Pele: How I fell in love with Pele

There was nothing remotely dramatic about growing up with Pele in Kolkata of the seventies. When the ‘King’ won his third World Cup and last played in one in 1970, I was too young to understand its significance.It was not until a few years later that I chanced upon a dog-eared copy of Pele: My Life and the Beautiful Game in the library of my friend’s dad, an advocate with a love for sport. He was a member of the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB), a privilege which acted as my passport to the hallowed Eden Gardens for a day’s action during the New Year Test matches, and a sworn supporter of Mohun Bagan.Any correlation between the Brazilian and the Kolkata giants seemed remote. Till, Pele’s New York Cosmos, where he was playing after retiring from international football, played an exhibition match against Mohun Bagan on September 25, 1977.Pele's New York Cosmos vs Mohun Bagan mediumhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0gFYk12iOIIf I say the opportunity was more than a windfall to the legion of football fanatics of the city, it still doesn't convey the impact it had. The seventies, as oldtimers will recall, were heady days for the sport in Kolkata – feeding on the three-pronged rivalry between Mohun Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting. The local league matches, believe it or not, were played for 70 minutes, while our exposure to international football was confined to the grainy, black-and-white footage from past World Cups in the Film Division clippings that ran before a movie show at the theatre.The king in KolkataIt was not a surprise that “lakhs of people”, as football historian Novy Kapadia describes it in his book, Barefoot to Boots, milled outside Dum Dum airport to get a glimpse of the man who popularised the term jogo bonito – the beautiful game — on which Brazilian national teams had established their copyright for generations.“Lakhs of people gathered outside the Dum Dum airport to greet the Brazilian legend. There were also teeming crowds outside his hotel in central Kolkata, waiting to catch a glimpse of the only man who had won three World Cups for his team,” Kapadia writes.When I took up sports journalism years later, I had the privilege of being an occasional visitor to the houses of some of the local stars of yesteryears, who helped Mohun Bagan draw 2-2 against Pele’s men.When the legend entertained the my city-Kolkata. Playing for New York Cosmos, Pele came to the 'homeland of the bea… https://t.co/130kMlCBcC— Mayukh Biswas (@MayukhDuke) 1672343592000A common presence on their ‘Wall of Fame’ in the drawing rooms were the photos of Shyam Thapa, Surajit Sengupta, Subhas Bhowmick, Gautam Sarkar, Subrata Bhattacharya, Pradip Chowdhury or goalkeeper Shibaji Banerjee with the icon – or action photos from the match.Each of them had their favourite Pele story and the person who always took pride about how he marshalled his team to stop the greatest footballer of the world was PK Banerjee, their coach. ‘’I had reminded my players that playing against the greatest footballer on earth was a lifetime experience. But, make sure that even if we end up losing the match 0-10, Pele should not be injured because his feet are priceless,’’ PK reminisced almost four decades later when the Brazilian again visited the city in 2015. medium96613314The match at the Eden Gardens was sold out with approximately 80,000 people at the venue. My friends and I tried to soak in the atmosphere by listening to the Bangla commentary on the radio. Then 37, Pele was past his prime and quite understandably, didn’t go all out on a rain-soaked turf – but each of his touches was greeted with a hearty roar from the crowd.The city probably fell in love with Brazil because it saw the magic of Pele. I have often wondered about the genesis of this love affair – which later spread to Kerala and Goa – the two other football-loving states till the arrival of a certain Diego Maradona drove a wedge in the loyalties and created a separate fandom for Argentina.Sociologists may know better. The image of Brazil being a vast country with economic deprivation – where every street kid out of the favela (hutment) of Rio de Janeiro takes to football as an escape route from poverty – must be a dream which found resonance in a city like Kolkata. If football was a game for the working class in Brazil, identifying with it was much easier than the structured development of Europe, where academies and schools oversee the nurturing of talent.Magic realismLive television had not entered our homes till the 1982 World Cup. However, there is enough evidence of Pele’s influence on Bengali consciousness. In his much-acclaimed novel Striker, published in 1973, author Moti Nandi gives enough evidence of this.Prasun, the poor, hardworking small-town boy who is the protagonist, dreams of a foreigner stepping out of his limousine outside his house to say that he is the secretary of Brazil’s Santos club and wants to sign him for the coming season. The choice of Santos as a dream destination for the aspiring striker is certainly by design – as Pele played for the Brazilian club till he moved to North America. medium96613359Nandi, with one such suggestion, captured the mood of his times – for Brazil were the holders of the Jules Rimet Trophy with three wins and Pele had established himself as the undisputed king of the game. The Brazilian idols may have changed over the decades with the likes of Romario, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Neymar replacing the likes of Zico, Socrates and Falcao – but Pele was the man who started it all.Much later, during my stay in Dubai, I met the legend. This was in the build up to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil when a septuagenarian Pele, then wheelchair-bound, paid a few visits to the UAE as a brand ambassador of Emirates airline.In an interaction with the media, it was hardly a surprise when Pele said he hoped Brazil would make the final and that it should be a repeat line-up of the 1950 final between the hosts and Uruguay. medium96613531After all, the World Cup was coming back to Brazil after more than half-a-century and the legend hoped there would be no ‘Maracanazo’ this time (Uruguay prevailed 1-0 in a shock win over Brazil in the final) and Brazil would triumph. A prediction, which came more from the heart as the Uruguayans were no longer the same force but then, Pele was never really on the mark with his predictions.It’s not that frail figure of Pele that I would like to remember. For me, it’s more about a whirling, sepia-tinted collage of the local newspapers the morning after that match in Kolkata, YouTube clips of some of his extraordinary goals and of course – his magic spell which still converts parts of the city into Brazilian ghettos every four years.Long live the King!(The author is a freelance editor and writer) medium96613203 medium96613966