Pele

The Full Biography

Pelé. Footballer. The boy from Três Corações who made a Brazilian game into a world climate, then spent the American years proving a Saturday in New Jersey could learn a name it had misspelled.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a man in yellow, arms out, a crowd already in the air before the ball has finished arriving. Three World Cups. O Rei. What the still cannot show is Edson Arantes do Nascimento of Três Corações, a father who had been a footballer and could not make it pay, a kid who shined shoes, a Santos contract at fifteen, and an old man in São Paulo who had already been a ministry and a commercial and a hospital file before the country buried him as a head of state.

He was born on October 23, 1940, in Três Corações, Minas Gerais. The family called him Dico. A local goalkeeper named Pelé — the story goes — lent the nickname as a taunt; the boy hated it and then could not get rid of it. His father, João Ramos do Nascimento, called Dondinho, had the gift and not the paycheck. His mother, Celeste Arantes, kept the house when the gift did not. They moved to Bauru, in São Paulo state. Edson played with rags tied into a ball. That sentence is in every account because it is true and because it is useful. The useful version still leaves out the afternoons that were only hunger and a vacant lot. He shined shoes. He sold roasted peanuts. The first room was not a stadium.

Waldemar de Brito, a former international, saw him at Bauru Athletic Club and took him to Santos FC. He was fifteen. The first-team debut came on September 7, 1956, against Corinthians de Santo André. He scored. By 1957 he was in the Brazilian side. The door was not a World Cup. The door was a coastal club that played like a circus and a machine, and a teenager who could do with a ball what older men were still planning. Santos became, for nearly two decades, the room he worked in: Campeonato Paulista titles as a habit, the Taça Brasil, a side that treated Tuesday in Recife and Saturday in Europe as the same job.

Sweden, 1958. He was seventeen. Brazil had never won the thing. He scored the only goal against Wales in the quarterfinal, a header in a match the world still files as a boy’s first true night. He scored a hat-trick against France in the semifinal. He scored two in the final against the hosts, including a dummy that left a Swedish center-half on the grass and a finish the newsreels kept. Brazil 5, Sweden 2. The pictures of a boy crying in the dressing room, Garrincha’s arm around him, are the civic object. The world learned a Portuguese nickname it would never again have to look up. He came home a fact. He was the youngest player to score in a World Cup final and the youngest to win one. Those records have not moved.

Santos, after Sweden, became a touring empire. They played everywhere a gate could be charged — Europe, Africa, the Gulf, the Americas — a club that was also a traveling proof. In 1962 they won the Copa Libertadores and then the Intercontinental Cup against Benfica. In Lisbon, in the second leg, he scored three. In 1963 they won both again, the Intercontinental this time against Milan. The club count of his goals, friendlies included, is the Brazilian weather: more than a thousand, a figure Guinness would one day write down as 1,279. FIFA’s lists are colder and smaller. A complete file says both: the club count is the religion; the stricter count is still a mountain.

Chile, 1962, is the wound inside the second star. He scored against Mexico, then tore a muscle against Czechoslovakia and sat the rest of the tournament. Garrincha carried the side. Brazil won anyway. The pair were not a single person. They were two weathers the country needed at once, and in Chile only one of them could walk. He came home to Santos and went back on the road. The body was already a national instrument. The instrument was already being kicked.

England, 1966, was a mugging. He scored against Bulgaria and was fouled until the tournament had used him up. Against Portugal he was kicked until he could not continue. Brazil went out in the first group. He said he would not play another World Cup. He was twenty-five. He did not mean it for long. The sentence sat in the file as a bruise, not as a retirement. Santos still had him. The country still had a yellow shirt to point at. The generals, who had taken the government in 1964, were happy to stand next to him. He was not a revolutionary. He was a national treasure a dictatorship could borrow. A complete life holds the treasure and the borrowing.

The thousandth goal, on a count Santos still treats as scripture, came on November 19, 1969, at the Maracanã, a penalty for Santos against Vasco da Gama. The stadium stopped. He took the ball. He lifted his jersey to the crowd. The country had been waiting as if a calendar could be a sacrament. Whether you file that goal as the thousandth depends on which ledger you trust. The night itself was real. The tears were real. The television was real.

Mexico, 1970, is the monument that is also a television event. Color. Jairzinho, Tostão, Rivelino, Gérson, Carlos Alberto. He scored in the opening match against Czechoslovakia. He scored the header against England that Gordon Banks somehow reached; the save is England’s civic object, the jump is his. He scored against Romania. In the final against Italy he headed the first goal, laid off the fourth for Carlos Alberto, and became, in a single fortnight, the only man with three World Cup winner’s medals. Brazil 4, Italy 1. The fourth goal, the pile, the yellow shirts in the Mexico City sun — that is the still the world kept. He left the national team in 1971 with a goodbye at the Maracanã that emptied a city into a stand. Seventy-seven goals in ninety-two caps. The record stood for half a century.

Santos could not hold him forever. He played his last official match for the club in 1974. In 1975 Warner Communications and the New York Cosmos made an American offer. He was thirty-four. The North American Soccer League was a league that needed a name more than it needed another midfielder. He gave them the name. He played first at Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island, a wreck of a ground, and then at Giants Stadium when the gates demanded a bigger bowl. Giorgio Chinaglia was the other star and the other temperament. Franz Beckenbauer arrived in 1977. Shep Messing, Werner Roth, Steve Hunt — a circus that was also a serious attempt to make the United States care. He filled nights when the country still thought the sport belonged to someone else. The 1977 Soccer Bowl, against the Seattle Sounders in Portland, was a farewell. He cried again. The American Saturday had learned the name. The league still died a few years after. The name did not.

He made films. He made records. He sat for every interviewer who could pay the freight. Pelé (1977), the biopic with a score that wanted to be a hymn. Escape to Victory (1981), John Huston’s prisoner-of-war match, put him on a field with Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone and a hip that had already begun to argue; the bicycle kick in that picture is a stunt and a signature at once. He was not a recluse. He was a traveling industry with a left foot.

I was born for soccer, just as Beethoven was born for music.Pelé

The turn is the Cosmos, and it is easy to miss because the yellow shirt is louder. A lot of great players die as a domestic saint. He spent his last seasons teaching a new country how to say his name, then spent the decades after as a traveling ministry of the game: ambassador, pitchman, minister of sport for a season, a face on every product that would pay. He was not shy about the products. The boy from Bauru had learned what a name is worth.

He married Rosemeri dos Reis Cholbi in 1966; they had three children, Kelly Cristina, Edson Cholbi — called Edinho — and Jennifer. The marriage ended in 1982. He married Assíria Lemos Seixas in 1994; twins, Joshua and Celeste, arrived in 1996. He married Marcia Cibele Aoki in 2016. There were other children the papers counted when they wanted a mess, including Sandra Machado, whose paternity he recognized after a fight, and who died in 2006. Edinho kept goal and then kept a drug case; the son of the king sat in a prison the country watched. He was not a quiet private man. He was a public man who sometimes wanted quiet and did not know how to buy it. Friends from Santos describe a professional who was first on the training ground and last to leave a photograph. Both are the life.

The later years

After the Cosmos he did not become a coach in the ordinary sense. He became a traveling argument for the sport. In 1994 UNESCO named him a Champion for Sport. He was a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He stood at World Cup draws, in sponsor tents, in presidential boxes that needed a yellow shirt beside the flag. He published memoirs that retold the vacant lot and Sweden. He endorsed coffee, cars, credit cards, medicine, and anything else a name could move. The boy from Bauru had learned that a name is a factory. Some Brazilians winced. He did not apologize for eating. Queen Elizabeth II gave him an honorary knighthood at Buckingham Palace in 1997. FIFA, in 1999, split a Player of the Century honor with him in it. He accepted the plaques the way he accepted a camera: as part of the job.

In January 1995 President Fernando Henrique Cardoso named him extraordinary minister for sport. He held the post until April 1998, when the ministry itself was abolished. The Pelé Law, passed in 1998, tried to force clubs toward contracts and transparency the old patrons did not want — a player’s right to move, a cleaner ledger, a modern club instead of a private court. He was not a natural politician. He was a famous man with a bill. The federations made him pay in enemies. He left the ministry and went back on the road. The road was the job he actually knew. He kept a house in Guarujá and a life in São Paulo. Marcia was there in the last chapter. The children were a large, unfinished room.

The body that had been the instrument began to argue in the 2010s the way a used machine argues. Hip replacements. A kidney that needed help. In September 2021 doctors at Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in São Paulo removed a tumor from his colon. He posted from the hospital with the old grin. The country watched the grin thin. He went back in, and back again, through 2022, a respiratory infection on top of the cancer, a public prayer calendar the family did not ask for and could not stop. He was still, in those rooms, Edson to the people who had known him before the yellow shirt.

He died on December 29, 2022, in São Paulo. He was eighty-two. Multiple organ failure, the hospital said, from the progression of the cancer. Brazil declared official mourning. The coffin went to Vila Belmiro, Santos’s ground, and lay there for three days while the queue did not end when the cameras left. The procession took him through the streets of Santos, past the house where the boy had lived, to the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica. The generals were gone. The name was not.

After he was gone

Santos still plays in the shirt. The Maracanã still says the name. Every Brazilian number 10 is a tax he levied on the future. The Cosmos are a memory and a reboot. Children who never saw 1970 know the word Pelé the way they know the word king. The club count and the FIFA count still argue. The argument is a form of love. FIFA’s 2022 World Cup, already in progress when he died, stopped to put his face on a screen. The yellow shirt is now a relic and a brand at once. The family has had to share a father who is a ministry, a commercial, and a tomb the country treats as a shrine.

The Pelé Law is still in the Brazilian file, amended and argued. The honorary knighthood is still in the British file. UNESCO and UNICEF still have his name on old letterhead. Edinho has had to live as a son of a climate. Marcia has had to live as the last wife of a man the world did not file as a husband. Vila Belmiro still takes visitors to the locker that is no longer his. The vacant lot in Bauru is a plaque now, which is what cities do when they cannot keep the afternoon.

He came out of Três Corações, shined shoes, made Sweden cry, survived Chile and England, crowned Mexico, taught New Jersey the name, sold what the name could sell, carried a law the clubs did not want, and died in São Paulo with a country in a queue. If you only remember the yellow shirt, you have the still. If you remember Bauru, 1966, the Cosmos, and the law with his name on it, you have him.

Portrait: Joop van Bilsen / Anefo (cropped by Bremps) · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl · via Wikimedia Commons

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