The referee whistled a penalty. Pelé did not want to take it. A hundred thousand people forced him to, screaming out his name.
Pelé had scored many goals in Maracanã. Prodigious goals, like the one in 1961 against Fluminense when he dribbled past seven defenders and the keeper as well. But this penalty was different; people felt there was something sacred about it. That’s why the noisiest crowd in the world fell silent. The clamor disappeared as if obeying an order: no one spoke, no one breathed. All of a sudden the stands seemed empty and so did the playing field. Pelé and the goalkeeper, Andrada, were alone. By themselves, they waited. Pelé stood by the ball resting on the white penalty spot. Twelve paces beyond stood Andrada, hunched over at the ready, between the two posts.
The goalkeeper managed to graze the ball, but Pelé nailed it to the net. It was his thousandth goal. No other player in the history of professional soccer had ever scored a thousand goals.
Then the multitude came back to life and jumped like a child overjoyed, lighting up the night.
Pelé
A hundred songs name him. At seventeen he was champion of the world and king of soccer. Before he was twenty the government of Brazil named him a “national treasure” not to be exported. He won three world championships with the Brazilian team and two with the club Santos. After his thousandth goal, he kept on counting. He played more than thirteen hundred matches in eighty countries, one after another at a punishing rate, and he scored nearly thirteen hundred goals. Once he held up a war: Nigeria and Biafra declared a truce to see him play.
To see him play was worth a truce and a lot more. When Pelé ran hard, he cut right through his opponents like a hot knife through butter. When he stopped, his opponents got lost in the labyrinths his legs embroidered. When he jumped, he climbed into the air as if it were a staircase. When he executed a free kick, his opponents in the wall wanted to turn around to face the net, so as not to miss the goal.
He was born in a poor home in a far-off village, and he reached the summit of power and fortune where blacks were not allowed. Off the field he never gave a minute of his time and a coin never fell from his pocket. But those of us who were lucky enough to see him play received alms of extraordinary beauty: moments so worthy of immortality that they make us believe immortality exists.
The 1970 World Cup
In Prague cinema puppet master Jiří Trnka was dying; so was Bertrand Russell in London, after nearly a century of very lively living. After only twenty years, the poet Rugama was dying too, in Managua, fighting alone against a battalion from the Somoza dictatorship. The world was losing its music: the Beatles were breaking up thanks to an overdose of success, and thanks to an overdose of drugs guitarist Jimi Hendrix and singer Janis Joplin were also taking their leave.
A hurricane was ripping through Pakistan and an earthquake was wiping out fifteen cities in the Peruvian Andes. In Washington, though no one believed in the Vietnam War anymore, it kept dragging on, with the death toll reaching one million according to the Pentagon, and the generals fleeing forward by invading Cambodia. After losing in three previous attempts, Allende was launching another campaign for the presidency of Chile, promising milk for every child and nationalization of the nation’s copper. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours. For the first time in history, the Vatican was on strike. While employees of the Holy Father in Rome were crossing their arms, in Mexico players from sixteen countries were moving their legs and the ninth World Cup got under way.
Nine teams from Europe, five from the Americas, plus Israel and Morocco took part. In the first match, the referee raised a yellow card for the first time. The yellow card, sign of warning, and the red card, sign of expulsion, were not the only novelties at the Mexico World Cup. The rules now allowed for two substitutions during the course of each match. Before, only the goalkeeper could be replaced in case of injury, and it was never very hard to reduce the adversary’s numbers with a few well-placed kicks.
Images of the 1970 World Cup: the impression left by Beckenbauer as he battled to the final minute with one arm in a sling; the fervor of Tostão, fresh from an eye operation and managing a sure-footed performance in every match; the aerobatics of Pelé in his final World Cup: “We jumped together,” said Burgnich, the Italian defender who marked him, “but when I landed, I could see Pelé was still floating in the air.”
Four world champions — Brazil, Italy, West Germany, and Uruguay — faced off in the semifinals. Germany took third place, Uruguay fourth. In the final, Brazil astonished Italy 4–1. The British press commented, “Such beautiful soccer ought to be outlawed.” People stand up to tell the story of the final goaclass="underline" the ball traveled through all Brazil, each of the eleven players touched it, and at last Pelé, without even looking, laid it out on a silver platter for Carlos Alberto coming in like a tornado to make the kill.
“Torpedo” Müller from Germany led the list of scorers with ten, followed by the Brazilian Jairzinho with seven.
Undefeated champions for the third time, Brazil kept the Rimet Cup for good. At the end of 1983 the cup was stolen and sold after being melted down to nearly two kilos of pure gold. In the display case, a replica stands in its place.
Goal by Jairzinho
It was at the 1970 World Cup. Brazil was playing England.
Tostão got the ball from Paulo Cézar and scurried ahead as far as he could, but all of England was spread out in the penalty area. Even the Queen was there. Tostão eluded one, then another and one more, then he passed the ball to Pelé. Three players suffocated him on the spot. Pelé pretended to press on and the three opponents went for the smoke. He put on the brakes, pivoted and left the ball on the feet of Jairzinho, who was racing in. Jairzinho had learned to shake off his markers on sandlots in the toughest slums of Rio de Janeiro. He came on like a black bullet and evaded one Englishman before the ball, a white bullet, crossed the goal line defended by the keeper Banks.
It was the winning goal. Swaying to the rhythm of a fiesta, Brazil’s attackers had tossed off seven guardians of the steel fortress, which simply melted under the hot breeze blowing from the south.
The Fiesta
There are towns and villages in Brazil that have no church, but not a one lacks a soccer field. Sunday is the day of hard labor for cardiologists all over the country. On a normal Sunday people die of excitement during the mass of the ball. On a Sunday without soccer, people die of boredom.
When the Brazilian national team met disaster at the ’66 World Cup, there were suicides, nervous breakdowns, flags at half-staff, and black ribbons on doors. A procession of dancing mourners filled the streets to bury the country’s soccer prowess in a coffin. Four years later, Brazil won the world championship for the third time and Nelson Rodrigues wrote that Brazilians were no longer afraid of being carried off by the dogcatcher, they were all ermine-caped kings in pointy crowns.
At the World Cup in 1970, Brazil played a soccer worthy of her people’s yearning for celebration and craving for beauty. The whole world was suffering from the mediocrity of defensive soccer, which had the entire side hanging back to maintain the catenaccio while one or two men played by themselves up front. Risk and creative spontaneity were not allowed. Brazil, however, was astonishing: a team on the attack, playing with four strikers — Jairzinho, Tostão, Pelé and Rivelino — sometimes increased to five and even six when Gérson and Carlos Alberto came up from the back. That steamroller pulverized Italy in the final.