by Pelé
Why did I say this? A few months earlier, I had left a training session in Santos a little early and I saw a group of kids, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, the kind that in Brazil you give a few coins to “keep an eye on your car.” It’s really common, and always a bit of a shakedown, to tell the truth. In this case, the kids weren’t even making any pretenses about watching anything because I caught them trying to steal a car that was parked near mine. I asked them what they were doing. They ignored me at first, until they realized who I was and then they perked up a bit. “Don’t worry, Pelé,” one of them assured me. “We’ll only steal cars from São Paulo.” I laughed in shock and informed them they wouldn’t be stealing any cars at all!
They smirked and scattered after that. But the incident stuck with me, and it worried me a lot. I too had engaged in my share of childhood high jinks—recall the peanuts on the train that ended up as seed capital for the Sete de Setembro team back in Baurú. But it seemed like life for Brazilian children was becoming so much more brutal, so much more dangerous, even if the economy was growing a lot in those years. Brazil had been transformed from a mostly rural country to an overwhelmingly urban one in just a generation. A lot of the community bonds I remembered from Baurú, where everybody knew everybody else, had been destroyed as neighborhoods broke up and people moved to the big cities. Instead of swimming in rivers and snatching mangoes from neighbors’ trees, as my generation had, many youths were now trapped inside giant walled apartment blocks and experimenting with drugs. It seemed, to me anyway, like there was a huge difference between stealing peanuts and stealing cars. And of course having kids of my own made these concerns more personal than ever.
Well, it’s funny, the way life works: My comment about the kids ended up being far more memorable and important than anything else that happened that day, including the one thousandth goal or my struggles to score it.
At the time, I endured a lot of criticism from people in the media who said I was being a demagogue, or insincere. But I thought it was important to use that moment, with the whole world watching, to draw attention to a critical matter beyond the soccer field, to a social issue that had begun to worry me greatly. As I got older, I was beginning to realize that sport could—and should—have a larger purpose, beyond just goals, passes and championships. As it turned out, despite all the cynicism and doubts, people in Brazil and around the world were actually listening to what I had to say.
2
I was at a cocktail party in New York, during the Cosmos years, when a very elegant older woman was introduced to me.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Pelé,” she said. “I’m Eunice Kennedy Shriver.”
I had met Mrs. Shriver’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, some years before. I found him very charismatic and kind, and I was saddened by his death in 1963. But until that moment I knew very little about the rest of the family and the work they did. So I was very curious when Mrs. Shriver began speaking to me, that very night, about the program she had started a few years before, in 1968, to encourage athletics and sport among disabled people.
“We call it the Special Olympics,” she told me. “And we would be honored if you would help us promote it.”
I immediately accepted. I had never heard of a more worthy project. Over the years, I probably became closer to Mrs. Shriver than any other person in the United States, as I did my part to help promote the Special Olympics by appearing at events and meeting with the athletes. Mrs. Shriver was always very good to me—very serious, very astute. She said she loved the happiness of the Brazilian people, our music and our dance. But she was focused above all on making the Special Olympics into a success. What began as a track meet in Chicago in 1968, with just fifteen hundred athletes, was transformed by 1983 into a mega-event with one million athletes from fifty countries. Playing a small part in that growth was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. I’ll never forget her timeless words: “In the Special Olympics, it is not the strongest body or the most dazzling mind that counts. It is the invincible spirit which overcomes all handicaps.”
I was astounded by the American ability to promote charity, business and sport at the same time. I had never seen anything like it in Brazil. Mrs. Shriver was particularly skilled at organizing these events where people could get together to do good deeds, have fun and make money. One example was when a huge group of us gathered for a three-day weekend in Washington, D.C., to raise funds for the Special Olympics and also promote a new movie: Superman, the one starring Christopher Reeve.
A whole bunch of famous people were there, from Steve Ross to the American journalist Barbara Walters to Henry Kissinger (of course). Mrs. Shriver’s daughter Maria, who was twenty-three, brought her boyfriend, an Austrian bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was a lot quieter back then—his English was better than mine, but not by much. I asked him if he had played soccer back in Europe. “I prefer lifting weights,” he said, smiling. “I’m better at it.”
For the viewing of the Superman movie, President Carter and his wife were in attendance. Kissinger warmed up the crowd, talking about his past as a goalie back in Germany. “I want to thank you for coming to a movie that is dedicated to my life,” he joked. And then, just before the feature started, the crowd saw a short film on the Special Olympics. I remember the room went totally quiet as all those kids talked about how important it was for them to have an athletic outlet of their own.
This, apart from being heart-warming, important work, was a tremendous learning experience for me. Charity and good work could be fun. It could be done effectively, with an eye toward specific, concrete results. Armed with this knowledge, I returned to Brazil, determined to do as much good as I possibly could back home.
3
By the early 1990s, it seemed like things in Brazil couldn’t get any worse. Yet somehow, they did. In addition to all our usual economic problems, we were hit by a series of almost unthinkable tragedies that were so terrible that the whole world wept with us. In 1992, a riot broke out at the Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo. Military police stormed the jail and opened fire: One hundred and eleven prisoners were killed. Just a few months later, in 1993, a group of gunmen opened fire on several dozen homeless children who were sleeping outside the Candelária Church in Rio de Janeiro. Eight of the kids, including some as young as eleven, were killed. The murderers, in that case, turned out to be policemen who apparently were angry over crime in downtown Rio and believed these helpless children should be punished for it.
The Candelária massacre, as it came to be known, was devastating for me and many Brazilians. I cried for days. It seemed to me like the culmination of all my fears about children in our country, the worries that I’d expressed back in 1969. It was proof that we lived in a profoundly sick society, one that had turned its back on its neediest and most vulnerable people.
The Brazil of my youth, the country of very rich and very poor people, hadn’t changed much over the years, at least not in that respect. The gap between the social classes was as big as ever, and Brazil remained one of the most unequal countries in the world. Meanwhile, our national population had grown at an astonishing speed: from about sixty million people in 1956—the year I left Baurú on the bus for Santos—to one hundred seventy million or so people in 1990. Almost all of the growth had occurred in cities; the rural country of my youth was now, shockingly, eighty percent urban. Our cities were colossal, but jobs were few and far between. Many people lived short, violent lives in the favelas on hills above Rio and São Paulo. Few of us believed we would ever see things improve.
In 1994, just as the World Cup in the United States was going on, there was also a presidential campaign under way. I didn’t pay much attention. As much as I dislike cynicism, I was convinced that politics would always be part of the problem in Brazil, not part of the solution. My history had certainly taught me to believe that.
The victor was a little
different from previous Brazilian presidents, though. He was a famous sociologist from São Paulo named Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He had studied poverty and its causes up close, and he had performed studies back in the 1950s showing how black Brazilians had suffered from a lack of economic opportunities. Fernando Henrique, as people called him, was a leftist during the dictatorship, and had even gone into exile in Chile and France. But he had evolved over time and now wanted to make Brazil a modern country with a vibrant, integrated economy. He wasn’t a charismatic guy, and while he spoke French, Spanish and English fluently, he sometimes struggled to speak in a language everyday Brazilians could understand. But, as the finance minister in the previous government, he had somehow managed to tame that old Brazilian problem of inflation. Prices rose a stunning twenty-five hundred percent in 1993, the worst year we ever had. But by the middle of 1994 they were barely going up at all. This unexpected success led him to run for president.
Fernando Henrique wasn’t above using soccer to help his political agenda. In that respect, at least, I guess he was pretty similar to some of his predecessors. On July 1, 1994, three days before the World Cup game in California between Brazil and the United States, Fernando Henrique launched a new currency, called the “real.” He hoped it would help stabilize prices even further. Of course, soccer would have no direct impact on whether a new currency succeeded or not. But, as Fernando Henrique later said, he did think that Brazilians might be more likely to accept the real if they were in a good mood and feeling confident about their country. What better way to accomplish that than by winning the World Cup?
So Fernando Henrique decided to stake his fate to that of the national team, inviting journalists and others to his apartment to watch as he sat in front of his television and cheered on Brazil. This was kind of a risky bet—after all, Brazil hadn’t won a World Cup in twenty-four years! But, of course, everything worked out, and Brazil beat Italy in the championship that day at the Rose Bowl. Coincidence or not, the real’s launch was also a success. Fernando Henrique won the election in a landslide a few weeks later. Politics and soccer—together once again in Brazil. I couldn’t believe it.
Sometime before the inauguration, in late 1994, I was invited to a meeting with Fernando Henrique in Brasilia. I didn’t really know what to expect. He was very polite, and more down-to-earth than I’d expected. “One of the things we want to do is get more kids into school,” Fernando Henrique said. “We think this, over time, will solve a lot of Brazil’s problems.”
This sounded great, but I didn’t really see what it had to do with me, until he got to the point. “Pelé,” he said, “I would like for you to be the extraordinary minister of sports in my government.”
Oh, this was not a new idea. I was flattered, of course. But I had been offered the post by three previous presidents already in the past ten years, and I had declined. I told Fernando Henrique as much, politely thanked him, and prepared to leave.
“Well, I understand,” he said softly. “But what about that appeal you made with your one thousandth goal, for the children of Brazil?”
Fernando Henrique said he wanted to make sports a fundamental part of his plan to coax kids into school. “This would be an opportunity for you to do something concrete, something real, to help the kids. So come on, Pelé. What do you think?”
I remember thinking: Man, this guy is good! Maybe it was time for me to stop talking about Brazilian politics, and actually do something to make a positive difference. Almost despite myself, I found myself saying “yes” to Fernando Henrique’s offer. After so many years complaining about politics, now I was going to be part of the system.
4
I’ve always been a very relaxed, informal guy, even by the standards of Brazil—a country where people are, let’s say, not known for wearing suits and ties everywhere. So the pomp and decorum of Brasilia, our capital, came as a shock at first. It was a city of elaborate titles, dark suits, black sedans, and speeches where you had to acknowledge everybody important in a room by name before you were allowed to say a single thing of substance! My friends didn’t even know what to call me anymore. Minister Edson? Minister Pelé? I’d had all kinds of nicknames over the years, including some that lightheartedly referenced my race, like negão and crioulo. People I’d known for decades would come up to me during those first few months at the ministry and say:
“Hey there, crioulo, what’s up?”
And then they’d turn pale and say:
“Oops, sorry, Minister Edson . . .”
I’d just laugh and tell them: “No, no, relax. . . .”
It was all a new experience for me, but I was very proud of my new position. I was honored to serve my country in an official capacity, and thankful for the trust that the president and my fellow Brazilians had placed in me. I was also proud to be the first black cabinet minister in the history of Brazil. That nearly two centuries passed after Brazil’s independence for this to happen showed, once again, how much Afro-Brazilians had struggled to find opportunities. I was glad to help knock down that barrier, so that many more people could follow in my footsteps, which others soon did.
I did discover, to both my surprise and delight, that one could do quite a few good things from Brasilia. As Fernando Henrique had promised, our biggest focus was on convincing families to send their kids to school. This would address several of Brazil’s most pressing problems, including, hopefully, the biggest of all: poverty. A 1992 study showed that fifteen percent of Brazilian children under the age of five showed signs of malnutrition. Obviously, this had horrible consequences for not only the present, but the future of Brazil as well. All told, about thirty-two million kids across the country lived in poverty—a number greater than the entire population of Canada. We believed that, if we could get kids into school and keep them there, we could ensure in the short term that they were eating better, and we could also keep them away from bad influences on the street that often led to crime. In the longer term, we would give them an education—which was clearly a necessary step to pull people out of poverty.
One of Fernando Henrique’s ideas was a program called bolsa escola, which paid families a small cash stipend of a few hundred dollars every month as long as they kept their kids in school. This was very important—in fact, it would mark a turning point in Brazilian education, and the lives of many poor people as well. But I knew from my own experience that the kids themselves also needed a sweetener—they needed more excuses to go to school. After all, if there had been soccer at school back in Baurú, I might have skipped class a little less often as a kid!
So, with the help of many dedicated people at the sports ministry and elsewhere, we started a program that put low-cost sports facilities, like soccer fields and basketball courts, in many of our poorest neighborhoods. We called these facilities vilas olimpicas, or “Olympic villages.” The name helped give them a big-time feel, but the vilas usually had a cost of well under a million dollars each. Since the Brazilian government was still very short of funds in those days, we were able to obtain much of the money from private sources like Xerox, an American company. Kids could use the vilas whenever they wanted, but—here was the key—they needed to prove they had been attending classes regularly if they wanted to get in. This requirement had two benefits: It gave kids an extra reason to attend class, and it also kept them off the streets after school, away from drugs and other problems, even if for just a few hours.
It was a simple idea, but man, was it effective. In many of the neighborhoods where we installed the vilas, school attendance soared, while youth crime dropped, in some cases to near zero. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, came to Rio and visited a particularly successful vila olimpica in Mangueira, a poor neighborhood. President Clinton gave a speech in which he lauded the success of the program, and congratulated one of the students in Mangueira for being the first person in her family to go to university.
; Afterward, President Clinton and I walked over to the soccer field. “Take it easy on me,” he said, laughing. I smiled, and the press laughed and snapped lots of photos while we kicked the ball around a bit.
President Clinton was not a bad ballplayer! But, to be honest, my thoughts were in a place way beyond soccer. I was so very happy, and proud of what we’d accomplished. That moment in Mangueira felt like a culmination of things that I’d worked very hard for. My success in soccer had given me a platform to make a difference. My education had given me the skills to do so. The trust that people had put in me, and the hard work my colleagues and I put in at the ministry, resulted in the creation of a project that really did make a positive difference in children’s lives. It was a moment to be proud of, for Edson as much as for Pelé.
5
The work with the kids was by far the most rewarding thing I did as minister. We also helped organize soccer tournaments among Brazil’s Indians, and games among prisoners in our jails. But there was another group whom I wanted to help as well: soccer players. And while this might not sound at first like a demographic that needed our assistance, given all the other needy folks in Brazil at the time, the truth was that a little government action was long overdue.
Most foreigners assume that Brazilian professional soccer must be thriving. After all, we’ve got one of the world’s richest soccer traditions, a huge base of loyal fans, and a never-ending stream of exciting local talent. So we must have one of the world’s best leagues, right? Wrong. Back in the 1990s, the Brazilian league often barely had enough money to pay its players, in part because so many funds were lost to corruption. Nobody really had any idea where all the millions of dollars from tickets and transfer fees went. The stadiums themselves were often unsafe because of rising violence in our society, from which soccer was not immune. As a result, families began staying away from games, and the stands at our big venues—even the Maracanã—were often half empty.