Why Soccer Matters

by Pelé

  There were also less . . . wholesome . . . pursuits. Steve Ross’ empire at Warner Communications opened up a new world of interesting people, including many singers and Hollywood stars who either lived in New York or were constantly passing through. One of the celebrities I saw most often was Rod Stewart, who was both a Warner Brothers artist and a huge soccer fan. Sometimes he visited the Cosmos facilities and kicked the ball around with us during practices. Rod would take me out to Studio 54, the famous—infamous?—restaurant and nightclub that was the center of the Manhattan party scene in the 1970s. We’d sit there and listen to music and have a good time. A few times, Mick Jagger joined us. So did Liza Minnelli, Björn Borg and Andy Warhol—who proclaimed that I was the exception to his rule about everybody getting fifteen minutes of fame. “Pelé will be famous forever,” he said, with a good bit of exaggeration.

  Even in such company, I stuck by the “No drugs or alcohol” philosophy that I’d followed over the years. This vow had been enormously helpful in preserving my body, and allowing me to keep playing soccer at age thirty-five—and beyond. But it made me a bit unusual for the Studio 54 crowd. One night, Rod got a little frustrated with me and said: “Damn, Pelé! You don’t drink, and you don’t do drugs. So what do you do?”

  Well, I had my weaknesses, particularly when it came to members of the opposite sex. And you can believe that there was no shortage of temptation in New York during the mid-1970s, especially as the Cosmos’ fame began to blast off. I remember one visit to the Warner building, where the actor Robert Redford also had an office. We were both standing in the lobby, chatting, when a group of autograph seekers came running toward us. I saw Robert flinch in anticipation. Surprise slowly spread across his face when he realized the fans were coming not for him, but for me.

  “Wow!” he said, marveling, standing there by himself as I signed away. “You are famous!”

  Fame also helped me with something really important—impressing my kids. This was a task that became much more difficult over the years, as it does for all parents. When my daughter, Kely Cristina, was a teenager, she kept begging me to introduce her to the actor William Hurt, whom she had a huge crush on. So I took Kely to a cocktail party in New York for the launch of his movie Kiss of the Spider Woman. When we walked in, William saw me and screamed: “You’re Pelé! You’re Pelé!” He was practically shrieking. He threw himself on me and started literally kissing my feet. I laughed and laughed. Kely was impressed, maybe for the first and last time ever!

  I hoped that coming to New York would help build a bridge to my post-soccer life, and I wasn’t disappointed. Some great opportunities showed up on that front, too. I had already done some acting in Brazil, including a role in a telenovela back in the 1960s in which I played an alien scouting out earth for an invasion. I wasn’t a very good actor (and I’m being kind), but it was great fun. One day over lunch in New York, the director Steven Spielberg proposed making a film of me playing soccer on the moon. To tell the truth, I never quite understood that idea—maybe he confused me with Marcos Cesar Pontes, another famous citizen of Baurú who became the first Brazilian in space! Eventually, I did appear in a big-time Hollywood movie: Escape to Victory, a film starring Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine. I played a soccer player. This, you could say, was less of a stretch for me.

  My contract with Warner included a bunch of cross-promotional deals. When they released a new video-gaming system for Atari, for example, I helped launch it. And there was also a whole network of people I met through Brazilians living in the United States. I had a business partner whom I helped open up some chiropractor clinics in Los Angeles. He, in turn, knew another Brazilian who was a professional cook for an up-and-coming pop star who, after years singing in an ensemble, was launching his solo career. And that was how I came to be invited to Michael Jackson’s eighteenth birthday party in California. He was very quiet, very well dressed, and very polite. A simple young man, but obviously very delicate. I was saddened by what happened to him many years later.

  Why do I mention all of this? All the contact with stars and celebrities—it was great fun. I was having the time of my life. But, looking back, there was also a constructive purpose: It helped make soccer glamorous. By giving the sport a little glitz, a little razzle-dazzle, we convinced many Americans that soccer must be worth watching. Celebrities started taking ownership of NASL teams—Mick Jagger took a stake in a team in Philadelphia, joined by fellow rockers Peter Frampton and Paul Simon. Elton John headlined the ownership group for the franchise in Los Angeles, the Aztecs. And, just as important, other big-name players around the world became excited about playing in the United States, too. My words had proven true after all: Soccer had indeed arrived.

  13

  After the Cosmos missed the playoffs in 1975, I told Steve Ross and Clive Toye that we’d need at least one more big-name player. “I can’t do this alone,” I said.

  I felt bad saying this—I really liked my teammates—but there is no substitute for talent in professional sports, and the brutal truth was that we simply didn’t have enough of it. Opposing teams were able to assign three or even four defenders to me, without my teammates making them pay for their decision. “We’re not going to win this way,” I said. “Please go look in South America or Europe for some other players who will join us.”

  I’ll say this about Steve Ross—with him, you didn’t need to ask twice. Before long, the Cosmos signed two more big-name stars of international soccer: the Italian forward Giorgio Chinaglia, and Franz Beckenbauer, the captain of the West German team that had just won the 1974 World Cup. These were dynamite acquisitions that solidified the NASL as a big-time league—and outraged many people in soccer’s “Old World.” Signing Chinaglia was such a coup that he “had to be smuggled out of Italy after the season started for fear of widespread rioting,” one newspaper wrote, probably with some embellishment, but only a bit. When Beckenbauer arrived in New York, a huge crowd of people, including many kids, went to the airport to greet his plane. Beckenbauer later said coming to the United States was “the best decision I ever made.”

  When all the other clubs saw the stars the Cosmos were signing, they decided to follow suit. Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, the star of the Portuguese national team that had eliminated Brazil in 1966, signed with the Las Vegas Quicksilvers. The Tampa Bay club signed Tommy Smith, a sharp-tongued defender who had played many years for Liverpool. The legend George Best, of Northern Ireland, would soon sign with the Los Angeles Aztecs. There were also new expansion teams in places like San Diego and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The competition was on!

  That 1976 season saw us make enormous progress on the field. Chinaglia led the league with nineteen goals and eleven assists, and helped take a lot of the focus away from me. I was able to get some more breathing room on the field, and in one game in Honolulu I scored four goals—including three in a fifteen-minute span in the second half. We played to packed houses almost everywhere we went, and the crowds in New York were so big that the owners moved the team over to Yankee Stadium. Winning helped fan the popular ardor even more: We finished the season with sixteen wins and eight losses.

  We made the playoffs, and faced the Tampa Bay Rowdies. That team was a remarkable success story, in some ways the opposite of our New York club. They did have that one star: Tommy Smith. But where New York was glitz and glamour, Tampa Bay was small-town pluck and ingenuity. Players and coaches would show up at a restaurant after games to autograph T-shirts. The team’s trademarked motto was “The Rowdies are a kick in the grass”—just a tiny bit racy for the United States back then! Before every game, a group of cheerleaders called “Wowdies” ran on the field and released balloons for their adoring fans. And then the whole crowd would sing along with the theme song: “The Rowdies run here, the Rowdies run there, they kick the ball around!” Yes, it was all a bit hokey, but people loved it—and the team was thriving. Even though it was an expansion team in 1975, Tampa Bay
won the NASL championship that year. And they looked like they might just pull it off again in 1976.

  The fans in Tampa Bay were knowledgeable, and very kind. Before the game started, as I took the field, the crowd gave me a standing ovation. It was a marvelous display of sportsmanship. Too bad it was the highlight of the game for me!

  The game started well enough. But the Tampa Bay team played exceptional defense, and I couldn’t get free of my man to save my life. On one play, I got knocked down, and as I lay there on the ground, with Tommy Smith standing over me, the Rowdies scored yet another goal to put the game away.

  We were disappointed by the loss, to be sure. But I was happy that the level of competition was up, and the NASL felt like a real league now. Nearly thirty-seven thousand people turned out for our game against Tampa—a very good crowd for any American sport. “Soccer Is Getting a Toehold,” Sports Illustrated proclaimed in August 1976. None of us suspected that, in some ways, the opposite was true. Storm clouds were gathering that would soon threaten everything we had worked so hard to build.

  14

  One of my greatest pleasures in New York City was to wander into Central Park by myself, and try to find a group of kids playing soccer. This required a little bit of hunting in the early days—it was much easier to find people throwing a baseball or an American football in one of the park’s huge, green meadows. But eventually, with some persistence, I’d come across a group kicking around a little black and white ball, and I’d smile.

  I’d just watch them at first, my arms folded, maybe standing in the shade of a tree. I wouldn’t say anything. Inevitably, someone would see me standing there. You can imagine the surprise! And then I’d go talk to them for a while, show them a few moves, and maybe give them tips. This was an era when Polaroid instant cameras really became all the rage, and somebody always seemed to have one handy. I’d pose with the group, all of us giving the Brazilian-style thumbs-up sign. And then I’d shake their hands or hug them good-bye, and disappear back into the urban jungle.

  It made me so happy to spread my love for soccer to new people. I was able to do this in more formal ways, as well. In the early 1970s, I signed a contract with PepsiCo to do a series of soccer workshops for kids around the world called the International Youth Football Program. Professor Mazzei and I collaborated together for this project, and we traveled to sixty-four countries, giving workshops to kids on how to play soccer better. The idea was a total triumph—it cost nothing for coaches, schools or players. For me, it was a great example of what corporations could do to make the world a better place, while also promoting their product.

  Also working with PepsiCo, we produced a book and a coaching movie called Pelé: The Master and His Method, which thankfully has survived for posterity and continues to be watched by some young people today. In the movie, we broke down the “beautiful game” into its most basic elements: ball control, juggling, dribbling, passing, trapping, heading and—finally—shooting (“The not so gentle art of scoring goals,” as we called it). I demonstrated each skill. I wore special shoes with lighter-color patches on the parts of the foot that are best used for shooting—a lot of kids mistakenly thought that they could kick the ball with the most speed and accuracy using the front of their foot, when the side is usually much better.

  We worked really hard to produce a film that not only showed the game’s technical skills, but transmitted some of soccer’s romance as well. During one scene, the camera zoomed in on a soccer ball, and the narrator said: “Fifteen ounces of leather and compressed air . . . a dead object? No, not really. Just resting. Waiting for a signal from its master.” Then I started to kick the ball around a bit, juggling it on my shoes and knees, and the narrator continued talking. “And suddenly it’s full of life. Doing everything that Pelé wants it to.”

  Those drills were the easy part. The bigger challenge was how to transmit to kids the importance and fundamentals of true team play—which of course had become a particular obsession of mine since 1970. So we filmed many of the scenes back at the old Vila Belmiro field in Santos, with some of my old teammates. We also filmed on a little village field, and on the beach, where we asked some kids to try their luck at a Pelé-style bicycle kick. In one scene, I tied a ball to a tree branch with a rope and headed it over and over—just like Dondinho had taught me so many years before.

  “But even for Pelé, there was a time when the ball didn’t always obey him,” the narrator said. “It was only hours of lonely practice as a boy that gave him this skill. Often he had no real soccer ball to practice with. He had to make do with whatever he could, maybe a ball of old rags tied with string . . .” Well, you know all that by now.

  Here, again, the moment in history we were living in helped our efforts a lot. New technology—the home film projector and, soon, the VCR—meant that more kids than ever were able to watch movies like this in their own homes. Just a few years before, that would have been unthinkable—if you wanted to watch a movie, you either had to go to the cinema or hope they showed it on one of the handful of TV channels available. Meanwhile, the decision to do the movie in English—despite the fact that mine was still a work in progress—was also a huge boost. This was the era when, thanks to American business and the spread of TV and other communications, you could suddenly find English speakers not just in the United States or England, but in places like Eastern Europe and South Asia as well. They, too, were able to see and appreciate the movie, making it even more popular. Once again, we were in the right place at the right time as the world was changing.

  Each of these projects helped, in their small way, to spread the gospel of soccer. Sure enough, as time passed, I’d go for my walks in Central Park and it became much easier to find kids playing soccer (and much harder to sneak up on them!). But as it turned out, the biggest triumph of the sport wasn’t really playing out in New York, or Boston, or any other big cities. The truly extraordinary growth occurred instead in places like Plano, Texas; Prince George’s County, Maryland; or Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Soccer turned out to be tailor-made for the more spacious, suburban United States that blossomed during the seventies and eighties. After all, there was never any shortage of space to build new soccer fields, and the sport held great appeal for boys and girls alike, eager to participate in a sport that perfectly represented the American spirit of equality and fair play. All of my doubts about the game’s future melted away. In the end, it turned out that soccer and the United States were made for each other.

  15

  Just as Santos once had, the Cosmos of Pelé toured the world—playing games in seemingly every corner of the world, from China to India to Venezuela to France. One of my favorite memories is of a trip to that beloved old stomping ground: Sweden. We returned to Gothenburg for a match against a local team, which we won 3–1. But the biggest surprise of all was at the team hotel, when an attractive blond woman approached me.

  “Do you know who I am?” she said earnestly.

  I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t, not at first. But when she introduced herself by name, I remembered instantly: It was Ilena, the Swedish girl I’d met some twenty years before, way back in 1958. She had brought along her young daughter, who was her carbon copy—blond and beautiful.

  I gave Ilena a huge hug. She had read about my visit in a local newspaper, and wanted to see me. We talked for the longest time about that magical summer, and everything that had happened in the years since. It felt so good to reconnect with someone whose life had intersected with mine so many years before, but whom I’d lost touch with because of distance and time. Plus, now I actually spoke some English, so I could understand much more of what she was saying!

  “I always knew you’d do well,” Ilena said, smiling. “Soccer has been very good to you, hasn’t it?”

  16

  The 1977 season was my final one with the Cosmos, and really the most fabulous farewell from professional soccer that a guy could pos
sibly ask for. The team moved once again—to the brand-new Giants Stadium just outside New York, where we could play before even greater crowds. Attendance nearly doubled once more, and we pulled an average of thirty-four thousand people to our games that year. The crowds were frantic, studded by celebrities, and increasingly knowledgeable about the game—no more cheering for errant shots from twenty yards out! That was also the year that the Cosmos signed my old friend Carlos Alberto—my Santos teammate and the defender who scored that final goal against Italy in the 1970 Cup. I was surrounded by friends and great players, we were playing excellent soccer, and I was living in one of the greatest cities in the world. I felt like I was in paradise.

  That final season also saw the Cosmos play for the first time in the so-called Soccer Bowl—the NASL’s championship game. As you can tell by the name, the NASL had borrowed some elements from American football, including a tradition of playing the championship game on a neutral site. In Portland, Oregon, we played Soccer Bowl III against the Seattle Sounders in front of some thirty-five thousand people. Before the game, all of my teammates came up to me and said they wanted to send me out with one last championship. I was deeply touched. And sure enough, thanks to goals by Stephen Hunt and Chinaglia—the Italian forward that Steve Ross had acquired—the Cosmos won its first Soccer Bowl!

  A few weeks later, on October 1, 1977, the Cosmos staged a “farewell” game for me. I had played one hundred and eleven games for Cosmos, scoring sixty-five goals. Of course, it wasn’t the first “farewell” I’d played in, by any means. But if anybody rolled their eyes, they were polite enough to do so in private. Friends and former rivals from Brazil and all over the world came to New York to watch the game. The best part of all was the opponent—the Cosmos were going to play Santos.