He was the95 game’s Elvis and Sinatra
IN 1973, a magazine called Texas Monthly sought new ways to describe the star of a ballet who shone a little brighter than the rest.
‘He’s a Christ, a Buddha,’ they wrote. Then, reaching for a parallel to which younger readers might relate, they called him a ‘rock star’.
In the years since, the term has been applied widely to those who barely lifted a guitar.
Bill Clinton was the first rockstar president. Billy Connolly the first rock-star comedian. Bjorn Borg the first rock-star tennis player. Pele can lay legitimate claim to being the first rock-star footballer.
To those of us too young to see the greats do their thing, tributewriting is an awkward business. Like gatecrashing a party with no invitation. And yet, for any child of the seventies with a football-mad father, Pele was an ever-present. And his death feels like losing a little piece of our own lives.
When he scored in a 4-1 win over Czechoslovakia in Brazil’s opening game of the 1970 World Cup finals, yours truly was just three days old. Eighteen days later, he lifted the trophy for the third time and was named the most famous man on the planet.
Add him to a list featuring John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Pope Paul VI, Muhammad Ali, Paul Newman, Queen Elizabeth II, Neil Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor and John Wayne, and there was only one winner.
Within three years the brand name ‘Pele’ would be the secondbiggest on the globe according to a survey. Forget oil and gas conglomerates, banks, automotive manufacturers, airlines and telecommunications titans. Only Coca-Cola was bigger.
By the mid-1970s, ‘soccer’ barely existed in the US public’s conscious. Celebrities? They couldn’t get enough of those.
So it was, then, that the New York Cosmos sensationally lured Pele out of retirement in 1975 to trigger a Stateside explosion in football’s popularity.
They became the most glamorous football club on the planet. Studio 54 in Manhattan was the most famous nightclub in existence. And the King of Football was John Travolta long before Saturday Night Fever hit the big screen.
‘Absolutely everybody wanted to shake his hand, to get a photo with him,’ said Mick Jagger of Pele’s residence at Studio 54. ‘Saying you had partied with Pele was the biggest badge of honour going.’
The aura of Edson Arantes do Nascimento attracted Ali, Peter Frampton, Elton John, Diane Keaton, Henry Kissinger, Robert Redford, Rod Stewart and Barbra Streisand to Cosmos games.
His team-mates were Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia.
Earning $4million for a three-year contract, Pele was the highestpaid team athlete in world sport in 1975.
When the great man died aged 82 on Thursday night, MailOnline published a picture scrapbook of his remarkable life.
There he was with Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s. The Queen and Prince Philip presented him with a trophy on a state visit to Brazil in 1968 and it wasn’t entirely clear who was the royalty.
He travelled to the White House to meet President Richard Nixon in 1974. Starred on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1975. Here he was with Sly Stallone.
Pele tried his hand at acting and had the title role in The Adventures of Plinio Pompeu.
He also starred in a sci-fi series called The Strangers. He famously scored that overhead kick in 1981’s Escape to Victory.
In 2000, he handed the trophy to an overawed Michael Schumacher for his F1 victory in Sao Paulo and was captured shaking hands with Tiger Woods.
It’s not really in Lionel Messi’s make-up to do the Hollywood thing. That he could if he so chose owes everything to the commercial trail blazed by Pele.
The game’s first cultural icon became instantly recognisable to people who had never watched a football game in their life. To those of us who only saw him do his thing via glorious colour shots of Mexico 1970, he was just there.
In 1999, Pele, Ali and Jackie Robinson were the only sports people to make the Time magazine compilation of The Most Important People of the Century.
The same year, he was one of nine sportspeople bestowed with the Athlete of the Century award by the International Olympic Committee, despite never taking part in the Games.
Pele was not only a rock star. He was an ambassador for everything right and good about football.
Like Elvis or Sinatra, he was instantly recognisable on every TV set in every front room in every city in every country.
Instances of people who didn’t recognise the face are few. Former Celtic winger Davie Provan once told the story of a trip to New York in the early 1980s.
Taking part in the Transatlantic Tournament alongside Cosmos, the Parkhead side were holed up in a hotel where a party was being hosted for the Escape to Victory cast.
Provan recalls standing in a crowded lift with Celtic assistant manager John Clark when Pele squeezed in and instantly recognised the Lisbon Lion from Brazil’s friendly draw with Scotland at Hampden in 1966.
‘Glasgow, No6’ said the world’s greatest player as Clark nodded and smiled politely. When Pele departed the lift, the two Celtic men turned to each other as Clark asked Provan, straight-faced: ‘Who the hell was that?’