The King is dead! Long live the King!

Pele, the footballer, the man the world calls The King still lords it but has a mixed legacy in his own country

In his excellent book ‘Futebol – The Brazilian Way Of Life’, Alex Bellos tells a disturbing but enlightening tale which, at first glance, appears to say everything about the reverence with which Pele has oft been regarded in the nation of his birth.

“In 1999,” he writes, “Pele’s Mercedes was stopped at traffic lights in Sao Paulo. Two armed men approached the car. On realising who was inside they apologised, hid their guns and went away. Few people – including footballers — command such respect. A year later in Rio, a similar incident occurred to Romario. The robbers took his Mercedes and mobile phone and Romario was made to walk home.”

But Bellos’ wrote his book in 2002, the last time Brazil won the World Cup. Twelve years on, as the country hosts the tournament, it’s hard to escape the sense of something of a role reversal in the respective standings on home soil of Pele and Romario.

1994 World Cup winner Romario, now a politician who has been fiercely critical of the massive overspend on the 2014 model, hasn’t spared tournament ambassador Pele the lash, branding him a “FIFAman” and, even, “an imbecile”. Nor did street protesters in Rio who, in the run-up to the tournament, unveiled a headline-grabbing banner which read: “Pele: Traitor Of The Century”.

And it’s not that native disenchantment with Pele is an entirely new phenomenon. Bellos acknowledges that Brazilians have long since come to judge him –and not always favourably – as “a businessman, a politician and a journalist, not just a footballer.” The result, he says, is a “complicated and controversial legacy”, in contrast, for example, to the undiluted and undying affection in which the ultimately tragic figure of Garrincha, the once and forever people’s champion, is still held.

The perception here of Pele as a conservative mouthpiece of the establishment –and one, moreover, all too prone to putting his foot in said mouth — has been sharpened by the divisive passions stirred up with the country’s hosting of the World Cup.

To the wounding charge of betraying his people, Pele responded with his own criticisms of the preparations for the tournament, adding that while he sympathised with the protestors’ grievances about a lack of investment in schools and hospitals, the eve of the games was not the time to be taking to the streets. Though some sources here contend that there has since been a cooling in the relationship between Pele and the local organising committee – it’s noticeable, for example, that since the tournament began his visibility is much greater in the television ad breaks than in the grounds – his qualified mea culpa was not, however, sufficient to rehabilitate him in the eyes of those who have come to regard him as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Like the fluent English-speaking young carioca I was talking to the other day who, when asked his view of Pele, replied: “For what he did as a footballer we love him but it would be better if…” — and here he mimed zipping up his mouth, an unconscious echo, perhaps, of Romario’s most celebrated put-down: “A silent Pele is a poet.”

It doesn’t help either that, despite some upheavals in his private life, there has always been a perceived holier than thou dimension to Pele’s already bland personality, in contrast to the roguish past escapades of Romario, say, or the never ending craziness in the world of Pele’s most hilariously bitter rival over many decades, Maradona.

I met Pele just the once, fortunate to get ten minutes or so of chat with the man they call ‘O Rei’ (‘The King’), when he was on a flying visit to Dublin on behalf of Mastercard in the run-up to USA ‘94. Most of what he had to say in that admittedly short space of time was never going to hog the front page, never mind the back, so I was pleasantly surprised when at one point, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, he assured me that there could never be another Pele because – and here he imitated a scissors with his fingers – “I have had the snip”. (In fact, he would subsequently have the procedure reversed and go on to father more children in his mid-fifties).

However, far from having a world exclusive, I soon learned that this was a standard interview line of his, an updated if slightly more risqué version of his hoary old riff about how, just as there can only ever be one Beethoven, there can only ever be one Pele. (And yes, he does frequently indulge that hugely irritating affectation of talking about himself in the third person).

A rather more memorable journalistic encounter was the telephone conference call my colleague Paul Lennon found himself involved in with the legend, back when Pele was the marketing face of Viagra. Despite being warned that, within his already narrow quota of allotted questions, Paul was obliged to ask the great man at least once about the product, he, quite rightly, tried pushing his luck with what turned out to be one football query too many. The result was the following reprimand down the line from one of the most recognisable voices on the planet: “But, Paul, you have still not asked me about erectile dysfunction!”

Not surprisingly with his country hosting the World Cup, the 73-year-old is more in demand here than ever as a salesman boasting global appeal, turning up in the football-saturated TV ad breaks to flog fast food one minute and the next – cheesily kitted out as a king sitting on his throne – encouraging consumers to spend at a well-known supermarket chain.

True, a host of other Brazilian footballers, past and present, are getting in on the same World Cup act, including plenty from the current squad and, perhaps surprisingly, Romario himself. That the latter is promoting beach footwear might strike some as quite an appropriate flip-flop, given that an Irish colleague who lives out here characterised Romario’s populist politics for me as “tropical Fianna Fáil” and chuckled in affirmation when I suggested he sounded like someone our people might recognise as a “cute hoorinho”.

The point is that, here in Brazil, between the controversial politics and the relentless hard-sell, it can be easy to lose sight of Pele the footballer, the man many — myself included — still regard as the greatest there has ever been. Which is why, having returned to my apartment from a game at the fabled Maracana last week, it was simply a sheer nostalgic joy to idly switch on the tv and find one of the channels showing ‘Isto E Pele (This Is Pele)’, a feature-length documentary from 1975 which, as its title is clearly meant to imply, proposes the view that the authentic Pele, the enduring Pele, the only Pele that really matters, was the one to be found on the field of play.

Here was a treasure trove of archive clips, from Santos to the Selecao, from the 17-year-old who burst onto the world stage in Sweden in 1958 to the maestro who played in the greatest team of them all, in Mexico in 1970. Here, from innumerable angles, in slow-motion and real-time, in black and white and luminous colour, were the innumerable, quotidian acts of wonder which, even more than the record-breaking stats, assert and confirm his claim to be the greatest ever.

Pele truly had it all: a blistering shot, magnificent heading ability, a masterful range and weight of passing, the composure to find the clinical finish and, perhaps most remarkable of all, an almost freakish ability to fend off ferociously tight marking and dribble through gaps which scarcely seemed to exist, somehow almost always emerging from a tangle of legs with the ball still at his feet. And, in large part, he did all these things on pitches which, as the footage shows, were often not much better than dust bowls. He also shipped some brutal punishment and, for the record, clearly learned to look after himself too.

The greatest hits are still untouchable, like the teenager’s flip-up and volley against Sweden in the 1958 final and all that magnificence from 1970: the audacious dummy against Uruguay (the greatest goal never scored), the booming effort from the half-way line against the Czechs, the towering headers which produced that memorable save from Gordon Banks and the opening goal in the final against Italy. And, of course, the coup de grace, his blind pass for Carlos Alberto to put the crowning touch to the greatest team goal of all time, as Brazil ran out 4-1 winners to lift the Jules Rimet for the third time and keep it for all time.

I’m always thankful that I’d reached the age of reason – allegedly – in time to watch, absorb and fully appreciate what Brazil and Pele did for football in 1970. A year earlier, when I was ten, I was also sufficiently on the case to almost quiver with excitement when pictures were beamed around the world of his 1,000th goal, a penalty at the Maracana. The event was so newsworthy that even RTE showed the footage and I vividly remember finding the images of the goal celebration – with Pele subjected to a pitch invasion by hordes of journalists and radio reporters with huge aerials protruding from their walkie-talkies — even more thrillingly exotic and remote than the pictures sent back from the surface of the moon a few months earlier.

And these, remember, were only the goals and glories that we were able to see. One that got away is one that many who were there consider his greatest ever. It happened on March 5, 1961 at the Maracana in a game between Santos and Fluminense. Five minutes before half-time, Pele received the ball on the edge of his own box, and proceeded to dribble the length of the pitch, leaving a succession of opponents in his wake, before blasting the ball past Carlo Jose Catilho despite the goalkeeper’s flying, full-length dive. “Indeed, so spectacular was the strike,” said one account, “that it drew a standing ovation lasting nearly two full minutes from all the spectators present, even those sporting Fluminense colours, in a phenomenon previously unseen at the Maracana.”

Since there were no television cameras present, a journalist at the game proposed that a plaque be erected at the venue to mark the event. This was duly done and, when I went looking for it out here the other day, was pleased to discover that it is still on display in the museum of the rebuilt stadium. The legend reads: “On this pitch on 5/3/1961, Pele scored the finest goal in the history of the Maracana.”

More than that, the goal actually entered the language: to this day in Brazil, when a goal of exceptional quality is scored, it is referred to as a ‘gol de placa’ – a goal worthy of a commemorative plaque. The only problem with all this is that there are Brazilian old-timers who will stubbornly insist that they saw Pele score an even better goal but, as his former team-mate Pepe once said: “If a plaque was put up for every incredible goal Pele scored, you’d struggle to find a stadium without one.”

Today, as a nation looks to Neymar, its latest Number 10 sensation, to deliver a gol de placa against Chile, I reckon it’s no bad thing to be reminded that, whatever about his contentious reputation in later life, there’s a hugely persuasive case for arguing that Pele, the footballer, still lords it over the best of all the rest there’s ever been, like Christo Redentor over the city of Rio de Janiero.

The King is dead! Long live the King!