural extension of what the Brazilians call “ginga,” the rhythmic swaying of the hips and samba no pé (“samba in the foot”). It took Pelé and his bandy-legged teammate Garrincha, perhaps the greatest dribbler of all time, to bring this musical expression of soccer out of the favelas and into prime time at the 1958 World Cup. Messi may have made these moves his own, even added some hot sauce for good measure, but he didn’t invent them.
You always remember your first time, especially when you feel the earth move. In my case, an entire stadium shook in ecstasy, induced by Pelé. It was 1968 and Santos was on a “Pay to See Pelé Play 20 Minutes” tour of the United States. My father took me to see them play Benfica at Yankee Stadium in New York.
The match was billed as Pelé vs Eusébio, or “the Black Pearl of Brazil” vs. “the Black Panther of Portugal.” What a way to finally behold my childhood idol in the flesh, rather than through a fuzzy tiny TV screen. Eusébio had been ordained Pelé’s successor in the global firmament after scoring four of Portugal’s five goals in a remarkable comeback against North Korea in the 1966 World Cup. Neither player had expressed anything but the most profound respect for each other—privately, though, the Brazilian had a score to settle. While Eusébio played no part in his country’s vicious fouling of Pelé in ’66, he was the face of the Portuguese team that battered him out of the tournament. Karmic payback was in the air.
Late in the first half, the Brazilian stood near midfield, the ball at his feet, facing Eusébio. At that moment, it felt like everyone in Yankee Stadium was poised over that stationary ball, as if Pelé had simply frozen time and motion to reassert his supremacy. He waited for the Portuguese star to lunge at the ball as he knew he would—and at that instant slipped it between Eusébio’s legs with a flick so casual he could have been brushing a piece of lint off his shoulder.
The nutmeg is soccer’s ultimate burn, and by humiliating Eusébio and then gleefully racing off with the ball down the pitch, the Brazilian was sending his Portuguese rival a message: “I’m Pelé and you’re not.” From every corner of the old ballpark, his name came cascading down—“Peléeeee, Peléee, Peléee!” It was as if 36,000 people were hugging him with their voices. I had never seen my father go quite so bonkers at a sporting event. Born and raised in Europe, he had played and followed soccer all his life and thought he had already witnessed the game’s acme as embodied by the immortal Ferenc Puskás and Hungary’s Mighty Magyars. Now, at Yankee Stadium, he had glimpsed an even higher dimension.
“Pelé,” he said over the din of the crowd, “is not of this world.”
My father’s words seemed eerily prescient seven years later when Pelé descended out of the sky, deus ex machina. It was May 28, 1975, 12 days before His Onlyness would sign a three-year $4.7 million contract with the Cosmos—the highest salary of any soccer player in the world at the time. I’d been tipped that Pelé would be attending that day’s game against Vancouver as a guest of the New York club. I showed up two hours early, just in time to catch sight of a helicopter touching down a hundred yards behind the goal at the south end of the Cosmos stadium. When the future Pied Piper of American Soccer disembarked, he could scarcely believe what he saw: a pile of dirt and rocks that looked like it had been left over from the Paleolithic era. Welcome, Pelé, to New York’s Randall’s Island! Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Pelé had a sludge heap rising out of the East River.
And yet two weeks later, in his first scrimmage with his new team, the Brazilian managed to paint his own masterpiece on this primitive terrain.
At 34, eight months removed from a competitive match after retiring from Santos in October 1974, he could not summon the miracles as easily as he once did. So Pelé initially hung back in midfield, orchestrating the action and shouting the few English words he knew—“Ok, Ok,” and “Easy, now, look, look, look the ball”—to his starstruck Cosmos teammates, all of whom had developed two left feet in his presence.
About 30 minutes into the game, Pelé suddenly reached back across the years and pulled a face-melting moment of joga bonito from his memory bank. The play started on the left flank, when the smurf-like Scot Johnny Kerr sent a shoulder-high cross-field ball to Pelé, who was lurking in the box. He sat back for a second or two, his squat body reclining as if in a beach chair, then with his left leg floating up, his right leg catapulted him into the air, his back parallel to the ground. He scissor-kicked sharply, caught the ball with his right instep, and drove it over his laid-out-flat body into the goal.
“What just happened?” said Cosmos goalkeeper Kirk Kuykendall.
It would be nice to report that soccer’s supreme evangelist came to America because he couldn’t resist the challenge of converting the heathens, one bicycle kick at a time. Nice but not true. Fact is, Pelé needed Yanqui dollars—a lot of them—to build back the fortune his financial advisers had lost through disastrous investments. But before he would put pen to paper Pelé had two specific demands: He wanted the money in cash, and to avoid messy tax issues in Brazil (the government had already deemed him a nonexportable national treasure) he didn’t want to be identified as a soccer player.
Warner Communications, the team’s parent company, rejected point one, agreeing instead to heavily front-load the contract. They accepted point two, though implementing it would require some ingenious corporate maneuvering. Atlantic Records, one of many entertainment companies under the Warner umbrella, was run by Ahmet Ertegun and his brother Nesuhi, lifelong soccer aficionados from Turkey. Along with Cosmos president Clive Toye, the Erteguns had been largely responsible for capturing soccer’s biggest prize. They would overcome the last contractual obstacle by listing Edson Arantes do Nascimento as a “recording artist” for Atlantic. The workaround wasn’t even that far-fetched. Pelé often spent his idle hours strumming his guitar and composing songs, some of which had been recorded by Brazil’s biggest pop stars.
After two years of traveling with Pelé on planes and in limos, I finally realized there was something he liked even more than music: sleeping.
“Once, I see him sleep from Brussels to Tokyo,” said the Peruvian midfielder Ramón Mifflin, who played with Pelé on Santos and the Cosmos. “You know how long this is? Twenty-six hours, half a world. Pelé never open his eyes.”
Of course, someone who can send a defender spinning off the edge of the earth is surely capable of feigning sleep. Who could blame him for wanting to close off a world of fans determined to talk to him, touch him, bear his love child? Enter Pedro Garay, Pelé’s bodyguard, who, among his other duties, was charged with fending off El Rei’s legion of admirers. A stocky bundle of tensile strength, Pedro was Cuban, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. For his boss’s protection, he carried a leather-wrapped, lead-filled “slapper” with him at all times. When it came to the ladies, however, Pedro was all Latin charm. In a Toronto hotel one night, I heard a ruckus at the other end of the hall, where Pelé’s suite was located. Pedro was demanding to search a chambermaid’s laundry cart, which looked unusually bulky. Sure enough, Pedro unearthed two half-naked females hiding beneath the pile of fresh linens. “Does Mr. Pelé need to have his bed turned down?” one of the women asked.
“No,” Pedro said firmly, “but my room is right next door.”
With Pelé smashing attendance records wherever he went, even the most soccer-illiterate swine—like, say, the xenophobic editor at the New York Daily News who told me not to waste my time on “a game for commie pansies”—could no longer ignore the seismic upheaval Pelé was having on the country’s sporting landscape. Pre-Pelé, the Cosmos were drawing fewer than 6,000 fans and giving away free seats with each purchase of a Burger King Double Whopper. In his third and final season, 77,691 delirious converts watched the Cosmos play the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, a number more than triple that day’s attendance for the New York Yankees.
By then, the Cosmos had left decrepit Randall’s Island for swankier digs: Giants Stadium in New Jersey. And Pelé, for all his eye-catching flicks and subtle back-heels, was no longer the goal-scoring predator who swooped down in the box with hawk-like rapaciousness. At 36, he’d become more of a creative fulcrum, his 18 assists in 1976 shattering the North American Soccer League record yet failing to lift the Cosmos to the title he so craved.
On another night in another city, this one Seattle, Pelé was uncharacteristically pensive. “I wonder if I fail in my mission, to bring soccer to the American people,” he mused as we sat in his hotel suite. His feet, badly blistered from his first encounter with an Astroturf field, were cooling off in an ice bucket. “To do this we must have a championship. This team must be the best. Every team I play on, it is the same way. If the team is no good, they will say Pelé is no good.”
If Pelé was the realize his dream of winning a title with the Cosmos, he would need a stronger supporting cast. It was provided to him quickly—a high-priced cavalry arriving in succession: The controversial Italian goal-scoring machine Giorgio Chinaglia; Germany’s majestic sweeper Franz Beckenbauer; Pelé’s old Santos teammate, Carlos Alberto, who was also captain of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup champions. All that marquee talent would eventually transform the Cosmos into a NASL juggernaut, but it also made for personality clashes that left more than a few egos in intensive care.
From the moment he set foot in the locker room, Chinaglia, equally beloved and reviled in his native country, made no secret of who would lead the Cosmos to a title. When an unfit Pelé reported for training at the start of the 1977 season, the Italian seethed, “Pelé may be a legend, but right now he’s just one more player I have to carry.” When he added, “Chinaglia is here to score goals, not to be a ballerina,” it was a thinly disguised jab at the one touch, short-passing game that Pelé and Alberto favored.
Just as he would do years later when Maradona cast shade at him, Pelé restrained himself until the bile finally bubbled up at a team meeting during an early season slump. As always, Chinaglia was the first to voice his opinion. He volubly criticized Pelé for not creating enough goal-scoring opportunities for him and getting in his way in the box.
For the first time since he joined the Cosmos, Pelé did something that stunned his teammates who had grown accustomed to his easygoing manner: He dropped an F-bomb. Facing Chinaglia at his cubicle, he said, “You shoot from no fuckin’ angle. Why not put a few goals in from direct front?”
The temperature in the room went from uncomfortably warm to thermonuclear. Chinaglia leaped to his feet, shouting, “I am Chinaglia! If I shoot from someplace, it is because Chinaglia can score from that place.”
Weeks later, while strolling down Fifth Avenue on a beautiful spring day, Beckenbauer would shake his head and say, “Never in 15 years of playing for Bayern Munich and the German national team do I see anything like this. I see a fight in the locker room. I see Pelé cry … ”
Beckenbauer and Pelé enjoyed an instant bromance. Pelé was the first to welcome Der Kaiser upon his arrival and he kissed him on the occasion of his first goal. There is a famous photo of them lathering up in the shower after a Cosmos victory, wearing nothing but boyish grins. So giddy were the two soccer titans that they didn’t notice the photographer—or simply didn’t care.
Eventually, the Cosmos were able to set aside their internecine squabbling long enough to coalesce into a team to be reckoned with on the field. Off it, though, they were already at the red-hot center of a celebrity freak show. At home games the Cosmos locker room frequently qualified as a fire hazard, overstuffed with the beautiful, the famous, and the well-connected, many of them part of the entertainment giant that was Warner Communications.
I’ll never forget the day my path to Pelé’s cubicle was rendered inaccessible by a starry-eyed scrum that included Mick Jagger, Peter Frampton, and soccer’s ultimate groupie, Henry Kissinger. Shoved from behind by a surging press mob, I lurched forward, almost pushing the former Secretary of State onto Pelé’s lap. “That’s for Cambodia,” I wanted to say. Instead, I simply muttered, “Sorry, Dr. Kissinger, I’m on deadline.”
I bumped into the same glitzy crowd at the team’s off-campus locker room, Studio 54, a decadent haven for A-listers so famous they were known by single names: Cher, Elton, Liza, Bianca, Mick, Andy—and Pelé. In my case, a simple “I’m with the Cosmos” was enough to get me whisked past the velvet ropes; at that brief, febrile moment in time those four magic words were every bit as cool as “I’m with the Stones.” I can still picture Pelé in the VIP lounge, immaculate in a crisp white suit, every inch a Roman emperor reclining on a gilded divan as toga-clad damsels hand-fed him grapes.
When Pelé saw me, he back-heeled a playful grin my way. “Not for the book, my friend, not for the book.”
The Cosmos won the NASL title in Pelé’s final competitive game on a goal by—you guessed it—Chinaglia. The victory party later that night was held in a Portland lounge appropriately named Top of the Cosmo. There the team took over the bandstand, singing “Franz Beck-en-bower, la la la, Car-los Al-ber-to … ” to the Latin tune “Guantanamera.”
The evening was in full, raucous swing when Beckenbauer tapped Pelé on the shoulder. “Pelé,” he said, “one more time. I want to dance with you.” Finally, Pelé relented and the two men did a little samba, stepping on each other’s toes and laughing, reveling in a mission accomplished.
And why not? Pelé had come to the U.S. two and a half years earlier to plant the seed of the world’s most popular game in American soil. He had nurtured that seed until it grew into a healthy, boisterous sport that would ultimately see almost as many children playing soccer as basketball and baseball.
But Pelé’s legacy is so much more than the mainstreaming of American soccer. With his dazzling inventiveness, his eye-bulging technical skills, and the unalloyed joy he brought to every touch of the ball, Pelé changed the nature of the sport so fundamentally that what we see today is just a more souped-up and tactically sophisticated upgrade of the game the Brazilian ushered into being.
If Pelé’s not the best player of all time, he is certainly the most complete. He could launch thunderbolts from distance with his “weak” foot and was blessed with such whiplash power in his neck that he could head a ball with more force than most players could kick it. He could corkscrew defenders into the ground with his sleight-of-foot trickery and then, when they regained their feet, circle back to beat them again just for the sheer delight of it. Júlio Mazzei, Pelé’s longtime friend and adviser at both Santos and the Cosmos, once told me that blind people would come to the stadium just to hear him dribble.
This is not to suggest that Messi doesn’t deserve every hosanna lavished on him as soccer’s Supreme Being of this century (so far). You can—and I do, to a sick degree—glory in his wizardry without feeling obliged to run down Pelé’s transformative genius. And vice versa. Which is why it struck me as so bizarre and out of character for Pelé to be shit-talking Messi, as he did last year when asked to compare himself with the Argentine.
“How can you make a comparison between a guy who heads the ball well, shoots with the left, shoots with the right, and another who only shoots with one leg, only has one skill and doesn’t head the ball well?” Pelé told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.
Needless to say, these comments were met by a torrent of frothing outrage on social media. But never for a second did I believe Pelé meant them. “There was a period in 2018 when he was in a lot of pain and became depressed,” said a family member. “He was not thinking straight.”
I certainly had never heard him denigrate Messi. When we last spoke, he called him “the best player of the last 10 years.”
It was the spring of 2016 and Pelé was in New York to promote his biopic, Birth of a Legend. I asked a mutual friend, the Brazilian youth soccer coach Wilson Egidio, if he could help arrange an interview. I’d seen Pelé in 2014 when the first hints of his physical deterioration had begun to manifest themselves, and I’d followed with increasing alarm the reports of his demise.
Pelé was staying at the Regency Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side. Even after spending parts of the past 40 years at his Sutton Place apartment or Hamptons compound, he still spoke English haltingly, and I felt he would be more relaxed conversing in his native Portuguese. Egidio joined us to translate. When we entered his hotel room, Pelé was sitting at a table by the window, shafts of fading sunlight from Park Avenue falling across his face and casting it in half shadow. The first thing I noticed was how old he looked, a particularly jarring sensation because he usually managed to appear decades younger than he really was.
I reminded him that when we talked two years ago, he had been declared dead in an erroneous tweet from CNN.
“I think Maradona made up that story,” he said with a cackle, the old sparkle back in his eyes.
He had just undergone an unsuccessful operation in Brazil on the hip that was causing him daily anguish. He was hopeful doctors in America could put it right. His back was aching, too, which explained the extra pillow that he was leaning against in the chair. He nodded at the black wooden cane propped up next to the wall. “It looks like I’ll be on the bench for a few games,” he said, smiling a little sadly.
He grew animated, though, when the subject of the world’s best players came up and I asked where he rated himself in the soccer pantheon. “I had two periods in my career, when I played with Coutinho at Santos in 1962 and with Tostão in the national team in 1970, where I think I was the best,” he said. “But it is a different game today and Messi is still playing, so the argument is not over.”
He was visibly tiring, and there was time for just one more question. I noted that in the two years since I’d last seen him, three of the all-time greats—Eusébio, Alfredo Di Stéfano, and Johann Cruyff—had passed away. Had this made him more conscious of his own mortality?
“I’m not afraid of dying,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning up. “I come from Três Corações.” That’s when Pelé and Egidio looked at each other and cracked up. An old joke between them, it seemed, but one lost on me.
“What’s so funny about the name of your birthplace?” I asked.
“It means,” said Pelé, “that I am a man of three hearts.”
Long live the King.
[This story appears with the author’s permission; also check it out in the wonderful publication Eight by Eight]