Pele on Nigeria: ‘Achieving ceasefire in Biafran War my proudest moment’

The beautiful game not just changed Pele’s life but one around him as well as at one point his club Santos was in demand to play teams in Europe.

Apart from the goals and the artistry on the field, there was much more to the legend of Pele. For a boy who initially wanted to be a pilot, only for an accident to ruin it, football became Pele’s world when he saw his father cry after Brazil lost the final to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup at the Maracana. From being part of a video game to stop a war in Nigeria to being called a National Treasure, there are a lot of factors that contributed to the legend of Pele.

The boy who wanted to fly a plane

Pelé, first went to an airport to sell peanuts as a very young boy from an impoverished home. But young Edson’s dream, seen barefoot and from dirt roads, was to fly for he loved everything at Bauru’s aerodrome — planes, gliders and pilots who take off from airfields.

A glider’s accident and death jolts Edson in 1940s, as he and his group of friends go looking for the wreckage and then the mortuary in the southeast of Brazil. From a window, they watched the autopsy and the dripping blood from a severed arm put him off his pilot dreams forever.

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Compelled by circumstances to start out on a shoeshine kit, he hunkers down to bring in money. Ironically he plays shoeless when kicking about a make-do football in the streets. They can’t afford both. Dreams of football aren’t cheap.

Pelé was the ‘I’ in the Edson bulb

His mother Celeste came from a town called Três Corações, in the Minas Gerais state in the ’30s and ’40s. Like most of interior Brazil, they had no electricity, and lots of football clubs. It’s where she met his father Joao, known as Dondinho, who played for the local club while doing his military service. They married and her first child was born around the time electricity came to Três Corações.

The baby was named after Thomas Edison. He was officially nicknamed Dico, but his real name was Edson Arantes do Nascimiento. At school, he pronounced the name of the local club Vasco da Gama goalkeeper, Bile as Pile so, a classmate started calling him Pele. The man himself thought it was like babbling and didn’t like the name.

Besides the King, in Brazil he was often called “Pérola Negra” which meant Black Pearl. “I was really proud that I was named after Thomas Edison and wanted to be called Edson. I thought Pelé sounded horrible. It was a rubbish name. Edson sounded so much more serious and important,” he once told The Guardian.

When Edson decided to form a football club with his friends, they had neither gear nor shoes. But in a pre-TV world, they had football stickers, like trading cards of famous players and their trivia. Pooling stickers into complete sets they decided to swap those for some gear.

The other ingenious scheme was to whisk away peanuts out of freight trains and sell them outside stadiums, airports and theatres. The first gear came from sacks of these stolen munchies.