Why Soccer Matters Page 11

  Over the years, my name and face would appear on pharmacies, gas stations, soda commercials and new apartment buildings. I endorsed a candy bar, clothing and even, if you can believe it, cattle. Some of the most energetic promotions I did were for the Brazilian coffee growers’ association. Brazil was (and is) the world’s biggest producer of coffee, but it had never been marketed abroad as a high-quality product. By the 1960s, our neighbors were coming up with snappy campaigns of their own, and Brazil felt pressure to match them. So when Santos played in Europe or the United States, I’d go running onto the field carrying a gigantic bag of Brazilian coffee on my back. The standard weight for coffee bags was sixty kilograms, or about 132 pounds. This was an era when I probably weighed 140 pounds wet! But hey—anything for my country, I suppose. Colombia had Juan Valdéz, and Brazil had Pelé.

  One reason we had so many opportunities: Companies were starting to look to the world for business in a way they never had before. Consider the Tetra Pak example: Here was a Swedish company, hoping to profit from sales in Brazil and several other “emerging” markets. A few years before, this would have been unthinkable, but better communications and falling barriers of all kinds were making business truly global for the first time. In the 1960s, we even did a promotion for sodas in Czechoslovakia—a country that was supposedly behind the “Iron Curtain,” and thus shielded from “evil” capitalism. Because my face and name were so recognizable, and I came of age just as this phenomenon was taking hold, I was often used as the tip of the sword in businesses’ efforts to open up new markets. Some people have said that I was, in some respects, the first modern global icon. That sounds a bit boastful for my taste—I prefer to believe that I benefited from many global trends and coincidences. Had I been born twenty or even ten years earlier, I would have still been a good player, but the story would look quite different. I guess I was truly in the right place at the right time.

  It’s pretty funny to go back and see some of the ads I was in. We created a “Pelé Coffee” that is still around and quite popular in some countries even today. One TV spot shows a very elegant woman on a jet airplane—the height of glamour in the late 1960s, believe it or not—asking a stewardess: “What coffee is this?”

  “It’s Pelé Coffee,” the stewardess answers.

  “Well, it’s delicious!”

  Then the camera zooms in dramatically on me. I’m looking over my shoulder with my best debonair smile and a cup of steaming coffee in my hand. “Já viu, né?” I say, practically growling. Loosely translated: “You dig?”

  Oh, it’s impossible not to laugh at all this now! But the ads do show how long I’ve been around, and how much the world has changed. Ads like that didn’t make much sense in 1960, and they certainly don’t make much sense in 2014. Somewhere in the middle, they did. Nowadays, in our more cynical times, many ad campaigns rely on humor or irony to promote their brands. This, to be honest, has always posed a challenge. Say what you want about me, but I’ve always been a sincere guy.

  There were lots of proposals I said no to. For years, Brazilian companies tried to get me to endorse a so-called “Pelé Pinga”—slang for cachaça, the Brazilian sugar cane alcohol used to make caipirinhas and other drinks. They wanted to make Pelé cigarettes as well. I turned those offers down, mostly because as a player I didn’t consume alcohol and tobacco. I believed I needed to protect the talents that God gave me.

  I always treasured the wonderful people I met through my sponsorships, and I was grateful to the companies for putting their faith in me. I was aware that every deal I did put me more squarely in the public eye—which, in turn, eroded my family’s privacy. The sponsorships and business deals also meant a little less time to focus on my true love, soccer. But it was difficult to turn down some of the offers, especially for someone who came from the world that I did. My family’s story showed that a soccer player’s career can end with a snap of a ligament; I thought it was important to earn what I could while I could, and do things like buy my parents a nice new house in Santos—which would never have been possible without the money from sponsorships. As late as the 1960s, I wasn’t even the highest-paid player on the Santos team.

  Besides, I reasoned at the time, all I had to do was turn my business affairs over to my friends and associates, and they’d take care of that aspect of being Pelé. That way, I could focus primarily on soccer, and not have to worry about money.

  That was another painful lesson that I would have to learn the hard way.

  7

  Bit by bit, the wounds from 1966 began to heal. Two years after Liverpool, I finally got to put one of my biggest regrets to rest when I had the great honor of meeting Queen Elizabeth. I had always admired her quiet grace, the dignity she carried herself with and her warm smile. The queen was on a tour of South America and the world, and very graciously communicated her desire to meet me after she attended a game at the Maracanã between two all-star teams from São Paulo and Rio.

  Prior to our meeting, I was paid a visit by a pair of very high-strung protocol officials from Itamaraty, the Brazilian foreign ministry. They were apparently worried their famous soccer player would go native in the presence of high royalty, and commit some sort of horrible gaffe. They gave me specific instructions on how to bow, how to listen respectfully, how not to interrupt, how to stand up straight, how to show deference . . . basically, how to drain every last ounce of humanity from our encounter.

  As I took the field for the game, a huge marching band came into the Maracanã and played “God Save the Queen.” I began to wonder if maybe all the formality wasn’t just a figment of my handlers’ imagination after all. But when the game ended and I was whisked away to a more private area to see her, all my concerns melted away. Queen Elizabeth entered the room with a huge smile, and a very informal air about her. “Mr. Pelé!” she enthused. “It’s a pleasure to meet you!”

  My English was still pretty awful at that point, but I’d carefully practiced a few key phrases. “Thank you very much, Your Majesty,” I replied.

  Everyone around us chuckled at this effort, looking quite pleased—even the guy from the foreign ministry. From that point on, we relied on the translators, but our conversation stayed very relaxed and pleasant. I said how much I had loved my time in Britain, and she talked about how her husband, Prince Philip, was a great admirer of mine. In fact, the queen herself was a much bigger soccer fan than I expected—she expressed regret that Brazil had not done better at the 1966 Cup, although she said she was very proud of the English team, of course. By the time we finished speaking, I was utterly charmed, and felt like I’d known her for ages.

  I think that was the last time I ever allowed anyone to give me instructions on how to speak to someone. It was a valuable lesson: People are the same everywhere, and we need to avoid creating barriers where there are none.

  In fact, the only possible breach of protocol on that day in Rio was when a member of the British delegation, maybe a diplomat, sidled up next to me and asked, in broken Portuguese, almost inaudibly, from the corner of his mouth:

  “So, Pelé . . . is it really true you’re not going to play in 1970?”

  8

  Out there in the world, beyond the realm of protocol officers, things were getting a lot more crazy. Throughout much of the 1960s, Santos was considered by many to be the best club team in the world. The world, meanwhile, was eager to see us play our carefree, daring, improvisational brand of soccer. We toured so often, and had so much fun while playing, that one U.S. newspaper called us “the Harlem Globetrotters of soccer.” The energy and passion generated by soccer was enough to make things interesting on their own. But this was a young world, a rebellious and anarchic world, and the frenzy that constantly enveloped us—exciting, flattering and occasionally somewhat scary—seems almost inconceivable to me today.

  One morning in Caracas, Venezuela, the runway was so mobbed with Santos fans that we had to wait f
or four hours inside our plane before police could finally clear a way out. On a trip to Egypt, we had a layover in Beirut, where an enormous crowd stormed the airport and threatened to kidnap me unless we agreed to play a match against a Lebanese team. (We politely declined, with the support of the Lebanese police, and flew on to Cairo as planned.) In Milan, Italy, a crowd of thousands caught wind that I was out shopping and tried to hunt me down for autographs. I hid behind a stone pillar, waiting for a team car to come and pick me up. When it appeared, I went sprinting into the vehicle, running faster than I ever did on a soccer field!

  Even the field itself didn’t offer that much protection. In 1962, we played in the finals of the Libertadores Cup—the Latin American championship, which Santos had never won before. Our opponent was Peñarol—a great team from Uruguay, which made our hearts beat even faster. After the usual home-and-away series ended in a tie, we played one final game, for all the marbles, at the Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When we won the game in rollicking fashion, by a score of 3–0 with two goals of my own, the crowd stormed the field. In the hunt for souvenirs, the fans removed literally every piece of clothing from my body! The next day, a newspaper back home featured the headline: A STRIP-TEASE, BY THE BLACK KING OF FOOTBALL.

  It may sound strange, but incidents like these rarely scared anybody, especially in Latin America—a certain disorder was just part of the local landscape during those years, like rain or sunshine or smog. Each display of exuberance made Santos’ legend grow. Our team featured many excellent players, including Zito, Pepe, Coutinho, and many others. Between 1958 and 1973, Santos won two Libertadores Cups, six first-division Brazilian League championships, and ten editions of the São Paulo state championship. As a result of both our success and our flair, the demand to see Santos play was insatiable. During the early part of the year, we’d tour other countries in Latin America—places like Argentina, which was much richer than Brazil back then and could afford to pay big fees. From June to August, that was Santos’ big payday, when we’d travel to Europe during the northern-hemisphere summer. We’d play twenty, twenty-five or thirty games in one go.

  We played everywhere: in the world’s capitals, like Paris and New York, and in less-traveled destinations like Kansas City, Missouri, Alexandria, Egypt and Turin, Italy. In the Ivory Coast, in Africa, fifteen thousand people lined the road from the airport to the town center when I went to play a game in their capital, Abidjan. One time, I drove in an open car down the Champs-Élysées in Paris on our way to a match against France. The French film star Brigitte Bardot showed up at the stadium, wearing the tricolor of France—red boots, white “hot pants,” and a tight-fitting blue sweater. Everybody in the stadium promptly forgot about me and the game, and spent most of the time watching her. The French team won. After the game, Bardot awarded the French captain with both the Cup and a kiss—he was so dazed afterward that the newspapers reported he left the Cup behind! Brigitte offered me a kiss, too—though I turned it down, figuring Rose wouldn’t care to see pictures of that splashed across every sports page in Brazil.

  The attention from fans was flattering—and relentless. On one flight from Mexico City to New York, I just leaned back and went to sleep. This is one thing I have always been able to do: close my eyes and take a nap, even if the world is collapsing around me. While I was asleep, passengers kept filing up to the front of the airplane, seeking an autograph. (This was the 1960s, when you could still get up and walk around on a plane without causing a panic.) Nobody woke me up, thankfully. As our plane started its descent into New York, a chant broke out. The passengers started serenading me in Spanish: “Despierta, Pelé, despiertaaaaaa!” Wake up Pelé, wake up! This stirred me, very slowly, from my slumber. I blinked open my eyes and saw the person in the seat next to me—Orlando Duarte. It took me a few minutes to realize what was going on.

  “My God,” I finally said to Orlando. “I thought I had died!”

  We both started laughing. Once we landed, I signed autographs for everybody.

  I always tried to put on a good show, because I knew I was a big reason why people came to our games. Santos would sometimes get one hundred thousand dollars for games I appeared in, and thirty thousand for games that I didn’t. I appreciated that people were spending their hard-earned money to see me. All told, I scored one hundred twenty-seven goals in 1959, and one hundred ten in 1961—numbers that didn’t quite seem real at the time, and seem downright impossible today. Beyond scoring, I also tried to accommodate the special requests of both the team and our hosts, some of which could be very strange. On a couple of occasions, especially in countries where black people were a less common sight, the organizers would ask either me or Coutinho to put on a white armband. They did this because, otherwise, the fans wouldn’t be able to tell us apart. I guess such requests seem a bit obnoxious in today’s context, but I was having too much fun to really care.

  Even the little “crises” we experienced from time to time almost always had good endings. In July 1968, we were playing a game in Colombia when my teammates and I started arguing with the referee, Guillermo “Chato” Velasquez, because we thought he should have disallowed a goal scored against us. One of my teammates, Lima, went to protest his decision. The referee was a big guy—a former boxer, actually—and started to get in Lima’s face—and then he sent Lima off. I was outraged, so I walked over and continued to argue—and then Chato promptly ejected me from the game, too.

  I probably deserved to be sent off. But as I left the field, the Colombian crowd started going absolutely crazy. People in the stands started to throw cushions, papers and trash onto the field, at the referee, and at one another. “Pelé! Pelé!” they shouted. Police came out of the bleachers to protect Chato.

  I ran into the dressing room under the bleachers, but the noise from the crowd remained just as deafening. There was stomping, firecrackers and this high-pitched roar. It pretty much sounded like World War III out there.

  I had begun to take off my shoes when the director of Santos came running in, short of breath.

  “You’re coming back into the game,” he said.

  “What?” I replied, incredulous. “Are you crazy? I was sent off.”

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “The referee has been removed from the game, and you’re coming back.”

  I couldn’t believe it—but the director really was telling the truth! With the entire stadium in revolt, the authorities decided that putting me back into the game was the only way to avoid a full-fledged riot. So I put my shoes back on and ran back out there. We continued the game, with Chato nowhere to be seen.

  The incident was pretty funny, but it also felt wrong. Chato was the referee, and he made a decision to throw me out. His decision should have been respected. For years afterward, I felt bad whenever I thought of what happened that day. Luckily, in the long run, I was able to make some amends. The healing process started when I saw Chato in a hotel in Brazil. We hugged, and exchanged contact information. When I played in New York near the end of my career, I sent him and his family tickets to one of our games. Finally, in Miami, during one of my farewell games near the end of my career, some journalists decided that we should do a “reenactment” of the expulsion. Chato pulled a red card out to send me off the field once again. I snatched the card from his hand and then kept right on playing, just as I had in Colombia!

  We all had a good laugh about it—especially Chato. What could have been a lifelong grudge ended in a friendship. That’s another great thing about soccer—most of the time, everybody walks away happy.

  9

  As fun as it all was, something in my life was missing. And people kept reminding me of it, again and again.

  “Don’t you miss playing for your country?” they’d ask. “Do you want 1966 to be the last memory people have of you in a Brazilian uniform?” Fans, Santos team officials, Brazilians on the street, journalists, other players—
always the same questions, and I never had a convincing answer. Oh sure, I’d say something about having played in three World Cups, and having been injured in all of them, and how the referees hadn’t protected me, and so on. But whenever I said these things, they seemed out of character, like I was playing another role. They didn’t seem like things Pelé would say.

  A few years before, in 1964, Santos hired a new technical director: Professor Júlio Mazzei. He quickly became one of the most important people in my life. A tremendously educated man who had studied in the United States, Professor Mazzei basically took over all aspects of the team’s physical preparation. Apart from our training, he also acted like a kind of counselor—helping all the players learn how to behave properly in hotels, in airports, and in other places when we were on the road. He was kind of a bridge that took us from the world of amateur athletics to the growing pressures of professional sports in the 1960s and 1970s; he helped all of us boys start to become men. Over the years, Professor Mazzei would be a constant source of stability and perspective; he was often the only person who could see people and events with a certain distance in my crazy life, and I trusted him immensely. He was like the older brother I never had.

  One thing I loved about Professor Mazzei was that he talked to me like nobody else could. He never pushed that hard, and he always used good humor. But he was always very honest, while trying to nudge me in the right direction. So around that time, I’d be working out or doing drills on the field, and he’d say:

  “Ahhhh, Pelé, looking good. You’re ready to win a third Cup for Brazil!”

  I’d just smile at him and mutter something under my breath.

  “What are you going to say when 1970 comes around and you’re just sitting at home?” he’d continue, laughing. “What are you going to tell your family?”