Why Soccer Matters

by Pelé

  Not even that got us a breakthrough. Six months passed with no deal. At one point, it seemed like the negotiations were stuck. We couldn’t quite agree on money. Also, the Brazilian military government was making noises about whether it was a good idea for Pelé to play abroad. You have to remember, this was an era when Brazil was still a quite isolated country, paranoid about its security and closed to the world in trade and many other things. “Globalization” was something the government feared, rather than embraced, because they knew that more exposure to the world would make Brazilians demand democracy and other rights. The military, just like all authoritarian regimes, had erected lots of barriers to keep this from happening. So, it seemed entirely possible that the soldiers who ran Brazil might act to stop me from playing in the United States, of all places. Moreover, many of those same soldiers were still angry about my decision not to play for Brazil in 1974, a choice that of course had a political element to it. While it wasn’t clear exactly how they’d stop me from leaving if I wanted to play abroad, this being Brazil, there were any number of legal tricks at the government’s disposal to keep me at home. I wondered if the whole thing was going to fall apart.

  Enter Henry Kissinger. The German-born secretary of state was one of the most powerful Cabinet secretaries in the history of the United States—and a huge soccer fan. He had played the game in his youth—as a goalie, of all things—and never lost his passion for the game. In 1973, he used some of his considerable clout to almost single-handedly orchestrate an exhibition game between Santos and the Baltimore Bays, another team in the NASL (and, not coincidentally, one that played close enough to Washington for him to come see the game!). He sought me out in the locker room after that 1973 game, looking like a wide-eyed kid. He told me that only star players would make Americans appreciate the true beauty of soccer. “Pelé, you are the one,” he said in his deep, gravelly, heavily accented voice. “We need you to play in the United States more often. People will go crazy. And even if soccer doesn’t catch on, at least I’ll be able to see you play!”

  That same summer, Dr. Kissinger arranged for Rose and me to make a quick visit to the White House, where I met President Nixon. It’s funny—I had forgotten about that meeting until recently, when the very last set of the secret tape recordings Nixon made in the Oval Office was released to the public, and I was on them! President Nixon was very polite, and said he thought I was “the greatest in the world.” At one point he asked me if I spoke any Spanish.

  “No,” I said gently. “Only Portuguese.”

  Nixon looked just a bit embarrassed, so I quickly added:

  “It’s all the same, though.”

  By the time Dr. Kissinger heard the Cosmos were negotiating to sign me in early 1975, President Nixon was gone—he had resigned because of Watergate. But Dr. Kissinger had survived, and was just as powerful as ever. He resolved to do whatever was necessary to grease the wheels so I could play in New York. In that spirit, he sent a letter to Brazilian president Ernesto Geisel, stating that if I played in the United States, it would be a massive boost to relations between our two countries. This was during the Cold War—this was Henry Kissinger. Well, you can imagine the effect the letter had. After that, the government grumblings about my impending departure abruptly stopped. We came to an agreement on money—about a million dollars a year for seven years. It was a deal that included all kinds of merchandising and promotion deals as well. One condition was bringing Professor Mazzei, who was hired by the Cosmos to be the assistant coach and fitness adviser. And before I knew it, there I was, standing at a podium at the 21 Club, with the good professor translating for me.

  “You can spread the word,” I declared. “Soccer has finally arrived in the United States.”

  It all sounded great, but there was one question nobody knew the answer to: Would anyone actually come and watch us play?

  10

  I’m not even sure I wanted to watch in the beginning!

  On the day of my first workout with the Cosmos, there was a driving rainstorm. The chauffeur didn’t even know how to get to the workout site—a small gym at Hofstra University, a school on Long Island. So I was nearly an hour late. This sent a horrible message—the last thing I wanted to do was create the impression that I thought I was operating under a different set of rules from my teammates. So I apologized profusely to Coach Bradley. He said it wasn’t a problem, and he even generously waived the customary twenty-five dollar fine for players who showed up late.

  I gathered the team together and I gave a short speech in my very awful English. I had practiced a bit beforehand with Professor Mazzei, who helped with my pronunciation. I rehearsed a bit that morning in the mirror, too.

  “It’s an honor to be here,” I said. “I’ve always been a team guy, and I still am. Please don’t expect me to win games alone. We must work together.”

  The guys on the team all nodded. They came up and introduced themselves one by one, smiling and very graciously welcoming me. It was very important for me to learn their names right away. One of my new teammates, Gil Mardarescu, a midfielder from Romania, made the sign of a cross on his chest and said: “I dreamed of one day just shaking your hand. But to play with you, this is a miracle!”

  I was flattered, of course. But this was also the kind of starstruck attitude we had to avoid on the field—as I had told the team, our team couldn’t be ten guys and Pelé. Soccer doesn’t work that way. I became even more worried.

  When we all got on the field together for the first time, the result was pretty shaky. I hadn’t played competitive soccer in eight months at that point, and I knew I would be rusty. There was also a bit of standing around and gaping while I went through drills and practice kicks. “The Cosmos acted like a sandlot baseball team suddenly playing alongside Babe Ruth,” one reporter wrote. I had arrived in the middle of the 1975 season, and the team’s record was just three wins, six losses. The players’ attitudes were good, but we needed more talent. At that first practice, we were playing an intrasquad game when I received a waist-high pass in front of the goal. I did a bicycle kick, launching the ball past the goalie, Kurt Kuykendall, and into the net.

  It was a move I’d performed a thousand times in Brazil, but Kuykendall acted as if he’d just seen a man walk on the moon. “What happened?” he kept asking. “What just happened?” Players on both sides were cheering me, clapping me on the back.

  We needed time together. But there wasn’t any—it was midseason, after all, and we had a game to play on June 15 against the Dallas Tornadoes. The site would be Downing Stadium, the tattered little venue on Randalls Island where the Cosmos had been playing its home games. The game would be carried live on national television—a first for the Cosmos. Before kickoff, a group of team officials carefully combed over the field, busily working to prepare the facility for its big-time debut. Of course, we had no idea whether anyone would watch on TV or even come to the game itself—the Cosmos’ average attendance that year had been just under nine thousand fans a game.

  I was delighted when we took the field and saw some twenty-one thousand fans—basically, the little field’s capacity. “Pelé! Pelé!” they chanted. At first, it seemed like we might disappoint them—the Tornadoes scored two goals in the first half. Every time I got the ball, three or four defenders came my way. But shortly after halftime, I was able to get a pass to Mordechai Spiegler, our Israeli forward who had played for his national team in the 1970 Cup. He quickly made the score 2–1. Nine minutes later, Spiegler returned the favor, sending a high ball in front of the goal. I jumped up—not quite as high as in my glory days, but enough altitude for that day—and delivered a header into the upper left part of the goal. “Pelé! Pelé!” The chants intensified, and I felt for a moment like I was back at the Vila Belmiro Stadium in Santos.

  The final score: 2–2. A tie. Not the kind of result that Americans typically like, but a good start nonetheless.

 
In fact, we had only one real problem that day. After my postgame shower, I found Raphael de la Sierra, the Cuban-born vice president of the Cosmos. I have to admit, I was in a panic.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said. “But I think this will be both the first and last game I play for the New York Cosmos. I can’t do this.”

  De la Sierra stared at me with his mouth gaping. “But why?”

  I was horrified to discover in the shower that my feet were covered in what looked like green fungus. No matter how much I scrubbed, how much soap I applied, the stuff wouldn’t come off. This was my worst fear come true—a facility so decrepit that it would cause me permanent damage to my health. No soccer player can live without his feet.

  As I explained myself, de la Sierra’s frown disappeared, and soon he was smiling. He patiently waited for me to finish speaking. Then he informed me that, because Downing Stadium had been in such awful condition prior to the game, team officials had spray-painted several huge bald spots of the soccer field with green paint. They did this hoping that the viewers on television wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and would think the Cosmos played its games on a beautiful, lush field.

  “That’s not fungus, Pelé,” he said, quaking with laughter. “That was paint.”

  11

  That first game attracted a television audience of ten million people—easily a record for soccer in the United States, beating any World Cup or club game up until that point. The broadcast itself wasn’t a total success—the TV audience missed the first Cosmos goal because of a commercial break, as well as the second one, which I scored, because they were showing an instant replay at the time. Clearly, soccer, with its constant action, contrasting with the long, TV-friendly pauses seen in most “American” sports, was going to pose a learning curve for everyone—even the TV executives!

  Nevertheless, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. “Except for a heavyweight championship fight,” one newspaper wrote, “no sports event in New York City has attracted so much attention around the world.” Suddenly, everybody all over the world knew who the Cosmos were. American journalists like Tom Brokaw, Howard Cosell and others talked about that first game, and said soccer had finally arrived in the United States. Lamar Hunt, the owner of the opposing Dallas team in that first game, watched on TV from a motel room in Tyler, Texas. “As I watched,” Hunt later recalled, “I thought, ‘Well, we’ve made it. It was worth the agony, the lean years.’”

  Indeed, the soccer boom was much bigger and more immediate than anyone—even the most daring dreamers, like Steve Ross or Clive Toye—could possibly have imagined. After that first game, the Cosmos embarked on trips to places that were supposedly soccer wastelands, cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, as well as more developed markets like Boston and Washington, D.C. No matter where we went, in every city we broke attendance records. In Boston, the crowd mobbed me after I scored a goal, and even tweaked my ankle a bit as they tried to wrest away my shoes for souvenirs. In Washington, D.C., some thirty-five thousand people turned out, the biggest NASL crowd ever. (A few nights later, for another game, only twenty-one hundred fans showed up.) Even in LA—where the team played in a tiny stadium at El Camino Junior College—the twelve-thousand-seat venue was filled to capacity. Everywhere we went, people were friendly, enthusiastic and surprisingly knowledgeable about soccer. It was as if America’s soccer fans had just been waiting for a ray of light to signal that dawn had finally come for their sport.

  The game also seemed to tap perfectly into the zeitgeist of the United States in the mid-1970s, as the Baby Boomers got older. Dick Berg, the general manager of the Dallas Tornadoes at the time, said: “Soccer is an antiestablishment game. It is not sanctified like the NFL or specialized like the NBA. Its individual play and constant movement are anticorporate, and we’re attracting the young adults who grew up in the sixties, the people who were then anti-Vietnam, had longer hair and listened to different music. They spend dollars now, and soccer has attracted them.”

  Well, I don’t know if all of that was true. But we certainly hit a nerve. Kids who played soccer at school started begging their parents to take them to our games. Even more important—in fact, this would prove to the most critical development of all—half the fans at NASL games were women. Sports Illustrated crowed: “Nobody in his proper mind would have dreamed that in a few short weeks, Pelé would be as well-known as Joe Namath,” the quarterback for one of the teams in New York that played the “other” kind of football—the Jets.

  I felt like half of my responsibilities were on the field as a player, and the rest were off the field as a kind of professor and ambassador of soccer. It was during those early weeks that I coined a phrase that would follow me around for the rest of my life. The American reporters were always asking me questions about “soccer.” This word was strange to me at first, since I’d always known the sport—even in English—as “football.” In order to distinguish between what I played and American football, which I found a bit dull and brutal and punctuated by too many pauses, I said that the sport I played was a jogo bonito—a “beautiful game.” The phrase stuck, and has been used to describe soccer around the world ever since.

  Those were some of the favorite days of my professional life. Was I as fast or as powerful as I had been ten years before? Goodness, no. Did we win every game? Not even close. But there was a newness to everything, a tingly feeling of discovery that I suppose I hadn’t really felt since that first World Cup in Sweden in 1958. Every time we went to a new city, and people came out to greet us, it felt like we were planting our flag, the flag of soccer, never to retreat again.

  Freed of the expectations and pressures of home—and also, I’m certain, more mature and comfortable in my own skin than when I was younger—I found new pleasures within soccer. I clowned around with my teammates, and generally enjoyed getting to see America. In Seattle, we stayed in a hotel where my room was about three stories above the harbor. The manager lent me a fishing rod and a bucket of salmon fillets for bait, and within seconds I hooked a small sand shark. I pulled it up to the balcony as my teammates, incredulous, cracked up with laughter. What to do with the shark? One of them ran into the room and came back with a table leg, which he used to bash the shark in the head. It wasn’t quite like being back home, fishing in the Baurú River—a shark would have caused the whole town to flee in terror! But it was close enough.

  We took our games very seriously, but everybody knew we had a larger purpose: promoting the game, and making soccer viable in the United States. And so there was a degree of camaraderie, even with the opposing team, that was sometimes harder to find in more advanced leagues. For example, I had a big problem with a particularly nefarious element of sports in the United States in the 1970s: Astroturf. Artificial surfaces in today’s modern era could be easily mistaken for soft, lush, regular grass. But during those years, Astroturf surfaces were essentially concrete floors with a little strip of green rug on them. I’d rarely been exposed to them before, and I felt like my feet were on fire. Some players for the Seattle Sounders told me that Astroturf was easier if you just had plain tennis shoes on; when I said I didn’t have any, one of them kindly lent me a pair. I was gratified, if a bit paranoid—in Brazil, or any other hypercompetitive league, an opposing player would have put rusty nails in the soles or something! (I’m exaggerating, but only a little bit.)

  All the camaraderie, and the practice, brought us closer together. The Cosmos would finish the 1975 season with a losing record, and miss the playoffs. We still needed more talent. But we felt like we had laid the groundwork for something. And the off-season—well, that was going to be a lot of fun too.

  12

  I was a grown man, but I was also living outside my country for the first time in my life. So there were times when I, once again, felt like that fourteen-year-old kid on the bus from Baurú to Santos: unsure of myself, far from home, excited but somewhat lost. I missed Br
azil. I missed the beaches, the steak asados on Sunday afternoons. Most of all, I missed the fans at places like Vila Belmiro, Pacaembu and the Maracanã. Sometimes, I’d just pick a star in the southern sky and stare at it, wondering what was going on back home, and what I was missing.

  Luckily, I was able to bring some of the comforts of home with me to the United States. The biggest of all was family. Rose and the kids joined me, and we lived in a nice apartment on the East Side. Kely Cristina and Edinho picked up English quickly, like all kids do, and settled into their American school. My brother Zoca also joined us, working at Trenton University and giving soccer clinics for kids. My parents spent a lot of time with us, and it was funny—the Nascimento clan maybe spent even more time together in New York than we had in Santos.

  Furthermore, New York wasn’t the kind of place where you really had time to be homesick. Unusually for me, given the fact that I usually cared about few things but soccer, I really lost myself in all the cultural options the city offered. Almost every weekend, I went to some kind of show or event with Rose. Sometimes we went to Broadway musicals, but very often we went to the ballet. There was something about ballet that really spoke to me and reminded me of soccer—the combination of strength, fluidity of movement, and elegance. I’d sit, transfixed, for hours and hours, week after week. I loved Cirque du Soleil for the same reasons. Watching it, I felt like I understood—I felt I could anticipate many of the moves the performers made.