It is no longer news that Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the man known as Pelé is dead. He was born on October 24, 1940. He died on December 29, 2022 at sunset on the old year.
If life was a football pitch and death could be dribbled past, Pelé would still be alive, kicking and driving, but death is an equal opportunity agent; he catches up with everyone in due time, and the world drags on.
The concept of death was not as apparent to us as the children of the 1960s. The future was green and death seemed to only happen to faraway others, people we rarely knew. Then we felt we knew Pelé, the owner of the magic feet that seemed made for round leather. We fell in love with the king because of the apocryphal stories we always heard about him, and it often came back to Pelé at football games in the grounds of the churchyard after school hours. We played felele, a flexible imitation of a leather ball, and we played barefoot. Who could afford football boots in those days?
Pelé was our superman before the rise of Superman, and many fables circulated about his extraordinary skills in the field. We admired his panache and his talent for scoring goals. We chatted about the boots, the balls, the game and, inevitably, the magic of King Pelé. We knew he lived far away in a place we couldn't locate on the map, but we still felt part of the man.
One of the fables claimed that he was a one-person football team and regularly played against entire teams in his part of the world. A more fashionable story has also been circulating about a law in place prohibiting him from taking a penalty anywhere in the world. According to folklore, the ban came after a penalty shot from Pele ripped open a goalkeeper's stomach. The kill kick would have taught the world never to jeopardize a goalie with straight shots from the King! I remember the morbid fascination induced by the tale, the imagination of the unfortunate goalkeeper and the messy innards around the goal post. No one should deserve such a bloody end for guarding the goal post. This validated my thinking that Pele was a descendant of Nephilim, one of the beings the Bible says was born "when the sons of God entered into the daughters of men".
I found the fable enchanting for its poetry. This depiction of a larger-than-life life modeled on a mythical model like D.O. Fagunwa, the dean of Yoruba literature whose works were part of our primary school curriculum texts. The mythical image of Pelé failed to fade with age, even after discovering that the stories had to tickle me. In adulthood, the fables metamorphose into metaphors for the exceptional exploits of the footballer. Of course, Pelé was not a Nephilim. He was a man of passions like us who seemed magical because he played football like no one had ever done. Pelé didn't invent football, but he created samba, the entertaining genre that transformed the game from a noisy show of muscles into a silky smooth symphony on the pitch.
Commenting on the trajectory from fame to shame that is the lot of many great careers these days, someone remarked that "the best of men are only their best men". The best of men melt like wax under the intrusive glare of paparazzi and ubiquitous social media. Even celebrities quickly become the butt of sordid jokes about sex, drugs or dirty profit. It's a rarefied mark of greatness that Pelé took his fame to the grave, especially considering how long he lasted.
He stepped into the global spotlight at the World Cup as some his age were still marking their mothers' skirts and reaching adulthood playing at the top. Pelé would dazzle the world at three Mundials, in '62, '66 and '70, to build on the myth that lasted a lifetime without taking the slippery slopes of fame like some celebrities.
Few parodies oppose the trajectory of Pelé to that of Diego Maradona. The young Argentinian dribbled around the world...
It is no longer news that Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the man known as Pelé is dead. He was born on October 24, 1940. He died on December 29, 2022 at sunset on the old year.
If life was a football pitch and death could be dribbled past, Pelé would still be alive, kicking and driving, but death is an equal opportunity agent; he catches up with everyone in due time, and the world drags on.
The concept of death was not as apparent to us as the children of the 1960s. The future was green and death seemed to only happen to faraway others, people we rarely knew. Then we felt we knew Pelé, the owner of the magic feet that seemed made for round leather. We fell in love with the king because of the apocryphal stories we always heard about him, and it often came back to Pelé at football games in the grounds of the churchyard after school hours. We played felele, a flexible imitation of a leather ball, and we played barefoot. Who could afford football boots in those days?
Pelé was our superman before the rise of Superman, and many fables circulated about his extraordinary skills in the field. We admired his panache and his talent for scoring goals. We chatted about the boots, the balls, the game and, inevitably, the magic of King Pelé. We knew he lived far away in a place we couldn't locate on the map, but we still felt part of the man.
One of the fables claimed that he was a one-person football team and regularly played against entire teams in his part of the world. A more fashionable story has also been circulating about a law in place prohibiting him from taking a penalty anywhere in the world. According to folklore, the ban came after a penalty shot from Pele ripped open a goalkeeper's stomach. The kill kick would have taught the world never to jeopardize a goalie with straight shots from the King! I remember the morbid fascination induced by the tale, the imagination of the unfortunate goalkeeper and the messy innards around the goal post. No one should deserve such a bloody end for guarding the goal post. This validated my thinking that Pele was a descendant of Nephilim, one of the beings the Bible says was born "when the sons of God entered into the daughters of men".
I found the fable enchanting for its poetry. This depiction of a larger-than-life life modeled on a mythical model like D.O. Fagunwa, the dean of Yoruba literature whose works were part of our primary school curriculum texts. The mythical image of Pelé failed to fade with age, even after discovering that the stories had to tickle me. In adulthood, the fables metamorphose into metaphors for the exceptional exploits of the footballer. Of course, Pelé was not a Nephilim. He was a man of passions like us who seemed magical because he played football like no one had ever done. Pelé didn't invent football, but he created samba, the entertaining genre that transformed the game from a noisy show of muscles into a silky smooth symphony on the pitch.
Commenting on the trajectory from fame to shame that is the lot of many great careers these days, someone remarked that "the best of men are only their best men". The best of men melt like wax under the intrusive glare of paparazzi and ubiquitous social media. Even celebrities quickly become the butt of sordid jokes about sex, drugs or dirty profit. It's a rarefied mark of greatness that Pelé took his fame to the grave, especially considering how long he lasted.
He stepped into the global spotlight at the World Cup as some his age were still marking their mothers' skirts and reaching adulthood playing at the top. Pelé would dazzle the world at three Mundials, in '62, '66 and '70, to build on the myth that lasted a lifetime without taking the slippery slopes of fame like some celebrities.
Few parodies oppose the trajectory of Pelé to that of Diego Maradona. The young Argentinian dribbled around the world...
Pele (PHOTO CREDIT: Sky Sports)
