He shined shoes and promised his father that he would win the soccer World Cup. He won three. Even in death, he remained loyal to the club in which he made his debut; decided to bury him on the field of Santos CF, who plays in white and sometimes with black stripes, as if to honor the fact that the shadow of the world is black, since a 17-year-old boy conquered Sweden, where the Nobel Prize until he saw him fly shirtless across the thick carpet of Azteca Stadium, right at the center of the world. That’s enough to understand his guaranteed eternity, but we have to add that all the windows he opened, all the tunnels or pipes he built for the best opposing defenders, the long shots like rockets, the gate it not true.
We must add the importance of his blackness, the majesty of the black shadow in white or yellow that dribbled different racisms and that made him the only player that they take as a reference to compare to verify if there is another one better is when he was Brazilian that this country awoke from a dictatorship fostered by the samba of infinite confidence that a single man exuded amidst all the teams he played with: they were not just his legs but his sacred invention of centering and sharing, from the wall with true friends and from the blind perception that Carlos Alberto came out of nowhere and at an angle to score the last goal of the 1970 World Cup, and with it trigonometry with Gerson or Tostao, the cutest thing called Rivelino and also the chivalry in the face of Gordon Banks’ paradox, dignity in the face of defeat and resignation in the face of Verlet tongues in a time when everything, absolutely everything was different: the ball was leather and sewn by hand, they were hardly used cards or theater in the fouls and many courts were long grass to slow down the shooting of the world; there without replays or VAR, where the errors of the flag-bearer or whistler were traced with redoubled claw games, where people began to think about the professionalization of the Olympic Games and amateur sport made its way to lock itself in the neighborhood gyms.
I played guitar and repeated the word love like rock and psychedelia idols did in that utopian decade of childhood when my parents dreamed of sparing us further wars and disappointments, though the shadow of the world left the moon as a foolish memory stained that the gods are men too. Playing the day part-time with Santos and part-time with the New York Cosmos, she had an unusual desire to convince Americans that football is called soccer and isn’t just a women’s sport, and bid farewell to Mohamed Ali as a witness at the headquarters forum out of the world of cyclical racisms… and suddenly centuries pass, silence falls and a luminous shadow rises over the other mortals and seems to hang in the air. Edson Arantes do Nascimento stretches out one leg while with the other he moves into the void and on this invisible bicycle between all the stars of the universe, connects his boot with a powerful caress in the face of the planet and the wake breaks the networks of the known and strangers; The net is a square and infinite velvet where the ball breaks the threads and opens a black hole. The black hole of all time where a kid who played with a rag ball in the favela stands forever with a trophy of pure gold in his hands. Mouto obrigado, Your Majesty.
Boxer Muhammad Ali greets Pelé at a ceremony honoring the footballer’s retirement in New Jersey in 1977. Richard Drew (AP)
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