José Miguel Wisnik: Pele was two people, the soccer star — and the ordinary guy who watched over him.
Pele celebrates a goal for the New York Cosmos at Randalls Island Stadium in New York on July 15, 1975.• Pelé once confessed that he had long been troubled by a conundrum, one he’d only be able to crack when he met God, face-to-face, and could demand an explanation.
According to him, his most personal aim was to achieve the unrealized greatness he glimpsed in his father, who’d been an admirable but obscure player, to redeem him from a failed soccer career. Before he knew it, he was the top idol of the most popular sport on the planet, making his thunderous arrival at the 1958 World Cup, at the age of 17.
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.
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.
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