DO YOU sit glued to your
television set through a whole nail-biting, free-kicking, heart-stopping
football match, especially when the World Cup is on once every four years? Have
you set your heart on being a Diego Maradona, a Zinedine Zidane or a Rivaldo
one day?
If you have, you no doubt
revere the legendary Brazilian whom most footballers consider the greatest of
the great ~ Pele! He’s helped his country to lift the World Cup thrice! He’s
scored over 1,000 goals in first class football. He was voted the sportsperson
of the last millennium. Can you bear that? In his No. 10 jersey, he could fill
stadiums across the globe. He scored two goals in his first World Cup final
against Sweden
~ and he was just 17 then!
Who is this amazing man with
magic feet? Where did he come from? How did it all begin?
Edson Arantes do Nascimento
(Pele’s real name) was born on October 23, 1940, in the poor town of Tres
Coracoes (Three Hearts) to a father ~ Dodinho ~ who lived by football, though
he hurt his right knee badly at the outset of his career. Brazil was a great country to be
born in, for most children there learn to kick a ball as soon as they can
stand. Walking often follows later! And so it was with Pele, too.
Pele was just seven when his
mother, Dona Celeste, allowed him to first visit a football stadium. He was to
shine shoes there, but his eyes were glued to Dodinho on the field. Later,
while helping his father to clean a health clinic, Pele heard of the wonderful
teams Dodinho had played against, the great players he had met. Pele was
enchanted. He could think of little else.
Pele and his friends soon set
their hearts on forming a real football
club. The boy was ten then. They hawked peanuts at railway stations to pay for
their shirts. But there was no money for shorts! What could the team do? Their
mothers solved the problem ~ by making them shorts out of empty flour sacks.
The children even found a rejected football to play with; it was better than
the ball of rags they usually kicked around!
In every free minute, Dodinho
and Pele talked of football. He watched every match Pele’s team played. “Learn
to kick with both your feet, not just the right one,” the father would urge.
Pele loved his father so much that one day he got into a fight at the stadium
because someone had decried Dodinho’s football skills.
Back home, Dodinho cautioned
him: “If you want to play football, you must not get angry. The Chinese say
that when a man makes a fist, he’s already lost the fight. Besides, if you get
angry on the field, they’ll throw you out of the game. That hurts your whole
team. So, kick yourself if you want to, but don’t start fights with strangers.”
Pele’s team ~ “the shoeless
ones” ~ played well. Their popularity surged. They were thrilled when the local
mayor announced a football tournament. But then their spirits drooped ~ for
they didn’t have the uniforms and shoes needed to participate.
They needed a saviour, and
one appeared in the shape of the father of three boys in the team. He talked
the manager of another football club into giving him all their worn-out shoes.
Did it matter to the boys that the shoes did not fit well? Not at all. At least
they could now play. At the tournament, 12-year-old Pele, the smallest player
on his team, displayed his superb skills. His team kept winning! And 5,000
people in a real stadium watched the mayor present the championship to the
winning side’s star ~ Pele!
Within a year, the Barau
Athletic Club asked the boy to join them. Pele now had shoes that fit perfectly
and a brilliant coach, Valdemar de Brito, who taught the team every football
secret he knew ~ and they won the championship. Soon, Valdemar came to visit
Dodinho ~ with an offer for the 15-year-old Pele from Brazil’s famous Santos club.
At Santos, Pele became the complete footballer.
Though he was homesick, he learnt much. The club’s footballers were men Pele
had admired for years. They were kind to him. They behaved as if they had
played with him all along. When the coach said he was too light, his new
friends fed him well to make him grow. The professionals often asked young Pele
to run errands for them, nicknaming him Gasolina,
for he was speedy, like engines run on petroleum!
The youngster surprised them
by scoring in his first major match. “Don’t call me Gasolina from now on,” he
told his teammates. “Call me Pele.”
That wasn’t just a
flash-in-the-pan. By the end of that season, Pele had scored more goals than
anyone else in Sao Paolo state.
On a visit to his family at
Tres Coracoes one day, Pele couldn’t believe what he heard over the radio:
“These players have been chosen for the Brazilian national football team ~ Santos… Mazzola… Pele…”
He flew to Sweden with other
top players to weave magic spells on and off the field and to return to a
hero’s welcome in Brazil,
to cities mad with joy!
That’s when the world began
to talk of the Pele legend ~ and it didn’t stop till he became the most famous,
the best-loved footballer of all time.
Before he finally hung up his
football shoes in 1977, Pele had one last mission to fulfil. While playing for
the Cosmos team in New York,
he did what he’d always enjoyed most ~ he taught American children to play the
game he loved. Don’t you wish you’d been there, too?
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