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In the 73rd minute of Brazil 2022’s World Cup opener against Serbia, 25-year-old striker Richarlison, a son of Favela Nova Venecia in Espírito Santo state, took a left-footed cross into the box. He then lifted the ball over his head, flipped his body, almost heels over him, and shot it out of the air with his right foot, past a would-be defender and the keeper’s outstretched arms.
Of the 172 goals scored in 64 games over 29 days, none was more spectacular.
Thanks to Pelé, who died Thursday at the age of 82.
Because when Edson Arantes do Nascimento, as Pelé’s parents called him, was called up by the Brazil national team in 1957 at the age of 16, football – or futebol as it’s called in Portuguese-colonized Brazil – was rarely played with the panache Richarlison displayed . It was still largely constrained by the European aesthetics and sensibilities of British expatriates, who imported the game to Brazil in the late 19th century and reserved it for the colonial settler class, which excluded unemployed black Brazilians who were descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.
As the much lauded and criticized Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre noted of the 1938 World Cup, in which Brazil finished third in a field made up of 12 European countries, Cuba and Indonesia: “Our style of football seems to contrast in some ways with European qualities like surprise, skill, cleverness, speed and at the same time individual brilliance and spontaneity. … Our passes, our catches, our deceptions, our floweriness with the ball … there is something reminiscent of dancing and capoeira [an Afro-Brazilian martial art]making the Brazilian way of playing football a trademark that refines and often sweetens the game invented by the English and played so stiffly by them.”
Pelé began acting in America in 1975. After that, nothing was the same.
And nobody perfected and embodied “Futebol-Arte”, as Freyre called it, more than Pelé. Pelé dribbled the ball off his opponents’ shins rather than around them, as Brazilian sports broadcaster Marcelo Barreto recalled. Pelé developed an equally strong left foot as his dominant right foot. He pioneered the acrobatic overhead kicks and scissor kicks that Richarlison unleashed on football’s biggest stage last month. And like the Negro League players who brought the thrill of speed to Major League Baseball when they were finally allowed to play, Pele was a faster footballer than football had ever seen.
Pelé revolutionized the way football was played and its popularity. But that didn’t make him a revolutionary figure, no matter how many photos were shared of him with Muhammad Ali and Nelson Mandela and other icons of his time. Most of his life off the field contradicts these synonymous comparisons.
Unlike Ali, a year after his first world title in 1958, Pele served his required time in his country’s military. And he didn’t dare sacrifice his career like Ali did by standing against his country’s government when many of his countrymen thought it was just and did it. As President Jânio Quadros in the early 1960s, he had effectively accepted contractual servitude to the government declared Pelé a “national treasure”. The President did this to allay public fears that a European club would kidnap Pelé, and Pelé complied.
And when the government turned against the Brazilians in the mid-1960s, Pelé did not back down. The recent Netflix documentary “Pelé,” which begins with a halting appearance of an age-stricken Pelé using a walker, reminds viewers of Pelé’s embrace of his country’s brutal military dictatorship from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, particularly during the presidency by General Emílio Garrastazu Médici from 1969 to 1974, when the regime was at its most repressive. There is a photo of Pelé embracing Médici and his successor, General Ernesto Geisel. The filmmakers asked Pelé if he knew about the torture of political dissidents, the disappearance of Médici’s opponents, the murders allegedly carried out by the state. Pelé answered ambiguously.
In fact, Pelé was anything but an extension of Médici’s regime. Médici used Brazil’s preparation and eventual 1970 World Cup win behind Pelé’s brilliance to wash criticism of his government with national enthusiasm for the team.
“I love Pelé, but that won’t stop me from criticizing him,” Pelé’s former teammate Caju said in the documentary. “I thought his behavior was that of a black man saying, ‘Yes sir.’ A submissive black man. … That’s a criticism I still hold against him to this day, because just a statement from Pelé would have made a big difference.”
However, Pelé has instilled a new sense of pride in black Brazilians. For example, he was one of the first black Brazilian soccer stars to embrace his Africanness rather than reject it. He didn’t bleach his face with rice powder, as Mario Filho recounted in his seminal text, The Black Man in Brazilian Football, of some of the first black players in Brazil’s professional league, who did so in hopes of gaining the favor of the elite class that supported their sport . That wasn’t a trait of Pelé that seems to have waned in his most recent incarnation, Neymar, who, to the dismay of many black Brazilians, has Europeanized his looks throughout his career.
But what Pelé did for black Brazilians he rarely backed up with performative politics, deeds, or words. He did not adorn his body with tattoos of revolutionary figures Che Guevara and Fidel Castro like a great footballer who came after him, Argentinian Diego Maradona. As a black superstar athlete, in the United States he was more like Willie Mays or Michael Jordan, whose answers to questions about racial inequality rarely get too lukewarm. When a goalkeeper from Pelé’s former club Santos confronted opposing fans for harassing him with monkey calls, Pelé fired the player and not the perpetrators. “If I had to stop or scream every time I was racially insulted,” Pele told a TV station, “every game would have to be stopped.”
So we should remember Pele for who he was, the greatest soccer player of all time. A global sporting icon. And one who smiled even for those he shouldn’t.