The son of a king, who would have thought, was once ashamed of his father.
It was the beginning of the 1980s. The boy Edinho, one of the three children from Edson Arantes do Nascimento’s marriage, Pelé, to Rosemeri Cholbi, lived in New York, home to the Cosmos, the team where his father had played a few years earlier.
The star’s time at the Manhattan club had given football more visibility in the United States, but it hadn’t been enough for the sport to compete against basketball, for example.
At school, sometimes a classmate said that his father was a doctor; Now another said that his father was an engineer. “I kept thinking: ‘My father is a football player, no one here really knows what that is’. I was ashamed!”, says the former goalkeeper, now coach.
This is one of the curious passages in “King – the Book about the Incomparable Man to Whom They Have Tried to Compare Themselves for 70 Years”, recently released by journalist Paulo Vinicius Coelho, the PVC.
The publication recalls the main episodes of the extraordinary career of the athlete, who died in December 2022. It also covers his marriages, his relationships with his seven children, his coexistence with his fans and his work as a minister, businessman and TV commentator.
It is a biography, although PVC avoids classifying the publication in this way. “I read the biographies written by Ruy Castro and Fernando Morais, so I have a certain shame [de me referir ao livro dessa maneira].”
It is true that “Rei” does not come close, for example, to the amount of information and narrative care of “Estrela Solitária”, a book about Garrincha written by Ruy. In any case, the work meets the basic requirements of a biography, portraying Pelé’s trajectory based on interviews and research in newspapers and old documents.
The author describes the very modest life of the couple Dondinho and Celeste in Três Corações (MG), where Edson was born in 1940. It was in Bauru (SP), however, that he spent most of his childhood. The skinny Dico, his nickname at the time, started to make news on BAC’s boys team, Bauru Atlético Clube.
At the age of 15, he was taken by Waldemar de Brito, then BAC coach, to Santos. Pepe, the Village Cannon, says he heard Brito’s announcement in July 1956: “I’ve come to bring a genius.”
Pepe, Clodoaldo and Lima, who played alongside Pelé at Santos, are among the approximately 25 names interviewed by PVC, a list that includes the aforementioned Edinho.
In the chapters dedicated to the World Cups, the author relives the disconcerting moves, even those that did not result in a goal.
In the team’s debut in 1970, against Czechoslovakia, the score indicated 1-1 at the end of the first half. The match was tense.
Pelé, writes PVC, “walked with the ball, just behind the midfield”. “He seemed to be looking at the ground, but his 360º vision noticed goalkeeper Viktor near the edge of the penalty area. He shot. The ball traveled 60 meters flying from the wide circle until it kissed the left post and went out as a goal kick, before the perplexed look of the Czech archer.”
In the 4-1 defeat against the Czechs, Pelé was the best on the field.
The author also considers situations in which the king left the nobility aside. There is, for example, a chapter dedicated to Sandra Regina, a daughter only recognized after five years of legal battles.
At the end of the interview about the book, the obvious and inevitable question comes: is Pelé still the greatest football player in history?
PVC does not respond directly. He prefers to remember an excerpt from the text on the back cover of his new book. “Being a King means living 82 years and spending 66 of them hearing that Di Stéfano could have been better; that Puskás could have scored a thousand goals, but he has no list; that Eusébio could have been faster; Cruyff, more cerebral; Maradona, more charismatic; Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo having more goals in official matches, with a scoresheet. And, during these 66 years, the point of comparison is always the same: Pelé. That’s what being a King is. That’s being Pele.”
