In the 1970 World Cup, Pele’s attacking partner was Tostao, one of the brightest players ever to appear. Brazil.
They first lined up together in 1966, when Brazil began preparing for that year’s World Cup near Tostao’s hometown. He introduces his father to Pele – and is surprised to see his father in tears. Years later, Tostao, still in awe, said to me: “It was as if he were meeting his god. So the idea of Pele becoming a religious icon is nothing new.
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The entire cover of Friday’s Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper was devoted to a haunting, iconic grainy photo of the man wearing the team’s No. Santoswith the title “Pele is dead, if Pele can die.”
Inside the newspaper, the theme continued: “Like the Olympian gods, Pele does not age or die. He will always live, imprinted in the global memory as the used Brazilian. football to make humanity’s dream come true.”
His birth name was Edson Arantes do Nascimento. Pele himself often makes a point – Edson will die one day, but Pele is eternal. He seems to consider the division between humans and myths something completely natural. His sister, Maria Lucia, detailed their last conversation and said her brother passed away peacefully. “I’m Edson’s sister,” she said. “Becoming Pele’s sister is inexplicable, because he was chosen by God to represent Pele on earth.”
It’s an interesting spiritual scenario — that someone is assigned a mission to be Pele, and someone ends up being a shoe shine boy from a small Brazilian town who shines brighter than anyone else. other in game history.
One of the first to discover the magnitude of the Pele phenomenon was Nelson Rodrigues, a leading Brazilian playwright who is also perhaps the country’s most influential football writer. He sees the game as an epic psychological drama, and his character Pele is the perfect man for him to create legend. As early as April 1959, when Pele was just 18 years old, Rodrigues wrote that Pele “belongs to football legend more than the sport itself.”
At the end of 1958, the year that Brazil won the World Cup for the first time, Rodrigues considered that Pele was “definitely a genius. I say it over and over again – a genius, Pele could become Michelangelo, Homer or Dante and greet them with overflowing intimacy like ‘how are you?’ Just as Michelangelo is the Pele of painting and sculpture, Pele is the Michelangelo of the ball.”
Perhaps even more striking is a column from April 1958, before Brazil won the World Cup in Sweden that year, when Pele was still not very popular in Rio de Janeiro, where Rodrigues was stationed. “Pele has a significant advantage over other players,” he wrote. “It was feeling like a king, from head to toe. He had a completely natural sense of superiority.” Rodrigues was the first to give Pele the royal crown.
For Rodrigues, Brazil, already number one in the world, is only constantly frustrated by its outrageous modesty. To this, he sees Pele as the solution. “In Sweden, he won’t be afraid of any opponent. He won’t feel inferior to anyone. That’s the aggressive and even insolent attitude we need. Yes, the My friend, I bet Pele would think all of our opponents were a bunch of wooden legs With Pele on the team, and others like him, no one would come to Sweden with the soul of a misfit. race. Others will tremble before us.”
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And just a few months later, with pompous form, with Pele scoring 6 beautiful goals in 3 finals, Brazil took home the trophy from Sweden.
At the time, part of Pele’s gift was understanding the importance of his talent and feeling completely comfortable with the responsibilities that came with it. He puts on a mantle of greatness as if it were made to measure.
It explains why he’s such a great big game player. Pele and his supporters certainly made the mistake of focusing too much on the number of goals he scored over the course of his career. This man is more than just a grim statistical accumulation, especially when the number has been inflated when including the matches he played for the Brazilian Army.
Pele’s soul is found more on the big stage. That’s why he loves Maracana so much; The huge stadium is a suitable venue for him to show off his great talent. Pele actually appeared in the crucial World Cup clashes, or the second leg of the 1962 Club World Cup — a big deal at the time — where he destroyed Benfica in Lisbon to win the championship for Santos.
These are the occasions that will ensure that Pele is eternal.
