A religious experience ought, at the very least, to be thrilling, so it was strange to see Wallace draw on the raptures of the saints to describe his admiration for Federer. “Roger Federer as Clockwork,” or “Roger Federer as a Movie You Love but Have Just About Memorized at This Point,” would have made more immediate sense. But as it turned out, Wallace wasn’t talking about narrative at all, and if he was using religious experience as a metaphor, it was a metaphor that was close to the literal truth. While acknowledging that in that year’s Wimbledon Federer had “provided no surprise or competitive drama at all,” Wallace saw Federer’s game as epitomizing the beauty of sports, which, as he wrote, has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body”:

David Foster Wallace, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” Play Magazine, August 20 2006

There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot.

Living in a body means contending with pain, the fact of death, and the limitations of our own wills—means enduring the fact that, in essence, something is always wrong in our position in the universe. But the beauty created by a great athlete playing a game can help us dream of transcending our own physical limits, can give us the sense, fleetingly, in what Wallace calls “Federer Moments,” that our bodies aren’t at odds with our wills, that we can do what we can dare, like honest Tottenhams. Federer as a religious experience therefore has nothing to do with the thrill of competitive drama or even with an individual style of play. It has to do, instead, with the reconciling beauty of a great athlete doing the apparently impossible. That’s what Wallace, who was serious about tennis, wanted. And that’s what Federer gave him, at least at moments.

I’ve been thinking about David Foster Wallace not only because we’re coming up on the second anniversary of his suicide but also because of Pelé Week. The two arguments against wholeheartedly embracing Pelé that popped up again and again during our series of posts were (1) that we can’t appreciate Pelé because the “Pelé narrative” is too monumental and FIFA-stamped and inauthentic in its postmodern-media-fascist way to see past when we watch his highlights and (2) that Pelé’s perfection as a player is so complete that he’s not really interesting; he always won, he had no weaknesses, and his game was so ideal that it stands outside history and has no point of contact with our lived experience of the sport. I see the force of both those arguments (I think I originated one of them), but I don’t think either one of them tells the whole story.

That may be just because I want to like Pelé. But watching him through a complete game, as I’ve done as often as I could over the last two weeks, reveals a player who is neither alienatingly mediated nor tediously flawless: After a while, you’re just watching a famous 25-year-old play soccer, which is not an unusual experience for a soccer fan. And what’s wonderful about this is not that you get to see Pelé humanize himself by missing shots or committing questionable tackles, although he sometimes does both those things, but precisely that you get to watch a player whose game is almost perfect; you get to watch him fulfill the argument of “Federer as Religious Experience.” He makes acts that are extremely difficult to perform look easy. In the process—and this is incredibly obvious, but given the general resistance to Pelé that I and others have felt, it’s worth asserting—he creates moments of fantastic delight for the spectator.

If you’re used to aestheticizing sports by thinking about “style”—i.e., a way of playing as a window onto an individual human character—then you may be inclined to look at the shallowness of Pelé’s public image and assume that he couldn’t have had a real style, not in the way Garrincha or Cruyff did, because what would it reveal? He’s a living Mastercard commercial. But Wallace’s essay suggests a form of aesthetic appreciation based on something different from and possibly deeper than character or self-expression: our innate sympathetic connection with other people’s bodies, and the thrill of seeing intention freely realized over and against all physical impediments. Put simply, Pelé, even more than Federer, maybe more than other athlete I’ve seen, traffics in Federer Moments.

There’s a case to be made, of course, that soccer is uniquely adapted for the creation of Federer Moments. Unlike tennis, which augments the player’s physical capabilities with a racket, soccer takes an essential physical tool—the hands—away from the player and forces him to compete in a state of artificial clumsiness. Soccer thus emphasizes the limits of the body and the difficulty of realizing intention. When a player does something amazing, we’re apt to see it not as a superhuman feat (he made the ball travel 150mph!), but as a human victory over what’s essentially an everyday difficulty. If the crisis of having a body is that it’s resistant to our will, soccer exaggerates the crisis, moves what you want to do even further away from what you can do, then gives us athletes who do what they want to anyway. That may be why moments of beauty in soccer, compared to those in other sports, nearly always feel like consolations.

There are moments in Pelé’s games when he dribbles straight into a crowd of three or four defenders. He seems to have done that often, though in the videos now it’s sometimes hard to say who he’s playing against or what year it is or even what the score is or how much time is on the clock. He’ll dribble into a crowd of three or four defenders, which is suicide for a footballer, even in Brazil in the 1960s; it’s almost impossible to keep the fine control you need to take a decent shot when all the defender needs to do is wallop the ball away from you. Pelé dribbles into a crowd of players who have put themselves between him and the goal and whose whole purpose is to get the ball away from him, to keep him from scoring, which again is infinitely easier than the task facing the attacking player, and often in these situations, instead of trying something dazzling or virtuosic, Pelé will just stop. He’ll come to a sudden halt, with his foot lightly resting on top of the ball, and a ripple of confusion and wrong-footedness will go through the crowd of defenders as it tries to react and not fall over. Pelé will do one of those dancing shivering whole-body fakes he excelled at, dropping his shoulder, say, as if he’s about to lunge to the left, but almost simultaneously hinting right with his hips, and rolling the ball just slightly in a teasing way under his toes. Half the defenders start to guess one way and the other half start to guess the other way, but they recover, they’re professionals paying attention, and then just at the precise moment when it looks like a stalemate Pelé knocks the ball through the semi-opening created by their split-second almost-guess and tears through after it, so that one of them falls over and one of them whips around in the wrong direction, and then he’s one-on-one with the goalkeeper and it’s easy to flip the ball up into the corner of the net, in that afterthought way that characterized a lot of Pelé’s strikes. He leaps up in the air to celebrate, that famous happy hop, and the surprising thing about the way he jumps is always how much he seems to belong on the ground; there’s something physically dense about him, something that looks like it wants to sink, so that you sometimes have the impression that the game is keeping him afloat the way the ocean keeps up a battleship. So he comes down, and you laugh, because you have just seen an intelligence perform the remarkable task of solving the complete problem represented by the presence and position of the defenders and the need to control the ball without the use of hands, and you have seen a body so perfectly balanced and controlled that it could act transparently as the agent of this solution even where the solution itself required timing, strength, speed, and awareness far surpassing what most athletes possess. You have seen a thousand different soccer players face this position, and Pelé probably faced it a thousand times, but even if you were reluctant going in, the effect of the Pelé Moment is that for as long as it lasts you are prepared to swear that no one who ever got into this situation got out of it quite like Pelé.

People who have religious experiences typically describe them as something ecstatic, transporting, and revelatory. I suppose there are smaller-scale “Counterpane”-type visitations in which one simply feels a mysterious presence nearby, but that’s not what Wallace is talking about. He describes the Federer Moment as “ecstatic”—ecstatic meaning literally out-of-body, being outside oneself—and it’s the mystic saints who tend to traffic in ecstasy, who are lifted up out of their corporeal shapes into a higher plane of existence where they experience a radiant consciousness of the connectedness of all things. What’s strange about this as a metaphor for watching Federer or for Pelé is that the feeling that generally seems to remain with the mystic saints once the mystic experience has ended is not one of peaceful acceptance of the body but a profoundly unsettled desire to exit the body again, one sign of which is that if the mystic saints are not actually prone to becoming suicidal, they nevertheless tend to become magnets for all kinds of physical torture, dismemberment, burning, impaling, crucifixion, whipping, and strangulation, and they tend to to accept all these things more or less willingly and with an eerie equanimity, not because their religious experiences have left them reconciled to their bodies but because their religious experiences have taught them that their bodies are prisons they want to escape.

Wallace interrupts his story about Federer at two points to write about a seven-year-old boy named William Caines, who served as the honorary coin-tosser at Wimbledon in 2006 after he “contracted liver cancer at age 2 and somehow survived after surgery and horrific chemo,” Wallace writes. The crowd, he says, roars its approval, but as William is ushered off a strange feeling comes over the spectators: “a feeling of something important, something both uncomfortable and not, about a child with cancer tossing this dream-final’s coin.” The feeling has a “tip-of-the-tongue quality” that “remains elusive for at least the first two sets.” Later in the essay, Wallace returns to the theme:

According to reliable sources, honorary coin-tosser William Caines’s backstory is that one day, when he was 2½, his mother found a lump in his tummy, and took him to the doctor, and the lump was diagnosed as a malignant liver tumor. At which point one cannot, of course, imagine…a tiny child undergoing chemo, serious chemo, his mother having to watch, carry him home, nurse him, then bring him back to that place for more chemo. How did she answer her child’s question — the big one, the obvious one? And who could answer hers? What could any priest or pastor say that wouldn’t be grotesque?

I’ve always wondered what Wallace meant by circling back around to talk about William in the middle of what is for the most part a genuinely happy-seeming celebration of Federer. The image of the cancer-stricken child seems to have no part, that is, in the enthusiasm that motivates the essay, and yet the edge of unease it introduces brings a powerful and not unreligious strain of skepticism into the pseudo-theology of Federer. Clearly no athlete and no delight in sport can answer the “big, obvious” question about what could possibly justify a tiny child suffering a devastating physical illness. If Federer is there to reconcile us to the fact of having bodies, Wallace hints, then the reconciliation he offers has limits and outside those limits is a large and unanswerable despair. I called the awareness of this despair “not unreligious” because while it may seem like a mere challenge to belief, a sort of renegade anti-Federer atheism, the feeling that seems to follow it into the essay seems to me to have more in common with the longing for bodily mortification that is often a weird corollary of profound religious experience. That is, if we begin with a sense that something is intolerably wrong, and the power of Federer or Pelé is to make us feel that that thing is actually right (or at least tolerable), then William introduces a larger sphere of consciousness in which we realize that the reconciliation was flawed and the thing is actually wrong and intolerable after all. But that second, larger wrongness, as I read it in Wallace’s essay, and this may be unfair, because again, William is only a tiny grain of doubt within what is generally a really positive piece of writing—that second, larger wrongness doesn’t stem from an apprehension that the reconciliation Federer offers is false, it stems from an apprehension that the reconciliation Federer offers is incomplete, that it doesn’t go far enough, it doesn’t stick. It only lasts a moment, and then you’re left not knowing when God will take you up again, which is an anxiety that actually bubbles up at times in the writings of the saints. And that seems to be a condition in which a heightened consciousness of mortality, one that may well express itself as a yearning toward suffering and breakdown, is hard to escape.

For that reason, while I think “Federer as Religious Experience” gives us a way to appreciate perfection in sports that is both right and beautiful, I also think it wraps itself in the wrong metaphor, one that makes it operate on a level too deep for its real content and that thus, inevitably, undermines it. “Religious experience” freights sport with a justificatory purpose that religion itself is not able to perform a lot of the time: Not only can Federer not answer big questions, he can’t answer any questions, and it’s a grim stacking of the deck to suggest that sport is therefore a hollow shell outside which lurks despair. In fairness, Wallace doesn’t exactly suggest this, but it’s the conclusion I reach every time I read his essay, including when it originally appeared.

I don’t know if these experiences are comparable, but watching Pelé over the last few weeks, what I have felt is a frequent, temporary delight that seems to be woven into and essentially a part of my everyday, untranscendent existence. A Pelé Moment might make me shout, or jump out of my chair, but more than anything they seem to make me laugh. There is, for instance, the famous lob over Bengt Gustavsson in the 1958 World Cup final, when, as a 17-year-old, he somehow controlled the ball with his chest to elude one defender in the area, flipped it way up into the air over the head of the second defender, wheeled around the onrushing Gustavsson, got to the ball just before it hit the ground, then volleyed it into the net. On YouTube, it’s amazing; watching it in the context of the full match, it a hundred times more amazing, because it comes from nowhere. You don’t know it’s about to happen. Then it happens, and it’s impossible even though it’s happening, but it’s happening even though it’s impossible. Everything that’s wrong—the difficulty of controlling the ball, the interposing defenders, the fact that he can’t use his hands—suddenly seems right, because it merely provides the occasion for the astonishing thing he improvises. You laugh, because it’s exhilarating, and you laugh because the consolation it offers is not a consummate, religious consolation, but an imperfect, fragile piece of momentary happiness. It’s a consolation that was made to make you laugh.

Pelé doesn’t strike me as a religious experience, then. He strikes me as a comedy, or better, as a comedian: not as a stand-up comic or a satirist, but as the opposite of a tragedian, the author of the kind of classical comedy that always ends with a wedding, the kind that revels in turning the order of things upside down so that it can give you the giddy satisfaction of seeing them turned right-side up again. This kind of comedy is in the business of reconciliation: The king turns out to be wise, the lovers love each other, and the villains reveal themselves to be failures, however things look for a while. When Titania is in the forest with Bottom, everything is wonderfully backwards: The queen of the ideal is enslaved to clumsiest physicality. Then Puck flies through, Pelé scores his goal, and all the faculties go back to their right places. It has no effect on the real world, or on whatever moves in the dark, and if the real world is a place of despair, then the most it can do is to keep despair at bay. It’s rigged, like all art, and it feels like a game because it is a game. But there are worse things than keeping despair at bay. The terrible thing about happiness is that it can’t answer any questions. But when it comes, you don’t need it to. And when it goes, well, what would you want it to say?

When I asked to interview Pablo and Dennis about Pelé they both responded with furrowed brows. Neither one liked Pelé, they explained. Pablo called him an idiot. “Perfect!” I said. I chose Dennis and Pablo because they are both Brazilian. That’s it. Just being Brazilian may not seem like much to go on, but it’s a start. If we are really going to figure this Pelé thing out, we need to explore as many perspectives as possible. This is the perspective of two regular dudes that happen to be from Brazil.

I decided to cut right to the heart of the issue and asked Pablo why Pelé was his “favorite soccer player ever.” This was sort of a joke—as you may recall, Pablo is partial to Garrincha—but instead of being reproached for putting words in his mouth, Pablo became serious. A sociologist might have found it interesting just how serious Pablo became. When I turned on my voice recorder the conversation went from gentle joking and B.S.ing to meaning-of-life serious. He thought about his response carefully. “He’s not my favorite soccer player ever,” he said. He explained that Pelé was important because no player has ever been as dominant as he was, relative to that player’s respective era. “Today it is hard to have a player [as dominant as] Pelé because physically the players are very even. In Pelé’s time the players were not as professional and soccer was different; there was not as much money surrounding soccer and players of that time didn’t take care of their bodies properly.”

Pablo has just demystified Pelé. It came as a bit of a relief to me. Pelé’s legacy is so legend-based it is nice to bring some reason into the mix. His greatness is as much an expression of his genius as a reflection of a changed sport. It’s not just fairy dust and mystique; there’s something more concrete, too. This is non-fiction. Professionalism has increased parity among players. When everyone is similarly fast, technically gifted, and tactically disciplined, genius has less wiggle room. While Pelé was a visionary in his time—Pablo has profound respect for his ability to “solve problems” on the field—the game’s evolution, not necessarily his genius, makes his position as The Greatest of All Time impossible to usurp.

As it turns out, Pelé’s stewardship of his own position as The Greatest of All Time is what Pablo and Dennis dislike about him the most. They see him as too premeditated. He is a man who has spent his entire life protecting his image and his place in the pantheon of sport. Through Pablo and Dennis, I now view him as an artist who created something so beautiful that he put down his brush, afraid to ever paint or even touch art again. Instead he just talks about it from a distance. Pelé has never coached, as many retired players do. Dennis even argued that when Pelé played for the Cosmos he was motivated as much by his desire to protect his legacy—not wanting to test himself at a high level in his old age—as he was motivated to bring soccer to America. Denis and Pablo argued that, when he finally retired completely, Pelé could have done much more to give back. They noted that he was careful to avoid testimonials and charity matches.

“In Brazil, in December, when the summer is starting, the older players get together and play in charity matches. They give the money to some foundation,” explained Pablo. “Pelé has never participated.”

“But he did that a lot in England. He did that in the United States but not in Brazil,” said Dennis. Dennis seemed suddenly mad, like Pelé had turned his back on Brazil.

“He did it for power, not to be good. That is my criticism,” said Pablo.

Both Pablo and Dennis acknowledged Pelé’s titles and records, the happiness he brought to Brazilians during a time of military dictatorship, but they dislike him as a person and resent him as a politician. Pablo said that Pelé often “stuck his nose” into business when he had no right. Unsolicited. That he often criticized Brazil’s underprivileged players for being driven by money. Just last week he encouraged Neymar, the eighteen-year-old phenomenon, not to move to Chelsea and to stay in Brazil. To Pablo and Dennis this is comical.

“In the 1990s Pelé was the Minister of Sport in Brazil and it was a disaster,” said Dennis. “He made gambling part of a soccer clubs’ income. You know, Brazil has a problem with corruption and mixing casinos with soccer became a great disaster. Lots of problems with money laundering came out of it all. I’m not saying he created it but…”

Pablo leaned over and whispered to Denis, “Ley de Pelé.”

“Oh,” said Dennis. “I forgot about that!”

According to Pablo and Dennis, Pelé’s largest contribution as Minister of Sport was what they call the Pelé Law. The law changed the way players were contracted to clubs, making it easier for them to leave a club. Players might view the law in a positive light but Pablo and Dennis, who live and die by the Campeonato Brasileiro, see it as the beginning of the end of Brazilian soccer.

“A lot of great teams lost a lot of great players, like Ronaldinho, who played for Grêmio, in my city,” said Pablo. “After this law, Grêmio lost Ronaldinho and the team got paid very little.”

Dennis said players used to have to pay a lot of money to leave their contracts. “In the 1980s, great players didn’t do that. The great Brazilian players, they were in Brazil. They were not as famous.” Dennis explained that Brazilians are jealous of European soccer. That if Brazil could keep some of their players they would have the world’s best league, “like the NBA.” As one of the first players to leave and the person responsible for the easy exportation of contemporary footballers, Pelé represents both the tip of the iceberg and the warming of the earth itself. Dennis thought for a moment and then his voice softened. “I wish that Brazil was not so corrupt,” he said. “For the sake of soccer.”

The Brazilian Pelé is not the American Pelé. He is not the English Pelé or the Icelandic or Indian Pelé, either. In many ways his legend may be similar. It seems just as self-fulfilling and culturally heavy in Brazil as anywhere. But it is more than that, too. In Brazil, the legend Pelé once earned on the soccer field is today carefully maintained and nurtured. To my friends he is insecure and self-important. He is The Greatest of All Time.

Brian Blickenstaff blogs at Touch and Tactics. You can also find him on Twitter.

The end of my years as a teenager is approaching, which means I am soon to leave behind my life’s last opportunity to believe that I know everything. Already I can feel uncertainty slipping into parts of my mind that were once ironclad, airtight. “Is America really the best country on earth?” I ask myself. “Is there any substantive evidence to suggest that my 8th grade Social Studies teacher is the devil?” The perfect life I designed for myself seems increasingly unlikely by the day. I’ve even resigned myself to the fact that I will not attend Stanford, play for the Red Sox, or marry Julie Margulies, all things that once seemed as inevitable to me as the rising and setting of the sun. One of my few long-held opinions that has not melted into a little puddle of indecision is that Pelé is the greatest soccer player of all time. I believe this, as I believed most of the things that I am now crumpling up and discarding, because I was told so during my formative years. But given the shinier, sexier options of Maradona, Zidane, and Cruyff, why should I hold Pelé above all the rest simply because I was told to do so?

Pelé is just one of the many transcendent athletes whom I have never had the opportunity to watch at the height of their power. I am able to roughly approximate, however, what most might have looked like. When I watch Messi skip and gambol and score goals in ways that forcibly pull Ray Hudson’s vocal cords out of his mouth, I think of how Maradona must have been even better. Likewise, I have tried to replicate Michael Jordan through Kobe Bryant and Sandy Koufax through Pedro Martínez, all the while keeping in mind the superiority of the genuine article. This method works for me when YouTube (which keeps trying to tell me that Zlatan Ibrahimović is the best striker in the world) does not. Instead of seeing 10 minutes of Jordan’s greatest moments, I know the feeling of opening the paper every day for a month and a half and seeing that he’s scored 34 points again, because Kobe’s just done it.

Pelé defies my puny attempts to categorize him. Wikipedia describes him thus: “Pelé’s technique and natural athleticism have been universally praised and during his playing years he was renowned for his excellent dribbling and passing, his pace, powerful shot, exceptional heading ability, and prolific goalscoring.” There is no modern-day player who can boast all these attributes at the world-class level that Pelé inhabited. One could perhaps argue that Cristiano Ronaldo comes close, but if the skill set is similar, the playing style is most definitely not. Ronaldo is all stepovers and trombones; thunder and lightning condensed into a 6’1” container. But when I watch footage of Pelé, the word that comes to the forefront of my mind is deft. Pelé doesn’t smash through defenses like Ronaldo does, he fillets them.

The typical Pelé goal seems to involve him weaving around three defenders inside the box with subtle little taps and drags, leaving them on the ground, the ball in the net. He is so obviously on a different level that one can choke on the air of nonchalance he leaves behind. Even his longer goals seem almost languid by comparison to the modern, Gerrardian blast that dents the crossbar and liquefies the net. Pelé’s stay about a foot or two off the ground before dipping into a bottom corner inches beyond the keeper’s desperate fingers. Maybe Pelé’s greatest accomplishment wasn’t doing what we think of as impossible, but doing the things we think of as impossible with an ease that makes them hard to recognize as such.

But YouTube can only tell me so much about Pelé. And since there aren’t many highlight videos of him fluffing chances and sending crosses over his target’s head, I cannot fully comprehend him as a player because I cannot conceive his flaws. I can look to games where Messi is buffeted and kicked across the pitch to see an example of how a player like Maradona can be neutralized; there’s no one to look to for proof of Pelé’s potential for failure. Instead of being anchored in my mind to a modern version of himself, he’s become more than merely a soccer player to me. Brazil will always mean Pelé more than it means Robinho and Júlio César and Maicon. But Pelé even transcends the greatest soccer nation in the world. To this boy, Pelé simply means soccer the way soccer should be played. That’s why Cruyff’s ruthless geometry, Maradona’s fire, and any other quality of any other player are all dwarfed by the man who lets a child retain his belief in perfection.

Will Levinger is a student at Concord Academy.

The 1950 FIFA World Cup was the first since 1938, mostly because of an intercontinental dust-up commonly known as World War II. Brazil was selected to host the tournament on the back of a third-place performance in the previous World Cup, and it was eagerly anticipated by the newly democratic country, which was looking to establish itself as a global power, in football and otherwise. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro was able to push forward construction of a controversial stadium named after the Maracanã neighbourhood, opening it about a week before the World Cup began.

Now, the World Cup wasn’t always set up the way it is now, with the playoff round leading to an ultimate final. This World Cup consisted of two round-robin group stages. The first, similar to the group stage we’re familiar with today, featured four groups consisting of four teams each—at least, they consisted of four teams each before Scotland, India and Turkey withdrew from the competition. The second stage of the tournament was a single group made up of each group’s winners: Brazil, Spain, Sweden, and Uruguay. Uruguay’s group in the first round originally contained Scotland and Turkey, so the 1930 world champions only played one game to qualify out of their group, defeating perennial minnows Bolivia.

Brazil won their first two games of the final group handily, thrashing Sweden and Spain (7-1 and 6-1, respectively). Uruguay, by contrast, could only draw with Spain and eke out a 3-2 victory over Sweden. Heading into the final game of the tournament against Uruguay at the Maracanã, Brazil were heavy favourites. As Alex Bellos notes in his masterful book on Brazilian football, Brazil had a good record against Uruguay in their recent matches, winning two of a three-match series held in Rio two months before the World Cup. The day before the match, Brazil’s newspapers anointed their countrymen as champions, saying “Tomorrow we will beat Uruguay!” and printing pictures of the national team accompanied by the words “These are the world champions.” The final is suspected to have attracted 200,000 spectators to the Maracanã, many of whom did not pay for a ticket.

Just after halftime, Brazil took the lead through Friaça. Pepe Schiaffino equalized for Uruguay in the 66th minute, but because of the nature of the round-robin competition, Brazil only needed a draw to win the tournament. The score held at 1-1 as the match headed into the final 15 minutes, and for Brazil, the World Cup seemed as good as won.

“Only three people have, with just one motion, silenced the Maracanã: Frank Sinatra, Pope John Paul II, and me.” —Alcides Ghigghia

Alcides Ghigghia scored for Uruguay in the 79th minute. Brazil could not manage a response. It was 2-1 in Uruguay’s favour, and no one could do anything about it. The champions were dead. Long live the champions.

“Ghigghia’s goal was received in silence by all the stadium. But its strength was so great, its impact so violent, that the goal, one simple goal, seemed to divide Brazilian life into two distinct phases: before it and after it.” —Joáo Máximo

My history professor often insisted that we cannot understand anything without first understanding its context. We cannot understand something in a vacuum, stripped of any substance or frame of reference. Perhaps more importantly, we cannot allow our own modern conceptions and opinions to cloud our view. Perhaps this is why Pelé seems less spectacular to us: because we live in a world of Ronaldinhos and Robinhos and Neymars. A world of YouTube football and Nike-branded stepovers.

1950 is Pelé’s context. Pelé is post-Ghigghia. He was still a boy in 1950, dribbling a grapefruit through the streets of Bauru while a country crumbled around him. He wasn’t even in his hometown club’s youth system until 1952, and he joined Santos four years later. The canvas that Pelé was given was warped with frustration. In 1954—three years before Pelé would make his international debut—Brazil was dumped out at the World Cup’s first knockout stage by Hungary’s Mighty Magyars. They were, hard as it is to believe, chokers on the big stage.

Before Pelé, no one used the phrase “jogo bonito” or “samba football” to describe the Brazilian national team. Pelé was the head author of those myths, the creator of that particular brand, fashioning the lasting image of Brazilian football out of the ashes of 1950. When Alan and Brian talk about “seeing” Pelé,” I must admit to myself that maybe I never will truly see Pelé. Certainly not as Brazil saw him in 1958, a teenager pulling his country out of its tortured history. Or as the world saw him in 1970, in the new vibrancy of colour television, playing a vital part in some of the most impressive football the planet had ever seen. I can see him now, casually stroking the ball out in front of the onrushing Carlos Alberto, I can sit in awe of the nonchalance with which he creates arguably the greatest goal ever scored in a World Cup. Somehow, though, it’s not the same thing. My desk is not the Azteca, nor is it Råsunda. I did not experience the Maracanazo, and that is not my frame of reference. You and I live in a world that has been, in part, created by Pelé: His influence may not be immediately apparent in the style of contemporary players, but it’s visible everywhere in the landscape in which those players play. Maybe we can’t see Pelé, but we are richer because Pelé was seen.

Gareth Simpson writes for the football blog 7500 to Holte. You can find him more regularly and less seriously on Twitter.

At the end of the episode entitled “Brazil” in the excellent documentary series The History of Football, Pelé offers the interviewer a few comments on his own footballing genius. He declares that just as there can only ever be one Michaelangelo and one Beethoven, so can there only ever be one Pelé. Why? Because, he says in Portuguese, “my father is a closed shop.” When the female interviewer fails to laugh, he repeats his words in English, and adds a snipping motion with his finger. “Do you understand?” he says, now staring at the camera with his world famous grin. “My father is a closed machine.”

Pelé’s reference to Beethoven as an exceptional equal is apt. In serious classical music circles, discussion of Beethoven’s compositional influence has long gone out of vogue. Not through any fault of his own, mind you; the sheer scope of his importance in the development of modern Romantic music, and the ubiquity of the more well-known symphonies among American middle-class (and -brow) classical music collections, meant talk of Beethoven eventually fell silent during the Mozart-soaked, “period performance” eighties. While some critics did make laughable attempts at revisionism—Beethoven as a failed classical/Romantic hybrid—the truth was the magnitude of Beethoven’s contemporary influence simply grew too big. You could no longer get a grasp of the whole.

In recent years, Pelé has fared little better. His popular fame as football’s official “Best Player Ever,” especially in America; his contribution to some of the most iconic images in soccer history; and his relatively anodyne personal life have all acted as deterrents to serious recognition of Pelé’s influence. Easier to sing paeans to the more troubled genius strikers of the analog age—Sindelar, Cruyff, Best, Garrincha, Maradona—than a smiling naïf who eagerly sports his own FIFA-approved brand and makes sycophantic pre-World Cup predictions.

It’s a common problem for the pre-digital, pre-satellite genius striker—because so few of us today can claim to have seen them play outside a grab bag of edited film reels on YouTube, we’ve lazily come to rely on their personal vices as a sort of shorthand for their essential greatness. Praising Pelé (or Rossi, or Platini for that matter)—what’s the point? At best, post-football, Pelé’s been a bumbling dad who makes bad jokes; at worst, he’s been a corporate stooge for a ruthless, post-Havelange “Fan Zone” FIFA. He is immune to any “tortured genius” psychoanalyzing. He looks way too good selling soda. Behind that smile, Pelé is a “closed machine.”

It’s all nonsense, of course, and the clues lie outside of the famed images from the World Cups in 1958 and 1970. You have to look at his club career, particularly with Santos, to get a sense of a footballing genius far removed from his later reputation in wider circles as “invulnerable.” Perhaps the best example is O Milésimo, Pelé’s thousandth goal scored in all competitions. It came in 1969, the dying days of Santos and Pelé’s glory period. As this clip lays out, such was the intensity of the build up that a Vasco da Gama fullback preferred to head the ball in his own net than let O Rei near it.

When the goal finally came, it wasn’t the sort of sublime over-the-head volley, or dancing, side-stepping bit of trickery we’ve come to associate with Pelé. It came from the penalty spot after a clumsy tackle by a Vasco fullback, the sort of goal he scored countless times in smaller stadiums throughout Brazil during unremarkable encounters that didn’t make the film reels. The sort of games with garbage goals, missed chances, or occasional bad performances that pre-modern strikers endured long before the global panopticon of digital satellite TV.

In fact, from an aesthetic perspective, the Thousandth is probably the least interesting Pelé goal captured on film. A weak, side-footed penalty that the keeper gets a hand to but just sort of plops in the net anyway. After the goal, Pelé lazily jogs over to pick up the ball, seemingly unaware of the surrounding mayhem, as if all he wanted to do was take it back to the centre circle so he could keep playing. And in a brief moment before cataclysmic crowds converge and sweep Pelé up into history, you get a sense of Edson the human being, whose thousandth goal came in an almost banal, Sunday-league moment of the kind we rarely got to see.

In many ways, the absence on film of the older, legendary strikers’ occasional journeyman moments works as a curse, and none more so than for Pelé. His influence, reduced to an epic Wikipedia entry and some kick-ass clips, seems almost banal in its brilliance. Pelé has no inner seething rage or libidinal insatiability or alcoholic abandon against which we can hold him in relief. That doesn’t mean should succumb to the cheap stance that his earnest kindness, his affability, somehow reflect poorly on his legacy. Genius is not always marked by inner pain.

Nor is it a series of YouTube clips. Pelé—one of the greatest players the game has and will have ever seen—played football in real life. The surprising drabness of O Milésimo stands as a rare, but much-needed reminder that genius like Pelé’s couldn’t be conjured up on a whim. It cannot be captured in a Wikipedia entry or romanticized by a drug addiction. It isn’t an ineffable Platonic form. It came in the lived moments of a man content to play a game he loved while still insisting on being his embarrassing, affable self, always that weeping seventeen-year-old kid the world fell in love with in Sweden some fifty-two years ago. And regardless if there is never another Pelé Week, never another book, another blog post about his legacy, his genius will still sit there as fat, stubborn and inscrutable as ever.

Richard Whittall blogs at A More Splendid Life.

Opposable thumb theorists, grin and bear with me. First, for our soft skin, lack of claws, and vegetable-friendly mandibles, humans possess a cerebral capacity beyond our animal peers in many respects. When we watch sport, often we reserve plaudits for the cleverest of players. A head-fake, a dropped shoulder, a no look pass—the art of deception and scheming allowed our forefathers to slay beasts with only stones and sticks at their disposal. In that vain, Pelé’s greatest goal never scored illustrates why he deserves praise. Watch.

For all our SAT scores, GPAs, and IQ’s, the human mind must focus on one simple task at a time to successfully complete it. While the brain regulates rudimentary activities, such as breathing, stopping Pelé requires a slightly higher plane of thought, reaction, and instinct. In the greatest goal never scored, Pelé deceives the Uruguayan goalkeeper not with a head-fake or stepover, but by forcing an immediate decision—stop Pelé, or stop the ball. In the game of chicken, the goalie chose neither, and only a slightly wide finishing shot spared him eternal infamy.

From the viewer’s perspective, soccer is the sport of anticipation and trepidation. If you team’s offense strokes the ball around the opposition’s eighteen yard box, it’s like watching Rambo plow through Communist Nazi soldier after Communist Nazi soldier. The adrenaline takes over and a smile forms on your face before the net begins to ripple. Conversely, when your team’s defense bunkers into its own half, the dread is akin to a horror film. You’ve seen a knife-wielding intruder walk down the hallway a thousand times, but the hair on the back of your neck still stands on end. By the time the ball enters the back of the net, you’ve covered your face with your hands. Pelé’s near goal puts you on edge with a robbery, split pass and perfectly timed run. Then it throws you for a loop with the divergence of movement. Could you have thought of that? Have you ever seen anything like it since? Nada.

For all our brains, the capacity for coordination also has elevated humankind to the top of the animal kingdom. Sport exemplifies the language without words, what Paolo Coehlo calls “the Soul of the World.” Like two lovers in a tango, the movement, coordination, and understanding draw your eyes to the invisible bond between persons. Soccer, with its eleven players, lack of timeouts, single interval, and merciless clock, requires perhaps the highest degree of sustained comprehension in any sport.

Of course, it also requires a sustained appreciation of context. Pelé’s most overrated goal exemplifies the beauty of collective thought, but it also exemplifies the dramatic significance of the context in which that thought takes place:

From the Brazilian’s own box to Pelé’s hesitation to Carlos Alberto’s perfectly placed and timed low volley, the assembly line of human interactions could have fallen apart at any single moment. A misplaced wheel, an unoiled lever, and the machine would have ceased in a fuss of smoke and sparks. Yet Pelé delivered the penultimate touch with precision and care, using his peripheral vision to see Carlos Alberto and his gaze to freeze the defense. So why did I call this the most overrated goal?

Well, by the time Brazil scored this goal, soccer historians will note that the verdeamarehla had already built a sizable lead based on proficient set pieces. Thus, rather then putting the Italians to the sword, this goal falls into the realm of “cherry on top.” For those who love sundaes and abhor functional relevance, yes, the goal was pretty. But the dramatic lies only in the intricate buildup, not in that sequence’s relevance to the game’s outcome. Unlike the Iniesta strikes of recent times, Carlos Alberto could have skied his effort with little effect on the outcome.

So there you have it—Pelé explains why you watch ESPN instead of Animal Planet, and why you are not mopping the habitat of a chimpanzee. The least you can do is thank him for it, even if some of his goals are a tad overrated, while some of his most brilliant efforts ended up sliding into side netting.

Elliott writes for Futfanatico.com.

If they’re still not convinced, I throw in some Puskás. Magic Magyars, 1954, Communism, exile, fraternising with Hungarian hobos in the streets of Madrid. The narrative of football.

Garrincha. Puskás. Bendy-legs and the Fat Man. I get lyrical just thinking about them.

And yet. What is the first name out of my mouth when the subject of football is brought up? Who do I use to define the sport, even if only through a negative? Pelé. No wonder they call him The King. I need the light, reflected from his regalia, to bring my shadow puppets Garrincha and Puskás to life. There’s some Plato back there somewhere, but I fear I’d get thoroughly lost in that cave.

In a way Pelé is football. People who heartily hate the game, people who wouldn’t recognise an off-side trap if it came up to them and gave them a cheeky haircut, they all know Pelé. They’ve heard of him, briefly seen some documentary about him. Nice smile. Quite important. It’s as if Pelé as a person ceased to exist, what remains is a walking icon, the institute Edison Arantes do Nascimento. He even talks about the player he used to be in the third person, as if the man who did those wonderful things no longer exists. As if what’s left is a shell. The Idea of Football. The Game Incarnate. The Grand Canyon, if you will…

I love the game of football. Not only the stories, not just the drama, but the simple, pure, undiluted game. The sheer cheek of a dribble, an impossible rush, some dreamy lob hitting the back of the net. But if I accept that Pelé is the physical embodiment of the game, I shouldn’t just admire him, I should love him, the same way I love the game. If I’m in it for more than just Garrincha’s human tragedy and Puskas’s geo-political significance, I should love the man from Santos, who played the game better than anyone else who ever lived. So that when somebody asks me the next time why I love that strange game, I can say: ‘You know Pelé? Because of him.’

Well, I’ll try, Edison. I promise.

Thomas Liekens is a football journalist and commentator for Prime Sport TV in Belgium.

I owned a football encyclopaedia as a child, dating from around 1980 and now sadly lost, in which Jimmy Greaves rates the top ten footballers of all time. Pelé is number two. Greaves notes that he can’t be considered the best ever, because he was never tested in the English League, the toughest competition in the world. So George Best gets the accolade instead.

I’m older now, and since the birth of the Premiership nobody listens to Greaves anymore, but the claim and the attitude behind it has always perplexed me. Not least because it prevails to this day. Recently, for example, Roberto Mancini arrived at Manchester City an unproven quantity—three Serie A titles and three Coppa Italia wins made him a risky appointment compared to, say, Sam Allardyce. Why would anyone hold such a bizarre view?

Pelé’s whole club career until his first retirement was with Santos—seventeen seasons, from 1956 to 1972. However, it’s not easy to quantify exactly what he achieved there—there isn’t a Football League equivalent from the era to compare. Brazil was the last of the major football nations to adopt an official national championship, in 1971, and even that wasn’t refined into the accepted double-round-robin format until 2003. Initially it was a group-and-knockout affair and fluctuated wildly from year-to-year. Santos finished somewhere in the middle of the pack when Pelé played (and even that’s not easy to work out—teams played different numbers of games, depending on how the competition progressed). But that was toward the end of his career. Better to look at his early days.

Football had traditionally been organised along state lines. The Campeonato Paulista ascended to primacy at some point during the early thirties, together with a greater professionalism in the Brazilian game as a whole. It continued, and continues, in parallel with the national championship, and has only declined in relative importance in the last decade or so. On a national level, the Taça Brasil was established to provide the Brazilian entries to the newly-created Copa Libertadores and ran from 1959 to 1968.

So how do the records stack up? Pelé comes out rather well. In the fourteen years from 1956 to 1969, Santos win the Paulista ten times and finish runners-up twice. Only in 1963 and, ominously, 1966 do they miss the top two. Pelé is top scorer ten times during the period, including every year from 1957 to 1965, with tallies ranging from 17 to 58. In the Taça Santos are runners-up in the inaugural competition in 1959, miss out entirely the following year, then win five in a row from 1961 to 1965. Again, 1966 marks the end of the run, Santos losing that year’s final. Pelé is top scorer in ’61, ’63 and ’64.

In the Copa Libertadores itself, Santos make their first appearance in 1962 and win. They win again in 1963. Pelé is second-top scorer both times. The next two years they go out in the semifinals. But by now Argentine and Uruguayan sides have taken over. Other countries barely feature until the 80s, and Pelé doesn’t appear in the competition again.

The total, then, is staggering—from ‘56 to ‘69 he wins seventeen out of thirty domestic titles and the Copa Libertadores twice. And individually, he finishes as top scorer about as much as is humanly possible.

But what of the standard? Here it becomes difficult. Like the European Cup, the Copa Libertadores was a quickfire competition in its early years—Santos play 8 games to win it in 1962, just 4 to win in ‘63. In 1964 they play only two, having been given a bye to the semis, and then 8 again in ‘65, when Pelé top-scores. However, as they follow up both victories by winning the Intercontinental Cup (defeating Benfica and Milan) it seems fair to allow that Santos, in their peak years at any rate, were at least the equals of anything Europe could offer.

Domestically, the standard of the opposition is the great unquantifiable. Does Pelé look good because he got an easy ride, or did he make the ride look easy simply by being brilliant? Unfortunately, we can’t compare the domestic competitions directly. There’s little way of knowing whether Jabaquara, Noroeste and XV de Piracicaba provided as stong a test, on a season-long basis, as did Sunderland, Southampton or Coventry. Those teams didn’t play each other regularly.

One can make an assessment in general terms: a 30 or 34 match season in Brazil, as opposed to 42 games in England, suggests that the English League may well have been more demanding. Few would argue that England is more mud-ridden than Brazil. Adapting the Soccernomics principle that quality at international level is a rough function of a country’s population, wealth, and football history, one would conclude that the English league should have been much stronger—England’s population of roughly 40 million in 1960 was far greater than São Paulo’s at perhaps 14 million (albeit with a far greater hinterland), England remained far wealthier, and its history of organised professional football far longer. The test seems fair, as leagues were almost entirely dependent on local players in those days, but you may spot an obvious flaw—more or less identical factors also apply to the two countries’ international sides, and it’s hard to conclude that during Pelé’s career England were more successful than Brazil. But of course that doesn’t count.

Nevertheless, however demanding the English League was in that era, it’s hard to see why success in it should be a guarantee of quality. Only Liverpool and Manchester United won repeat titles during the sixties, suggesting that the slog might have served to randomise results, rather than allowing talent to assert itself.

English teams did do well in the European Cup throughout the decade—Tottenham (with Greaves), Liverpool and Manchester United all reached the semifinals—before United’s win in 1968, with Best himself scoring the crucial goal and winning European Footballer of the Year for his efforts. But Everton and Manchester City also made first round exits during the period, and 1968 was the first appearance in the final by any English club. Spain, Portugal and Italy had already enjoyed dominance in the competition before then, and it was nearly ten years before an English club became champions of Europe again.

Best’s personal record is certainly superb domestically. A league winner twice, with 171 goals in 435 games during the nine seasons following his debut in 1963—all achieved not as a classic hitman striker so much as an inside forward, sharing the glory with Charlton and Law in a way that Pelé never had to do at Santos. Personally his impact was enormous, and can only be judged in criteria which can’t be quantified, such as the extraordinary interest and affection he attracted even while repeating descending into disgrace, which of course Pelé would never do.

So again we run out of criteria to judge them. Internationally the two couldn’t be compared, even if Greaves allowed us to try. Best is eternally crippled by being from Northern Ireland, and therefore not just bereft of Pelé’s medals, but also of the chance to feature at all. Of performance on the highest stage, which allows us to distinguish a Gary Lineker from a Clive Allen, a Henrik Larsson from a Kris Boyd, we get only a fleeting glimpse.

It’s impossible, then, to disprove Greaves’ argument. Greaves isn’t attacking Pelé—why, he’s the second-best there ever was—he’s attacking his achievements. And, the inference is, Greaves should know. Success in a foreign league? Greaves succeeded at Milan, after a fashion, but didn’t care for it much and came back to the toughest league in the world. Where he continued to score at a phenomenal rate, finishing as league top scorer six times in his career—well, Pelé might have got more, but in a foreign league. Three World Cup wins? Two words: George Best.

But here we get to the rub. I alluded to 1966 as a dark year for Pelé. It is, of course, the blot on his career—the year that he was hacked out of the World Cup by Bulgaria and Portugal. The year Brazil didn’t win.

England won instead. Greaves started the competition as England’s top goalscorer, with 43 goals in his 51 games. But he didn’t find the net in the group games, got injured against France and was replaced by Geoff Hurst—who kept his place and performed the greatest scoring feat of all in the final.

The greatest scoring feat of all, that is, unless you realise, as Jimmy Greaves does, that the World Cup isn’t the true test. That’s reserved for the toughest league in the world—and the record there, if you care to look, still stands today at 413 goals in 602 games, from 1957 to 1972 . . . by one Jimmy Greaves.

Ismael Klata is a Liverpool fan, and thus considers himself amply qualified to deal with longstanding disappointments and nurseable grievances.

Science fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock has written an enormous sequence of novels about the Eternal Champion, the same hero reborn in dozens of different persons. Whether the Eternal Champion is named Elric of Melniboné, Oswald Bastable or Ulrich von Bek, he is always first and foremost the Eternal Champion. The particularities of each champion’s life and personality are different, but their role is the same every time, to restore balance to an off-kilter world.

The World’s Greatest Player is similarly reborn over and over again, though whole eras of football can pass without a player of that stature: 1990-98 is a recent example. It is questionable whether we have such a player among us today. Messi is pretty close to clinching that title, but his disappointing World Cup this summer kept him from stepping up onto the pedestal, this year at least. It is, of course, ridiculous to consider any single player to be clearly better than all the other players, yet there is wide consensus that Pelé was the greatest player from the late fifties to the early seventies. It’s hard to argue with his World Cup tally, and I wouldn’t (though, to be technical, he had little to do with Brazil’s 1962 win, being sidelined with a torn muscle after the 2nd group match). His transcendent skill is evident from the many videos one can watch online. Before his time you get into the hazy era before every major game of football was recorded for television, so it is hard to compare the skill of previous contenders. After Pelé’s day you have Cruyff, whose claim to the role is sadly marred by not winning the World Cup, a cruel but crucial prerequisite. Maradona followed Cruyff and then you have Zidane.

It has been a long while since I’ve been stunned by an advertisement, let alone one for fashionable suitcases, but the Louis Vuitton ad featuring Pelé, Maradona and Zidane did just that. There’s nothing that striking about the image itself, three men standing around a foosball table, but I suppose that when you’re photographing what might well be the three most iconic living sportsmen there’s no need to go crazy. The people whose attention this image was meant to captivate would’ve stopped and looked at anything featuring those three. Playing frisbee golf, watching American Idol on a ratty sofa, drinking tomato juice out of clown shoes, all would’ve made me cease whatever I was doing to stare. I’ll admit that part of what shocked me was that there now was, apparently, a third person who could stand alongside Pelé and Maradona. Growing up it was incontestable that the greatest football players of all time were Pelé and Maradona. I may be reading too much into a single ad, but it genuinely shocked me to see Pelé and Maradona joined by a third. On reflection, it’s not that surprising, given that these three are the same player reborn.

Watching videos of these players what strikes the eye aren’t the differences but the similarities. If anything defines their superhuman quality, it’s how they can cut through a gaggle of defenders like an industrial laser through a car door. The manner in which they do that is similar. They appear to be on the verge of falling over, but somehow they stay upright as they stumble through the men heaped around them, the ball staying at their feet like a lovestruck puppy. At other times, when not unlocking defenses like a supercomputer unscrambling a Rubik’s Cube, they epitomize economy of movement, seeming not to do much until suddenly one action leads to the winning moment: Pelé’s sideways pass to Jairzinho who then scored the single goal of the 1970 game against England, Zidane’s two late goals against England at the 2004 European Championships, and Maradona’s flat-footing of the entire Brazilian team in 1990 before setting Caniggia up for the lone goal of the match.

Those aren’t the only similarities, of course. They also have incredible vision, finding weakness in their opponents where none was suspected, finding passes where none appear feasible. They were leaders of their teams, got their teammates to play at a higher level than they were previously thought capable of and, conversely, left their nations bereft of ideas after retirement. Argentina and France are both lost in a search for replacements and Brazil suffered 24 years in the World Cup wilderness (even the Copa América eluded them until 1989). All three grew up poor and made the most of their talent, working tirelessly at becoming the best. And all seem to move with instinctual ease, making decisions with the kind of speed which makes one suspect they can see a few seconds into the future. Sure, there are differences between them, but the differences are small compared to the totality.

All three embody what we want out of football players, ball control, success, proletarian upbringing, flair, attack-mindedness, vision, leadership and a penchant for winning games in dramatic fashion. That is no accident. Collective fandom has an ideal player and these three fulfill it to a tee. Pelé, Maradona and Zidane all had defects, none were anything special defensively, for instance, but if they had been that might actually have sullied them. Beckenbauer was as complete a player as they were but spent too much time defending to live up to the role of World’s Greatest Player. Players in the mold of Juan Sebastian Verón and Gunther Netzer, slow deliberate players, can’t be the World’s Greatest Player because they seem to put too much thought into their game, taking their time to find the perfect pass. And those who appear to work too hard, Jürgen Klinsmann, for example, are never considered.

Pelé seized the moment when football globalized. People were no longer limited to watching their local matches and he became arguably the first ever World’s Greatest Player. The unanswered question is whether he set the mold or if he epitomized an already existing ideal. Do we collectively seek out this particular type of player because they’re intrinsically more pleasurable to watch than any other kind, or did Pelé imprint himself on the global fandom like some ball-dribbling Konrad Lorenz causing us, even those who never saw him play live, to seek out his image on the field? Either way, we await the next incarnation of The World’s Greatest Player, bringing beauty to a game that always exists in a fallen state, biding our time till the return of the Golden-Shirted Age of Pelé.

Kári Tulinius is an Icelandic poet and novelist. His first novel, Píslarvottar án hæfileika (Martyrs Without Talent), was published this spring in Reykjavík. He currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island.

Over Brian’s last few posts about Pelé, we—RoP’s community of contributors/commenters and readers—have advanced the notion that history punishes perfection by consigning it to irrelevance. Perfection is so unrelatable that it becomes ahistorical. It supersedes the ordinary to such an extent that it isn’t even extraordinary: it simply doesn’t belong in any category of our own experience. We have so little truck with it that we forget to adapt it for the generations that will follow us. It just—exists, marking proto-geological time, questioned now and then for its usefulness, fundamentally immutable. In a worldview that discriminates between gods and humans, we are comfortably heretic. ‘Those who are heroes are known / Such as this man, who is the son of that other … / Thou hast no mother and no father / Thou resemblest a bastard child, God.’

In the rational view, perfection cannot exist in sport, because sport cannot accommodate a mathematical notion of perfection any more than history itself can. And even if Pelé achieved football’s value of perfection, which is possible, since he may be the greatest footballer known to us, it is not his records, or the specifics of his talent that have caused his myth to develop differently from that of the great footballers who followed him. How have those links between our present and Pelé’s past snapped?

I.

I’m going to spoil you for the first few pages of Moti Nandy’s brilliant Bengali novella, Striker, published in 1973 and set in contemporary Calcutta. In a crowded neighbourhood, a large, gleaming car stops to let out a prosperous, cigar-chomping football agent. He has come to the teenage protagonist’s house, attracting a considerable audience in his wake, hanging breathlessly on to every word of his. Yes, the agent has come to speak to young Prasoon. Yes, he does in fact have an offer for him. Yes, he wants to take Prasoon back home to play professionally for his club. The football agent is not from Ajax, Juventus or Real Madrid. He comes from Santos.

These opening pages were first read a mere three years after 1970, a World Cup that Calcutta followed via newspapers and post-facto magazine reports, through radio bulletins carried word-of-mouth around a crowd and black-and-white photographs. In an age when telecommunications did not mean what we think they mean now, when culture lag and a controlled economy might have unmoored even this historic footballing city from the global moment, Pelé and his team became a watershed. To this date, Kolkata (as we now name it) contains a Brazil-supporting, Pelé-worshipping population equalled by few in Asia.

To go quickly over ground Brian’s already covered: we could say that the charm of this love story is rooted in that paucity of eyewitness record. Was Pelé lionised precisely because he was not hypervisible, and is his importance diminishing because we now live in a too-visual world? No. Football is not just a YouTube fandom. And in fact, this is the neatest evidence we have that ‘YouTube football’ is less significant to fans’ relationship with the game than is sometimes supposed. Because then Pelé highlight reels—undreamt-of by most football fans in the world in 1973, but available to us today—would be at the very top of our heightened expectations of a-ha moments, wouldn’t they? Someone like Marco van Basten, that early prototype of video-game footballers, would probably be the most worshipped goalscorer ever (hey, Bergkamp fans—I’ll see you outside). Can we then agree that football can be judged by a set of criteria that aren’t just restricted to visual comparison? Is it unthinkable that a community of football fans and players could apprehend the magic of Pelé even outside the stadium, outside of live coverage, outside of readily available video footage?

I believe this is part of the reason why we are unable to relate to Pelé’s iconography the way his contemporaries did. Our technical limitations are different from theirs. We cannot reconceive Cristiano Ronaldo out of a journalist’s description of an accelerating run down the wing; there is now no way to transmute a Riquelme pass into a sharp intake of breath over the radio. We have more access to the Pelé experience than our predecessors did, but the other pieces of that story are missing, the pieces that Moti Nandy and his characters got. The hero of Striker, Prasoon approaches the end of the prologue dizzy with joy, ready to go out and embrace the world in a Santos jersey—until he realises that he should not be understanding the agent, since that gentleman is speaking in Portuguese. Prasoon recoils as he remembers that he does not speak the language. He wakes with a chill; he has only been dreaming.

II.

Brian mentioned in an earlier post that football is not a sport where narratives are confirmed by statistics, and this makes a notable departure from the history of a sport like, say, cricket, where Don Bradman’s average goes a long way to establish his genius even to who were those born generations after he played his last Test. But Bradman reminds me of an important link in the narrative of greatness, and that is its inheritance, or continuity. Aussies, hear me out to the end of this paragraph. I write from a subcontinent where a candidate for the position of the second-greatest batsman ever has been plying his trade for the last twenty years. For those unfamiliar with cricket, a cursory Google search for ‘Sachin Tendulkar’ will establish his credentials and his unprecedented reputation in India well enough. As it happens, one of the cornerstones of that reputation is a famous endorsement from an aged, long-retired Don Bradman, who, on watching the young Tendulkar bat, remarked that he reminded Bradman of himself. The baton passed; it signified, in however limited a fashion, Tendulkar’s worthiness to take up the mantle of history. But it also signified something else: Don Bradman himself. To generations nourished by the Tendulkar spectacle, it is not just Bradman who contextualised Tendulkar; it is Tendulkar who gives us a sense—again, in however limited a fashion—of what Bradman was. It allows us to imagine a cricketer who was apparently like Sachin Tendulkar, but better.

It’s easy to relate this to the short-term phenomenon of Maradona and his heirs. Some of us can remember and compare Diego himself with his most emphatic inheritor, Lionel Messi. Argentinian football may be different three or four generations from now, but the Maradona standard has continued to be applicable to every potential national #10 over the last two decades, as some putative successors have learned to their cost. Yet to whom, similarly, does Pelé compare? The astonishing depth and variation of genius—and drama—in Brazilian football has ensured that there is no predictable pattern of succession that allows us to link any one player to Pelé. Better than Ronaldo—almost unthinkable, but then Ronaldo is a #9. Better than Zico—tactically appropriate, but hardly embellishing the legend. Better than Robinho—I’m going to stop here now. But I hope it’s easy enough to see that sports history is to some degree atavistic, and Pelé, partly thanks to his own talent, partly thanks to the multifarious ways in which Brazilian football has developed and succeeded in the years since he played, does in fact stand alone.

III.

Self-preservation doesn’t have quite the public currency that self-destruction has. Even so, Pelé hasn’t preserved himself, in his long and apparently healthy life post-playing career, as a paragon of dignity. In my darkest moments I imagine Paolo Maldini, thirty years from now, shilling for the latest performance-enhancing drugs from Big Pharma and making bright, crazy predictions of success for the football team of Padania. Would a future generation be able to construct any coherent notion of his grace and dignity as a player in the face of such annoying evidence to the contrary? Would such a figure convince you to evaluate his history impartially?

If football is not merely the totality of visual evidence, then surely, what footballers do off the field and after their careers matters to their legend. Pelé’s long career as a public figure has forced him not only to negotiate his own personal and professional commitments in their media representations, but also the changes in the nature of those media itself. His anchoring institution is not a national team (at least not the way the albiceleste are for Maradona) or a club (as is Alfredo di Stefano’s): it is FIFA, a constituency which does not come with its own loyalist fan base, except presumably in the offices of Coca-Cola. This has reconfigured the Pelé myth in interesting ways. By yoking his career irrevocably to memories of the World Cup, his club career has been relatively ignored. By associating him exclusively with the champagne effect of victory, his story defies the longer haul of football’s rhythm: the ins and outs of a season, the tensions of tournament politics, the bitterness of failure and the anticipation of a mollifying change of fortune. Can such a man have a real story? How does that peerless career compare with the operatic wonder and terror of the last days of Zinedine Zidane? If football were The Lord of the Rings, and Zidane did to us what Denethor did to Pippin, then how does Pelé appear in our recent experience of international football—as Tom Bombadil? Ring a dol dillo.

IV.

But bear with me a moment. Tolkien fans will know as well as I that Tom Bombadil is a contentious figure at the heart of the canon. He appears to us as a random, singing, omnipotent figure, a giver of gifts and an utterer of doggerel; he gives us tantalising hints of his powers, but remains an affable cypher from start to finish. Is he a deus ex machina, pulled out by the authorities at the start of the adventure to armtwist us into believing in their power? Is he a blip of probability in a predetermined world; the end of imagination, or its wildest flight of fancy? Why is he called Iarwain ben-Adar, oldest and fatherless?

Maybe Pelé is blessed with the fate of all origin myths, to be simultaneously ubiquitous and unrecognisable. Because he is the figurehead of a certain view of football. Perhaps that view significantly violates the chronological development of football and football celebrity. But who today escapes it? Doesn’t Pelé make it irrelevant to note that Puskás came before him and Cruyff after? He stands at the fount of all our conceptions of football heroism; perhaps only a stepchild of time can do that. It’s easier to forget such myths than remember them, but they also have a tenacity that allows them to exist, lapsed or current, long after the seasons have changed and the crumblier statues have become logs in the desert. Perhaps that’s what it really means to stand outside history.

Supriya Nair writes the football blog Treasons, Stratagems and Spoils, and can be found on Twitter here.