Not only is he
known by football afficionados, but also by everyone from every level of
society in the planet; from school boys to teachers, from taxi drivers to
businessmen, from singers to movie stars, from politicians to the Presidents,
even The Pope.
Pope Benedict
XVI is the football lover besides his predecessor, Pope John Paul II who played
football in his young age in Poland.
Ronald Reagan,
when received Pele in the Oval Office, said, “Good to meet you. I’m the
President of the United States; you don’t have to tell me who you are – I know
you’re Pele, everybody knows!”
People around
the world know Pele as the greatest footballer with his fantastic achievement.
He scored 1,283 goals during his professional career – started with his
football club Santos in 1956 and ended with club Cosmos in 1977 - and decided
to retire when he was in the top. But how Pele stepped from the very bottom
with tears until he became an icon, that’s a long journey.
This book tells
the journey.
In this
autobiography (written originally in Portuguese and translated to English by Daniel
Hahn), Pele acts as a story teller. He opens the story with words as he tells a
fairy tale for children: “However long we may live, we never forget the time
when we were young. Memory is like a film which we alone can watch…”
Then he tells
his boyhood, when he was born to the very poor family in Minas Gerais, a state
in the South East of Brazil just to the North of Rio de Janeiro. The beautiful
story was, when his father saw him just after he was held up to the world in
the day he born, his father’s eye stared at his scrawny legs and said, “This
one will be a great footballer.”
If that was a
prophecy or just a wish from his father, we don’t know, but Pele is as we know
today.
Like every man
who reached success through failures and pains, Pele also experienced the same.
He tasted the sweet games as well as the bitter ones. He had joy and tears. He
was the superstar when Brazil won three times World Cup; the first victory in
1958, 1962 and in 1970. It was Pele who motivated the Brazil team to kick the
ball to the sky. Today, only Brazil is the five times World Cup champion.
Besides for the
great achievement, one thing that people always praise Pele is that he
understood the time to stop. He decided to end his career as footballer when he
was at the top. This is very rare. Most people choose to keep the fame forever
and not conscious that the glory subsides.
The
autobiography is also telling about Pele’s private life and family. He has
failure in his first marriage with Rosemeri – divorced in 1978, and married the
second time with Assiria in 1994 (Note: As the autobiography was written in
2006, it is not telling that Pele married for the third time with Marcia Aoki
in 2016).
It seems not
too easy for superstar to succeed in both: career as well as family. But that’s
a real life.
***
Serpong, 7 Aug
2021
Titus J.
