No one else combined his speed and dribbling skills, the ability to shoot with both feet, his precise and devastating ground and aerial play, a magical sense of timing with the ball, an instantaneous understanding of what was going on around him, all grounded in a robust and rigorously balanced athleticism. Even so, the Pelé-effect isn’t just a sum, unique it may be, of quantifiable skills.
A poet once remarked that Pelé seemed to drag the field with him toward the opposing goal, like an extension of his own skin. A philosopher conceded, playfully, the possibility of glimpsing flickers of the Absolute in him. The beauty and intelligence of his body in action, plus his eagle eye and the unpredictability of his tricks, made Pelé appear to be operating on a different frequency from the other players, watching in slow motion the same game he was participating in at high speed, while others around him seemed to be doing the reverse.
The phenom was quickly discovered and embraced on every continent, long before the introduction of large-scale marketing campaigns. It’s because his existence connects with the world through a symbolic alignment of a different nature. Beyond being recognized and revered in the traditional circles of European football, this affable Black man, ambassador of a peripheral country and performing in a nonverbal language, was perceived, celebrated and loved in the most diverse corners of the world as the eloquent assertion of a grandeur greater than any political and economic supremacy.
In Brazil, Pelé’s arrival on the world stage coincided with that of the nation’s new capital, Brasília, founded in 1960, and its innovative architecture, and the success of bossa nova music. It’s been said that a goal by Pelé, one of Oscar Niemeyer’s curves or a Tom Jobim tune sung by João Gilberto were like a “promise of joy” from an exotic marginal country that seemed to be offering the world a smooth if profound passage from popular vernacular to modern art, without the costs of the Industrial Revolution. The dictatorship that followed, beginning in 1964, gave signs, recurring and persisting to this day, that this path wasn’t so direct or so simple, to say the least.