Salve Jorge, a popular restaurant in Historico Centro district in Brazil’s Sao Paulo, pays homage to the famous ‘George’s’ from across the world. Literally meaning ‘Hail George’, the colonial-styled watering hole displays rows of framed illustrations of well-known namesakes – the saint, Shaw, Harrison, even George of the Jungle -- across its many walls and stairwells, yet the one image that stands out is a black-and-white photograph of a man standing on a football field. He’s in Brazil’s colours, one foot on a ball in easy control. One hand is at the waist and with the other, he’s holding a hard-bound book, intently poring over it. Amid the bustling waiters and patrons looking for a table, the picture simply stops you in your tracks.
For someone who was probably among the most-photographed personalities of the last century, alongside the Beatles, Elvis, Monroe, Loren and Ali, this was perhaps a never-before capture, even for Pele. The image is yet another example of the fine specimen of an athlete that Pele was, the near-perfect musculature lending to him a ready handsome-ness and beauty in power. It was this physical being that probably even rivalled Muhammad Ali’s more talked about one. Till date there isn’t a footballer, or an athlete for his sport, as physically perfect as Pele was. Yet, what sets the image apart, making it special, is the idea to thrust a book into his hands. It makes him transcend from a legendary genius footballer to something of a cultural treasure. Pele was never known to be a man of letters, and it may have been an accounting journal for all we know, yet the composition symbolises the idea how football is – or once was – so deeply connected to the literature and arts of Brazil.
Brazil would famously anoint Pele as a national treasure, thus preventing the top clubs of Europe to poach him, yet he would become the most recognisable faces of the 20th century as film became more accessible and photographs and flickering newsreels became the documents of history. You could argue that Ali earned global love with his charisma and for his stand on race in the latter part of his career. Pele was doing it in his prime, without speaking English and with the ball at his feet. He was becoming the most famous face of all time, and as we would realise later, the first-ever global sports hero.
Of course, the colour telecast worldwide of the 1970 World Cup and later, a push by Warner Brothers and NY Cosmos did help but what is staggering is that in a world yet to be overrun by PR machinery, he had managed it completely from South America alone, quite a feat when you consider how stranded Latin American pop culture is today, and when even a callow Mbappe can confidently dismiss their football as backward compared to Europe’s.
Almost all workers in a Brazilian automobile assembly plant were famously able to name him when they were shown his photograph. Kidnappers once bolted, apologising when they learnt who they had picked up, Pele has briefly even stopped wars in Africa. Then we all knew that the world had changed when, in 2008, Pele was robbed at gunpoint by a gang of young men even after he told them his name.
Till then, it had helped that his name, a two-syllable unforgettable, would carry its own instinctive recall – Gulzar would so simply slip it in in the verses for his cult film, ‘Gol Maal’, where Pele would even figure as a question during a job interview.
Even in John Houston’s ‘Escape to Victory,’ staple viewing whenever the VCR was hired during the holidays, he was Pele even though he played Corporal Luis Fernandez.
His bicycle kick goal for the rag-tag Allieds team against the might of the Nazi Germans was seared into our young minds for good, we talked about only that for weeks on end in school afterwards, though not quite brave to attempt it. After that goal, it was somewhat of a dampener then, years later to see his biopic, Pele: Birth of a Legend, dwell on the self-doubt that plagued our hero in his initial playing days, when in reality he was a beast. ‘Escape…’ probably remains the only film where us teenagers looked up the entire male cast, not bothering once to see who the women actors were. It was always usually the other way around, but then that was the timeless appeal of football, and Pele.
Pele would still come to us as comprehension passages in our internal exams at school – even if they were needlessly extolling the feats of Jack Kelsey in the Welsh goal, only to be finally undone by a slight 17-year-old Brazilian who would score the first of his 12 World Cup goals. Pele figured as a chapter in high school syllabi, where he’s just won the World Cup, been gifted his first car – a Volkswagen Beetle by his club, Santos -- which he casually gifts to his father, Dondinho, a down on his luck minor leaguer. School libraries would invariably have a dog-eared comic-book-form biography of the football hero, who beat poverty to become a global great.
In that aspect, Pele was an aberration because it was in a sports-averse ethos of 1970-80s India that he still managed to make our school books. In those safety-first, government job seeking times, sports and the craze for it was looked down upon as an indulgence. It didn’t exist as a career choice and worse, those who flocked to the stadiums were wastrels with no aim or hope in life. Pele’s mention in ‘Gol Maal’ is testimony to this, the late ’70s film deals with a crusty old-school employer being critical of the younger generation’s love for sports, and Pele. In another film around the same time, ‘Do Aur Do Paanch,’ his name is lampooned by the con-men protagonists, reducing it to the phonetically similar Indian name for the fruit, banana.
But the man prevailed. Even if we didn’t really see him play, except for the occasional packaged football superstars shows on Doordarshan, we would fight to own the No 10 jersey even if we were playing hockey during sports at school. Sometimes a team would have more than one No 10, someone having scribbled the number on his back for himself, no one minded.
Pele was a permanent fixture of sorts, a four-letter word that was not taboo, much before private sports channels and YouTube became the norm. Somehow, paradoxically, once that happened -- the explosion of 24-hour sports television invading our senses – it humanised the man for us.
With his dazzling play, Pele would once effortlessly unite his world, a disparate society of class and race. There is a wonderful image from 1970s Mexico doing the rounds on social media, where a huge poster on a cornershop wall announces: ‘We won’t work today, we are going to see Pele.’ That was his strength. But once that era was over, Pele would become an everybody and as larger realities -- uncomfortable questions of inequalities, race, class, identity -- would continue to confront the world, the silence of the man despite his standing, would show up.
Pele’s rise from poverty to the humbling adulation of his people and the others worldwide would count for little as we would read later of his blind eye to the military rule in Brazil in 1970, or the deepening social divide and class inequalities, highlighted most notably at the 2014 World Cup where support for the Selecao would predominantly comprise Brazil’s white upper middle-class elite who could afford it and would treat it as an outing, nothing more. But perhaps, it was his absence at equally-famous (and arguably more loved) teammate, Garrincha’s funeral in 1983, that made his own countrymen begin to question his heroism and stature. Not many have forgiven him since.
In 1981, Pele would be voted the Athlete of the Century by the French sports newspaper, L’Equipe. Two decades later, at the turn of the century, when lists of the most influential sports icons of the last century would be drawn up, Muhammad Ali would headline every one of them. It was never a race between the two greats, but it would also be worth noting that while a Parkinsons-hit Ali would be re-discovered for his legacy, around the same time, Pele, always a magnet for global endorsements, would have become the worldwide face of Viagra in a somewhat foolhardy yet brave admission of age and his acceptance of it.
His footballing legacy, glittering, unblemished and intact, who the real Pele, the world’s first global sports star, was would always be another story. Yet, in some Pavlovian way, that bicycle kick for the Allied team would always play in our minds whenever his name would be mentioned. And that would be the enduring lure of Pele.
