Pelé is dead, something that seems unbelievable even to someone like me who has no idea what the differences might be, between any of these sports involving round objects. I can remember wondering what all the fuss was about because, whatever, I was ten and rolled my eyes at the adulation and then I saw a clip of him on the field, and then many more, and was mesmerised. I still don’t care for soccer but Pelé wasn’t just soccer, he was Pelé. If you grew up as I did, with Pelé always in the background, it’s hard to believe that he was a mere mortal who might die.
I remember him coming to Calcutta and what a huge, huge, huge deal that was, and how intense was the worship of this one man. So much of what passes for sports in the U.S is occluded by the spectacle of merchandising and the endless chatter of talking heads that I think it will always be impossible to convey to the average person what soccer really means to people in the rest of the world, and to make them understand that Pelé was more than a human, more than a god, that he embodied the pure genius of soccer at its finest: a body defying the rules of physics, transcendent in a singular moment that soars above flesh and memory.
*****
Img. Wikipedia, John Matthew Smith.
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