Fast, agile, skillful with both feet and lightning fast with his headers, he helped Brazil to three World Cup titles
December 29, 2022 at 1:58 pm EST
Pelé in 1969. (AP)
He was hailed as the king of football, but it was Pelé’s other moniker – the Pérola Negra, or Black Pearl – that best evoked the rare brilliance he packed into his diminutive stature. Pelé, who for decades was considered the most famous athlete in the world, died December 29 in a hospital in São Paulo, Brazil. He was 82.
The cause was complications from colon cancer, said his manager Joe Fraga.
Pelé’s eminence in football spanned three decades during which he helped Brazil win the World Cup in 1958, 1962 and 1970. Fast, agile, adept with both feet and laser-like with his headers, Pelé was built for goals and gifted with a master of jazz improvisation skills on the soccer field.
During his 22-year professional career, Pelé played in more than 1,300 games and scored nearly as many goals, but was by no means a one-man show. He saw the field the way a chess master sees the board – two, three, four moves ahead – with the tactical ability to pass to teammates who are better placed to hit.
It was barely 20 years old when the Brazilian President declared it an official national treasure. It was an honorable and economical restraint; it prevented him from being transferred to a wealthy European club willing to pay hugely for his services. Pelé was an asset too important to the national interest to export.
Nonetheless, poverty-born and raised soccer champion Edson Arantes do Nascimento was among the first athletes in the world to recognize the power and richness of personal branding.
Later in his career, after retiring from Brazilian club Santos, which was the country’s dominant team in the 1960s, Pelé brought his global aura to America, signing with the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League 1975 when he was in his mid-30s. The deal was reportedly brokered by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one of Pelé’s ardent admirers and a believer in the international goodwill that produced “the pretty game.”
The genius of Pelé’s play led to a 48-hour truce in at least one civil war when Nigerians laid down their arms during a 1969 exhibition in Lagos to see his championship.
What Pelé, football’s one-name wonder, meant to the beautiful game
It wasn’t just Pelé’s skill that pushed boundaries; so is his fame. He never found out the origin of his nickname. “Pelé” has no meaning in Portuguese, but it was easy enough for a child to pronounce and be understood in all languages, as was Pelé’s signature smile.
As he noted in a 2001 interview, “Wherever you go, there are three icons that everyone knows: Jesus Christ, Pelé, and Coca-Cola.”
Brazilian soccer player Pelé died on December 29 at the age of 82. He helped Brazil win the World Cup in 1958, 1962 and 1970. (Video: Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)
A year earlier, international football’s governing body FIFA had named Pelé and Argentina’s Diego Maradona as Co-Players of the 20th Century. The question of who was football’s greatest of all time – Pelé with his three World Cup titles or Maradona with his only title in four World Cup appearances – has stirred passions far beyond South America. It was a debate that offended Pelé.
Pelé concealed his lack of appreciation for Maradona, the Argentinian 20 years his junior, whom he viewed as a bad role model due to his drug addiction, personal scandals and his clumsy role as Argentina coach for the 2010 World Cup.
Even so, Pelé’s off-field behavior was not beyond reproach. He had frequent extramarital affairs and refused to acknowledge any of his daughters as his own, despite DNA testing proving he was her father.
For the football stars who supported Pele, there was no doubt who was the greatest. They were consumed by another debate: Was Pelé invented for soccer, or was soccer invented for Pelé?
“Pelé was the only footballer who pushed the boundaries of logic,” Dutch-born superstar Johan Cruyff once said.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, Pelé said he remained a man of faith and saw his life’s work as fulfilling God’s purpose for him. This fate, however, did not imply a vow of poverty, chastity, or single-mindedness.
Pelé viewed wealth as power and used his fame for sometimes questionable business ventures. He has made and lost fortunes over the years and has been a pitchman for video games, soft drinks, computer products and pharmaceuticals.
Rising from poverty, he was sometimes humbled and amazed at his success.
“It is not easy to psychologically separate Edson from Pelé,” he wrote in one of his autobiographies. “Pele has developed a life of its own. He has overtaken everything. I feel the dichotomy between Edson and Pelé every time I pull out my Mastercard. On one side is the picture of me doing an overhead kick together, signed by Pelé, and on the other is my real signature.”
But he had no ambivalence, no trace of doubt about the competence behind the brand.
“In music there is Beethoven and the others,” Pelé said in 2000. “In football there is Pele and the others.”
Edson Arantes do Nascimento was born in October 1940 in Três Corações in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. His birth certificate is dated the 21st, but he celebrated October 23 as his birthday.
He learned to play football from his father, João Ramos do Nascimento, a minor league player who later in life found work as a government employee. Pelé’s upbringing was so strict that he reportedly made soccer balls out of paper balls stuffed into socks or used grapefruit instead.
When Pelé was 5 years old, his father joined a football club in Bauru, a suburb of São Paulo, and moved there with his wife and three children. To support the family’s meager income, Pelé polished shoes as a child. But his love of football was so great and his disinterest in studying so profound that he left school after fourth grade to play football on the street and pursue a short-lived career as a shoemaker’s apprentice.
Diego Maradona, fascinating soccer star and Argentine legend, has died at the age of 60
At the age of 10 he started being coached by Waldemar de Brito, a friend of his father and former player of the Brazilian national team. Pelé developed quickly. And with an introduction from de Brito, he signed his first professional contract at 15 with Santos.
Pelé was called up to the Brazil national team when he was 16. He made his World Cup debut at 17 – at the time the youngest player to take part in a World Cup. Pelé scored six goals at the 1958 tournament, including a hat-trick in the semifinals against France and two goals in the 5-2 final against Sweden.
By the time the 1962 World Cup began in Chile, he was no longer a teenage phenomenon. Despite his modest height of 1.67 m, Pelé was widely hailed as the world’s best player. He scored in the first game of Brazil’s 2-0 win over Mexico, but an injury ended his tournament. Brazil defended their title without him.
With Pelé injured again in 1966, Brazil were unable to defend their title.
Pelé was 29 years old when the 1970 World Cup began in Mexico. Pelé scored the opening goal in Brazil’s 4-1 win over Italy in the final. “I told myself before the game that like everyone else, he’s skin and bones,” said Italy’s Tarcisio Burgnich, who defended Pele at the World Cup. “But I was wrong.”
Goalkeeper Costa Pereira said the same thing after his Portuguese club lost to Santos in the 1962 Intercontinental Cup. “I came hoping to stop a great man,” Pereira said, “but I left believing I had been undone by someone who wasn’t born on the same planet as the rest of us.”
After retiring from Brazilian soccer in 1974 and reportedly facing $1 million in debt from bad investments, Pelé signed a three-year, $2.8 million contract with the North American Soccer League’s New York Cosmos. Sports Illustrated later reported that the nascent league’s average attendance increased nearly 80 percent after he came to the United States.
Pelé led the Cosmos to the 1977 championships. He played his last game – a show against Santos at Giants Stadium – playing half for his American club and the other half for his former Brazilian club.
Pelé’s marriages to Rosemeri dos Reis Cholbi and Assíria Lemos Seixas ended in divorce. For many years he was romantically linked to model Xuxa, who was 17 when they started dating in 1981. In 2016, he married Marcia Aoki, a business executive 32 years his junior.
Pelé had at least six children from his marriages and other relationships, including daughter Sandra from an affair with a maid. Based on DNA evidence, Sandra successfully sued for legal recognition in a Brazilian court and also wrote a book called The Daughter the King Didn’t Want. She died of cancer in 2006.
His son Edson “Edinho” do Nascimento, a former Santos goalkeeper, was arrested in a money laundering case in 2005 and received a nearly 13-year prison sentence in 2017. He was allowed to serve out his sentence under an agreement that allowed him to work on player development for Santos.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Pelé wrote at least two autobiographies and dabbled in acting and composition. In 1992 he became the United Nations Ambassador for Ecology and the Environment. From 1995 to 1998 he was Brazil’s sports minister.
Pelé’s health problems increased after the age of 65. He underwent eye surgery for a retinal detachment, had a hip replacement, and was hospitalized for a urinary tract infection.
At 74, he signed a lifelong contract with Santos that included a license deal for merchandise marking their joint accomplishments.
Nearly four decades after kicking his last match ball, Pelé was still building a legacy that lifted a nation and its sport. in a new century. “Pelé was one of the few who contradicted my theory,” mused artist Andy Warhol after completing his silkscreen portrait of the great footballer in the late 1970s. “Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”