Why Soccer Matters Page 5

  As for what I said next—honestly, I don’t know where it came from. Maybe it was just one of those things a nine-year-old boy says to make a parent feel better. But it certainly was interesting, given everything that would happen later.

  “It’s OK, Dad,” I told him. “One day, I promise, I’ll win the World Cup for you.”

  SWEDEN, 1958

  1

  Our bus chugged up the mountain, belching black smoke and straining with every shift of the gears. At one point, we seemed to roll backward, and I began praying to God to please, please let us survive this trip. I pressed my face to the window, hoping to see a lush field of grass or some other soft, benevolent thing that might cushion our fall if we tipped over. No such luck—only a rocky outcropping, covered with a thick tangle of emerald jungle. Beyond that, barely visible, the distant skyscrapers and factories of São Paulo, which we were now leaving behind, headed for the Atlantic coast.

  I took a deep breath. This day was already terrifying enough, even without the risk of a fiery death. I was on my way to audition for the Santos Football Club, a relatively small but successful team in a port city by the same name. I had spent the last few years playing for the youth team associated with the BAC, Dondinho’s club in Baurú. The youth coach, Waldemar de Brito, was an accomplished soccer virtuoso who had played on Brazil’s 1934 World Cup team. Waldemar was certain that I possessed a special talent. So he had arranged for my tryout with people he knew at Santos. Dondinho and I had taken the train from Baurú to São Paulo earlier that morning, where we met up with Waldemar and had lunch. Now the three of us were on the bus headed for Santos.

  Leaving Baurú had been heart wrenching. First, I had to say good-bye to all my friends from the neighborhood—the boys I’d been playing soccer with for years. And then, the night before my departure, the whole family gathered one last time to see me off. My grandmother, Dona Ambrosina, cried inconsolably. Everybody else held things together pretty well though, including—somewhat surprisingly—my mom. She still had deep misgivings about soccer, but Waldemar had spent long hours in our house, working to assure her that my skills were truly extraordinary, a gift from God, just like Dondinho had always said. Waldemar even sobbed as he pleaded with her, saying it would be a sin to keep a player like me penned up in Baurú. And in any case, if it didn’t work out after a month of tryouts, he said I could come back home.

  I guess his argument was convincing enough. Right before I left, Mom presented me with two pairs of long pants she had sewn for me, special for the trip. They were the first long pants I’d ever owned—up until that point in my life, as I ran around Baurú, I’d needed only to wear shorts.

  “I know you’ll make us proud, Dico,” she said. “If you remember everything we taught you, and you stay out of trouble, there’ll be nothing to worry about.”

  I had my doubts. And first, there was this little matter of the mountain.

  Along we crawled, making agonizing hairpin turns and going over bridges that seemed to be floating on top of the clouds. It seemed unnatural, almost against God’s will, for us to be driving so high in the air. I worried that He might change his mind, and send us flying back down the mountain backward—all the way back to Baurú.

  The whole time, probably seeing how nervous I was, Waldemar was whispering advice into my ear, while Dad slept in the seat behind us.

  “Don’t talk to the press—they’ll just try to make you look foolish.”

  “Beware of cigarettes. They’ll make you run more slowly.”

  “Women: They’re trouble!”

  Unfortunately, I didn’t hear half of what Waldemar was saying, even though I certainly could have used the advice. I was already thinking too much about our destination—and one thing in particular, which excited me more than anything.

  Before I knew it, we were pulling into the city of Santos, bound for the bus station. We passed the railway yards, the red-roofed mansions on the hills, and the narrow maze of streets downtown. Finally, down one of the city’s many long, straight boulevards, I spotted the thing I had been most eager to see. It shimmered there in the distance, blue and impossibly large—much larger than I had imagined. I was so excited that I think I screamed, waking up the other passengers on the bus.

  “Calm down, boy!” Waldemar hissed, laughing with surprise. “We’ll take you there soon enough!”

  I was fifteen years old, just a boy from Baurú seeing the ocean for the first time.

  Barely two years later, I would be carried around the field on the shoulders of my teammates, having just helped Brazil win our first World Cup title.

  2

  It amazes me, even now, to think how quickly everything changed.

  Those two years were like being on a rocket ship—thrilling but slightly out of control, always headed higher but with a destination that was totally uncertain. At various points, there was little I could do but close my eyes and enjoy the ride.

  But this to me is not a story about fame, or glory. It’s not even really about sport, per se. It’s a story about realizing that I was really good at something.

  I believe that every single person has a talent, a gift. Some people are even blessed with more than one. It could be art; it could be music. It could be mathematics or curing disease. The important thing is to discover one’s talent, work hard to perfect it, and then—hopefully—be lucky enough to use that talent and be properly recognized for it. Being able to do all those things in a relatively short time, from 1956 to 1958, was the greatest and most gratifying adventure of my life.

  I know that my experience was not typical in many ways. But I have friends who are doctors, business executives, schoolteachers and nurses, and they speak of their self-discovery using many of the same terms that I do. The pleasure of excelling, of really being the best, is something that everyone should be able to feel. There’s nothing quite like it—and it doesn’t matter if there are sixty thousand people watching, or nobody at all. If you can find that thing that you’re good at, that makes you happy, it will fulfill you for as long as you walk this earth. For me, as for countless millions of boys and girls around the world, that thing was soccer.

  3

  When I walked into the Santos stadium on that first day, it seemed like anything but the start of something big. In fact, I felt like I was about three feet tall.

  We arrived on a Sunday, and there was a game in progress—Santos versus Comercial, a game for the São Paulo state championship, the main league my new team played in. Waldemar got the three of us some seats, and I watched in awe. I’d never seen a game of this caliber before, not even as a spectator—and of course there was no television in those days either. The action moved at a velocity that seemed unreal. I had even heard of several of the players, including Jair da Rosa Pinto, who had been on that ill-fated 1950 Brazilian national team at the Maracanã. I kept blinking my eyes, again and again, unable to fathom that I might soon be playing alongside these guys.

  The game ended, and Waldemar escorted Dondinho and me underneath the stands to the locker room. After I was introduced to the coach—Luis Alonso, known as Lula—the first player I met was Válter Vasconcelos, a great attacking midfielder who over the course of his career scored more than one hundred goals for Santos. He wore the number ten shirt—traditionally worn by the team’s field general, the player who distributes the ball around the field, a bit like the quarterback in American football.

  Vasconcelos put his arm around my neck and flashed a grin at my dad.

  “Don’t worry,” he said in a low rumble. “We’ll take care of the boy!”

  I smiled, relief washing over me. But that feeling didn’t last long. Before I fully realized what was happening, Dondinho was giving me a hug good-bye.

  “Everything will be OK,” he said quietly. “You’ll be a big success.”

  And then, just like that, Dondinho walked out of the locker room wit
h Waldemar, headed back to Baurú, and the only life I had ever known.

  I stood there, watching the door for a minute, sort of expecting them to come walking back through at any moment. It was as if, in a single instant, my childhood had ended. And in a way, it had.

  I have to admit, those first few nights after Dondinho left were desperately lonely. I was sleeping in the stadium itself, in a dorm room underneath the bleachers where Santos had put bunk beds for the single players. The other guys were very kind, and did their best to make me comfortable. But it didn’t feel much like home—the room was horribly dark, and there were no pictures, no relatives, no homemade rice and beans. I spent my nights thinking of my parents, my brother and sister, and my friends from the old Sete de Setembro team.

  Early one morning, I tried to run away back to Baurú. I made it as far as the stadium’s front door, but one of the team officials, a nice guy named Sabuzinho, stopped me. He said that because I was a minor, I needed written permission to leave the building. I told him not to worry, that I’d just bring a note back to him later. God knows what I was thinking—I had no money, no means of getting anywhere. Luckily, Sabuzinho saw through my ploy—well, let’s be honest, he didn’t have to be a genius to see what I was doing—and he sent me back to my room, where I stayed.

  There was no one moment when things started to turn around for me. There was no epiphany or great triumph. Instead, I just kept training, kept doing my drills, kept focusing on soccer. Some mornings I’d wake up, and my head felt like it was filled with fog, making it physically hard to move. But I’d fight my way out of my bunk, and get myself to the practice field. And soon enough, once we started dribbling and passing and shooting, the fog would disappear. Every single time.

  Santos said I was still too small—literally too tiny, since I weighed only about a hundred and twenty pounds—to play any games with the first team. At first the older players had me fetch them coffee, cigarettes and sodas—more errand boy than teammate. But they did have me training with the big boys. And it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was indeed capable of keeping pace with the top players.

  In one practice, Coach Lula assigned a player named Formiga (“Ant”) to cover me—a really good defender who had even played a few games for the Brazilian national team. I was able to dribble past him twice, and send a bunch of balls into the goal.

  “You’re looking good, kid,” Lula said. “Keep working. And eat! My God, you’ve got to get bigger!”

  This wasn’t hard advice to follow. With good sources of protein like chicken and beef regularly available to me for the first time in my life, I ate everything in sight, while continuing to exercise constantly. Santos had a gym, and I began learning karate, which was very useful in learning how to jump properly—and, just as important in soccer, how to fall. My body started filling out with muscle. My legs got so big that, before long, my thighs had the same circumference as my waist. In the meantime, I did all the basic drills I’d performed since I was a kid, at Dondinho’s instruction. I spent hours on the field, kicking the ball around long after the other players had departed.

  I realized that, even if I was far away from home, I was doing what I loved.

  I was happy.

  And although I didn’t realize it yet, I was on my way up.

  4

  Dondinho always told me that to succeed in soccer, talent was important—but it wasn’t sufficient. His story certainly proved that. Indeed, he always said that you had to have luck, too. Those words were ringing in my ears in mid-1956 as I was trying to figure out how to get on the field for Santos.

  My first games were for Santos’ youth team. I scored quite a few goals, enough to convince the club to declare my tryout a success and sign me to a real contract—even if it wasn’t particularly legal, given that I was still only a minor. After a few more junior matches, my shot at the big-time finally came. Well, sort of. The main Santos team had a practice match—a “friendly,” as they’re called—in the nearby city of Cubatão. Several of the regular players weren’t able to go, so I donned a first-team jersey for the first time and took the field. We won 6–1, and I scored four goals.

  After that, the other players started to treat me a bit differently. In addition, the media in Santos began paying attention, writing stories about the kid from the interior who could do amazing things with the ball. Word spread, and we started getting crowds of ten thousand people or more for Santos’ practice sessions—twice the usual number.

  On September 7, 1956—Brazil’s independence day, the day for which my neighborhood team had been named—I got into a first-team game for Santos that officially counted, against Corinthians. This wasn’t the well-known Corinthians team, but a smaller team with the same name from Santo André, one of the industrial suburbs of São Paulo. Almost as soon as I got on the field, one of Santos’ best players, Pepe, took a shot on goal. The goalie knocked the ball out, and I managed to score on the rebound—my first official goal as a professional player, the first of more than 1,280 goals that I would score in my career. I was thrilled, and I ran around the field punching the air with delight. When the game was over, the Corinthians’ crowd stood and applauded us. The players were also very kind, and came over to congratulate me.

  It was a good debut. The Santos media began openly calling for the team to get me into games more regularly. People around town started to recognize me too, and ask me when I’d start playing more often.

  I was prepared to wait. I had started off at Santos as an armador, a supporting midfielder. But I was now being used mostly as an attacking midfielder—the number ten spot. The issue with this was that Santos already had two really good attacking midfielders on the field—Del Vecchio and Vasconcelos, the guy who had put his arm around me and welcomed me so warmly on my first day with the club.

  Given my family’s history, I just hate that things happened the way they did. One afternoon when Santos was playing São Paulo in a championship game at home, Vasconcelos had a terrible collision with an opposing player. As he writhed about on the field, all of us realized it was serious—and it was. Vasconcelos’ leg was broken.

  His injury turned out to be the opening that put me on the field for good. When the season started up again in early 1957, and Vasconcelos still hadn’t fully recovered, I took his place. I would never really give it up again.

  Vasconcelos was the consummate gentleman when, years later, reporters asked him how the whole thing went down.

  “The Santos number ten shirt was unquestionably mine,” he said, “until the arrival of a little black boy with sticks for legs, who entered history as Pelé.”

  5

  There have been lots of crazy theories over the years about the origin of the nickname “Pelé.” One is that it came from the Gaelic word for soccer—which is neat, but doesn’t explain why a boy from Baurú would be called that. Pelé also means “wonder” or “marvel” in Hebrew—but that hypothesis falls short for the same reason. One of the more elaborate theories is that a group of Turkish merchants in Baurú once saw my friends and me playing, and I accidentally touched the ball with my hands. So they said “Pé”—which is Portuguese for “foot”—and “le,” which may or may not mean “stupid” in Turkish. Actually, that theory makes no sense at all, but believe it or not it has been mentioned in previous books about me, so I’m only repeating it here to demonstrate the extent of the confusion during all these years!

  So what’s the truth?

  The truth is actually a little bit disappointing: Nobody knows for certain where “Pelé” came from. That’s because the name is utter gibberish—it means absolutely nothing in Portuguese. But there is one theory, which comes from my uncle Jorge, that seems much more credible than the others, and it has to do with those pickup soccer games we used to play back in Baurú.

  As I’ve mentioned, I used to play goalie a lot, because otherwise, if I was on offense the wh
ole game, our team would start winning big and the kids from the opposing team would lose interest. Well, during those very early years, the goalie on Dondinho’s semiprofessional team was a guy nicknamed “Bilé.” So when I played in goal, the other kids in the neighborhood would say—“Hey, he thinks he’s Bilé!” “Look, Bilé saved another shot!” Since we were so young, the name got twisted around, and the vowels and consonants became a little mangled. “Bilé” evolved into “Pelé.” And before long, that was the nickname that followed me around on the soccer field.

  Growing up, I hated that damn nickname. After all, it was a garbage word that meant nothing. Plus, I was really proud of the name Edson, believing it was an honor to be named after such an important inventor. Things even got to the point where I’d fight other kids who called me “Pelé.” If they insisted on a nickname, I could definitely tolerate “Dico,” and there was a period where my nickname on the field was “Gasolina”—because I was fast, I guess. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t rid myself of “Pelé.”

  When I got to Santos, though, something changed. And I began to think of the Pelé nickname in a whole new way.

  This is a tough one to explain. But here goes: As my career began to really take off, I started thinking of “Pelé” almost as a separate identity. Edson was the poor kid from Baurú, the son of Dondinho and Dona Celeste, the boy who desperately missed his family back home. Pelé was the rising star who, while still a teenager, would become a sporting icon and perhaps the world’s most famous athlete. Edson could be reserved and shy. But Pelé could play the crowd and flash his smile for the cameras. They were the same person, but represented two different realities—one familiar to me, and one that was new, constantly changing, and sometimes a little scary.