How Pele became a harbinger of change

On December 18, Argentina played France in the FIFA World Cup final. We saw Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe in a duel for the ages, 120 minutes of heart-stopping action, a roller coaster of emotion, a game that many good judges call the greatest World Cup final of all times.

Eleven days later, as if content that the baton had been passed, and that the beautiful game was in good hands, Edson Arantes do Nascimento passed away.

***

The basic fact about Pele is his greatness as a footballer. Let me quote some people who are better qualified than me to judge. According to Johan Cruyff, himself one of the fundamental geniuses of football, “Pele was the only footballer who surpassed the boundaries of logic.” The Brazilian striker Romario thought that “instead of calling the game football, we should call it Pele”. And when the Manchester United player Pat Crerand was asked, how he spelt Pele, he replied: “G-O-D.”

Now, all of this is true and it is essential to an understanding of Pele. But saying it also reminds me of a remark that V.S. Naipaul made about India. Visiting in the early 1960s, he wrote: “India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value; a thousand newcomers to the country before you have seen and said as you.”

And so it is with Pele. To say that Pele was a great footballer is necessary, but it is also to make an observation of no value. Many people have made it before and many people will make it again. I will not, therefore, be writing much about Pele’s greatness as a footballer. I am interested in thinking about Pele from a different perspective.

***

The year is 1967. A civil war has just broken out in Nigeria. Fought between the Nigerian government and the secessionist state of Biafra, it is bitter and brutal, and by the time it finishes, about one lakh soldiers and 10 lakh to 20 lakh civilians will have died.

This is a catastrophe and there is hate on all sides. In the midst of this, something extraordinary happens in 1969―a two-day ceasefire agreed by both parties. The reason? Pele is coming to Nigeria with his Santos club team and everyone wants to watch him play. Santos play friendlies in Lagos and Benin. Thousands of fans come to watch the King. Once the matches are finished, Pele leaves and the ceasefire ends. The war starts again.

I cannot quite get my head around how crazy this is. Can we imagine Ukraine and Russia halting hostilities to watch Messi play in Kyiv? Forget just Messi, throw in Ronaldo, too, and add Neymar while you are at it. Add anyone you like. It is impossible to imagine people stopping a war to watch them play.

But they did that for Pele.

***

Edson Arantes do Nascimento was born in 1940. As a child, he worked as a shoeshiner and as a servant. He sold peanuts on the street. His family could not afford a football, so he played with rags of paper and grapefruits.

In his autobiography, Edson describes the conditions of his childhood, and writes that “poverty is a curse that depresses the mind, drains the spirit, and poisons life”. That was the curse that he was born into. But with his talent, with hard work and the luck that every man needs, he rose from those conditions to become the first global superstar of football, a man with million-dollar deals and the adulation of the entire world.

Or, to put it another way, at some point, Edson Arantes do Nascimento became Pele.

And this I think is the key to understanding why Pele was able to stop a war, and the key to understanding him in general. We have to understand that there are actually two entities here. On the one hand, there is Edson, who is a regular human being blessed with a singular talent. Edson grew up poor, Edson played football, Edson played football very well, Edson lifted his family out of poverty and enjoyed a comfortable life as soon as he could have it.

Pele, now… Pele is a whole different kettle of fish. Pele is not a man. Pele is a myth. Pele is the name for a collection of stories and meanings, the name and the legend around which dreams and hopes could arise and flourish.

Pele is the story of possibility. Pele is the story of the dream realised, the eternal dream of the downtrodden, the dream of lifting yourself out of poverty and into safety and security.

Moreover, Pele was not just born poor, he was born poor and black. This was a serious handicap in the Brazil of that time. But despite these dual handicaps, Pele made it. Pele showed Brazil and the world that a black man could succeed, that being black did not condemn you to a life of hardship and failure.

Demonstrating what is possible is one of the most powerful things one can do. No one had run a four-minute mile for 2000 years. Then Roger Bannister ran one and within a year, 24 others had done it. And today, it is completely normal for amateur middle-aged runners to run four-minute miles.

Pele is the story of possibility at the collective level, too. Around the time that Edson was coming of age, around the time that Edson was becoming Pele, there was a huge shift happening in the world: centuries of colonial rule had begun to unwind. The European empires started receding. Slowly, reluctantly, imperfectly―but it had started and could not be stopped. The colonised world was beginning to free itself. But it is one thing to be formally and politically free and quite another thing to be free in one’s soul.

I am old enough to remember the instinctive inferiority complex that we Indians had with respect to the old rulers. Whenever I heard an English accent I would immediately be on guard, trying to impress, or at least be respectable. I would defer to English opinions. I considered the judgments of English culture as being the true test of quality―a batsman could only be considered good if he made runs overseas, Vikram Seth was celebrated only after he received a huge book deal from English publishers.

All of that was in the 1990s. Now imagine how much worse it must have been in the 1950s and the 1960s. Imagine the burden the colonised people of the world were under, imagine the weight of the yoke they had to throw off.

That is Pele’s context. That is the world he walked into and in that world he represented something that entire nations were striving towards. He proved himself not just competent in the global arena but a master of it. He played the game invented by the colonisers―and beat them at it.

***

There is one final element of Pele’s story that I want to talk about.

When you think of World Cups, of football, of Brazilian football, what do you think of? I think immediately of yellow shirts and blue shorts, a riot of colours, smiling faces, gleaming teeth, joy and beauty, the fluid grace of the Brazilian style. I think of freedom, the bliss of unfettered self-expression, of sun and sand and water.

All of this, it turns out, is Pele’s doing. Prior to 1958, which was when Pele burst onto the international scene, Brazilian football was associated with none on those things. It is Pele who popularised the idea of jogo bonito, the beautiful game. And it is in large part because of Pele that we associated the beautiful game with Brazil.

Football has changed irrevocably since Pele’s heyday. It has changed technically, tactically, and physically. It has changed economically and become big business. The foundation of that business, though, the underlying reason why millions of people watch, is that it is ultimately play. It is a place for emotion, for beauty and joy, a place to put away the workaday world, a place where passion can live and where we can delight in the grace of human talents and possibilities.

For everyone who saw him play, or even just heard about him, Edson represented this joy and this grace. Edson represented human possibility not just on the individual and collective level, not just economically and politically, but in a certain sense even spiritually, for what else is spirituality apart from the effort to express and incarnate the highest possibilities of the human body and spirit?

I am not saying that Edson was actually a manifestation of those highest possibilities. I am saying something subtler and I think more accurate. I am saying that Pele was a symbol of those possibilities.

As this symbol, he was worshipped. And as this symbol, men stopped a war so they could watch him play.

Sanklecha is a writer and a philosopher. He writes at www.thenewphilosophy.com.