Over Brian’s last few posts about Pelé, we—RoP’s community of contributors/commenters and readers—have advanced the notion that history punishes perfection by consigning it to irrelevance. Perfection is so unrelatable that it becomes ahistorical. It supersedes the ordinary to such an extent that it isn’t even extraordinary: it simply doesn’t belong in any category of our own experience. We have so little truck with it that we forget to adapt it for the generations that will follow us. It just—exists, marking proto-geological time, questioned now and then for its usefulness, fundamentally immutable. In a worldview that discriminates between gods and humans, we are comfortably heretic. ‘Those who are heroes are known / Such as this man, who is the son of that other … / Thou hast no mother and no father / Thou resemblest a bastard child, God.’
In the rational view, perfection cannot exist in sport, because sport cannot accommodate a mathematical notion of perfection any more than history itself can. And even if Pelé achieved football’s value of perfection, which is possible, since he may be the greatest footballer known to us, it is not his records, or the specifics of his talent that have caused his myth to develop differently from that of the great footballers who followed him. How have those links between our present and Pelé’s past snapped?
I.
I’m going to spoil you for the first few pages of Moti Nandy’s brilliant Bengali novella, 
Striker, published in 1973 and set in contemporary Calcutta. In a crowded neighbourhood, a large, gleaming car stops to let out a prosperous, cigar-chomping football agent. He has come to the teenage protagonist’s house, attracting a considerable audience in his wake, hanging breathlessly on to every word of his. Yes, the agent has come to speak to young Prasoon. Yes, he does in fact have an offer for him. Yes, he wants to take Prasoon back home to play professionally for his club. The football agent is not from Ajax, Juventus or Real Madrid. He comes from Santos.
These opening pages were first read a mere three years after 1970, a World Cup that Calcutta followed via newspapers and post-facto magazine reports, through radio bulletins carried word-of-mouth around a crowd and black-and-white photographs. In an age when telecommunications did not mean what we think they mean now, when culture lag and a controlled economy might have unmoored even this historic footballing city from the global moment, Pelé and his team became a watershed. To this date, Kolkata (as we now name it) contains a Brazil-supporting, Pelé-worshipping population equalled by few in Asia.
To go quickly over ground Brian’s already covered: we could say that the charm of this love story is rooted in that paucity of eyewitness record. Was Pelé lionised precisely because he was not hypervisible, and is his importance diminishing because we now live in a too-visual world? No. Football is not just a YouTube fandom. And in fact, this is the neatest evidence we have that ‘YouTube football’ is less significant to fans’ relationship with the game than is sometimes supposed. Because then Pelé highlight reels—undreamt-of by most football fans in the world in 1973, but available to us today—would be at the very top of our heightened expectations of a-ha moments, wouldn’t they? Someone like Marco van Basten, that early prototype of video-game footballers, would probably be the most worshipped goalscorer ever (hey, Bergkamp fans—I’ll see you outside). Can we then agree that football can be judged by a set of criteria that aren’t just restricted to visual comparison? Is it unthinkable that a community of football fans and players could apprehend the magic of Pelé even outside the stadium, outside of live coverage, outside of readily available video footage?
I believe this is part of the reason why we are unable to relate to Pelé’s iconography the way his contemporaries did. Our technical limitations are different from theirs. We cannot reconceive Cristiano Ronaldo out of a journalist’s description of an accelerating run down the wing; there is now no way to transmute a Riquelme pass into a sharp intake of breath over the radio. We have more access to the Pelé experience than our predecessors did, but the other pieces of that story are missing, the pieces that Moti NandyYou can read Nandy’s story in a diptych of his football novellas, Striker/Stopper, translated to English by Arunava Sinha and published this year by Hachette India. and his characters got. The hero of Striker, Prasoon approaches the end of the prologue dizzy with joy, ready to go out and embrace the world in a Santos jersey—until he realises that he should not be understanding the agent, since that gentleman is speaking in Portuguese. Prasoon recoils as he remembers that he does not speak the language. He wakes with a chill; he has only been dreaming.
II.
Brian mentioned in an earlier post that football is not a sport where narratives are confirmed by statistics, and this makes a notable departure from the history of a sport like, say, cricket, where Don Bradman’s average goes a long way to establish his genius even to who were those born generations after he played his last Test. But Bradman reminds me of an important link in the narrative of greatness, and that is its inheritance, or continuity. Aussies, hear me out to the end of this paragraph. I write from a subcontinent where a candidate for the position of the second-greatest batsman ever has been plying his trade for the last twenty years. For those unfamiliar with cricket, a cursory Google search for ‘Sachin Tendulkar’ will establish his credentials and his unprecedented reputation in India well enough. As it happens, one of the cornerstones of that reputation is a famous endorsement from an aged, long-retired Don Bradman, who, on watching the young Tendulkar bat, remarked that he reminded Bradman of himself. The baton passed; it signified, in however limited a fashion, Tendulkar’s worthiness to take up the mantle of history. But it also signified something else: Don Bradman himself. To generations nourished by the Tendulkar spectacle, it is not just Bradman who contextualised Tendulkar; it is Tendulkar who gives us a sense—again, in however limited a fashion—of what Bradman was. It allows us to imagine a cricketer who was apparently like Sachin Tendulkar, but better.
It’s easy to relate this to the short-term phenomenon of Maradona and his heirs. Some of us can remember and compare Diego himself with his most emphatic inheritor, Lionel Messi. Argentinian football may be different three or four generations from now, but the Maradona standard has continued to be applicable to every potential national #10 over the last two decades, as some putative successors have learned to their cost. Yet to whom, similarly, does Pelé compare? The astonishing depth and variation of genius—and drama—in Brazilian football has ensured that there is no predictable pattern of succession that allows us to link any one player to Pelé. Better than Ronaldo—almost unthinkable, but then Ronaldo is a #9. Better than Zico—tactically appropriate, but hardly embellishing the legend. Better than Robinho—I’m going to stop here now. But I hope it’s easy enough to see that sports history is to some degree atavistic, and Pelé, partly thanks to his own talent, partly thanks to the multifarious ways in which Brazilian football has developed and succeeded in the years since he played, does in fact stand alone.
III.
Self-preservation doesn’t have quite the public currency that self-destruction has. Even so, Pelé hasn’t preserved himself, in his long and apparently healthy life post-playing career, as a paragon of dignity. In my darkest moments I imagine Paolo Maldini, thirty years from now, shilling for the latest performance-enhancing drugs from Big Pharma and making bright, crazy predictions of success for the football team of Padania. Would a future generation be able to construct any coherent notion of his grace and dignity as a player in the face of such annoying evidence to the contrary? Would such a figure convince you to evaluate his history impartially?
If football is not merely the totality of visual evidence, then surely, what footballers do off the field and after their careers matters to their legend. Pelé’s long career as a public figure has forced him not only to negotiate his own personal and professional commitments in their media representations, but also the changes in the nature of those media itself. His anchoring institution is not a national team (at least not the way the albiceleste are for Maradona) or a club (as is Alfredo di Stefano’s): it is FIFA, a constituency which does not come with its own loyalist fan base, except presumably in the offices of Coca-Cola. This has reconfigured the Pelé myth in interesting ways. By yoking his career irrevocably to memories of the World Cup, his club career has been relatively ignored. By associating him exclusively with the champagne effect of victory, his story defies the longer haul of football’s rhythm: the ins and outs of a season, the tensions of tournament politics, the bitterness of failure and the anticipation of a mollifying change of fortune. Can such a man have a real story? How does that peerless career compare with the operatic wonder and terror of the last days of Zinedine Zidane? If football were The Lord of the Rings, and Zidane did to us what Denethor did to Pippin, then how does Pelé appear in our recent experience of international football—as Tom Bombadil? Ring a dol dillo.
IV.
But bear with me a moment. Tolkien fans will know as well as I that Tom Bombadil is a contentious figure at the heart of the canon. He appears to us as a random, singing, omnipotent figure, a giver of gifts and an utterer of doggerel; he gives us tantalising hints of his powers, but remains an affable cypher from start to finish. Is he a deus ex machina, pulled out by the authorities at the start of the adventure to armtwist us into believing in their power? Is he a blip of probability in a predetermined world; the end of imagination, or its wildest flight of fancy? Why is he called Iarwain ben-Adar, oldest and fatherless?
Maybe Pelé is blessed with the fate of all origin myths, to be simultaneously ubiquitous and unrecognisable. Because he is the figurehead of a certain view of football. Perhaps that view significantly violates the chronological development of football and football celebrity. But who today escapes it? Doesn’t Pelé make it irrelevant to note that Puskás came before him and Cruyff after? He stands at the fount of all our conceptions of football heroism; perhaps only a stepchild of time can do that. It’s easier to forget such myths than remember them, but they also have a tenacity that allows them to exist, lapsed or current, long after the seasons have changed and the crumblier statues have become logs in the desert. Perhaps that’s what it really means to stand outside history.
Supriya Nair writes the football blog Treasons, Stratagems and Spoils, and can be found on Twitter here.
Read More: Pelé
by Supriya Nair · August 17, 2010
Also, Supriya and I have talked this over, and we would like to buy dinner for anyone who can convincingly explain the connection between Maradona and the Dark Lord Sauron. Don’t be bashful, people.
@Brian Phillips Massive bags of coke
@Brian Phillips, I fear that you’ve made rather a spurious comparison. Sauron is a faceless evil — all we see of him in the text is a flash of a watchful eye that may or may not be metaphor — and all of his works are the product of centuries of careful scheming. Maradona is, to put it mildly, neither faceless nor a careful schemer. The parallel of the orc to the Argentine #10 position aside, I think your offer of dinner will be waiting for a while.
The invocation of Bradman is interesting here because Bradman’s brilliant career is interspersed with moments of obvious human limitation, and not just in the sense that he could be attacked or injured (as Pelé was also). When England set up its defensive formations for Bodyline bowling, Bradman could have square-cut and late-cut until the cows came home, never in danger of going out — but he didn’t have the patience for it. He’d try for a while, but eventually would get frustrated and take fuller swings.
And then there’s that final duck that dropped his Test average below 100 — all he needed was four runs to stay above 100 . . . and he got zero. What if Pelé had ended his World Cup career by sailing a penalty over the bar to lose the final for Brazil? Maybe I could see him then. . . .
@Alan Jacobs But the duck in the last match cannot count as a failure/blemish. His average, and most aspects of his batting (i.e., stats) are in a stratospheric level. Blazing a penalty over the bar in a clutch situation is a larger (way larger) failure than Bradman getting out for a duck in his last match.
A sense of perspective: Bradman’s batting average was 99.94. The second highest was Graeme Pollock at 60.97. You are considered a great batsman if you can maintain a Test match batting average over 50 through your career. Especially, back in the day, when batsmen didn’t have helmets to protect themselves from bouncers.
My point is 99.94 and 100, is a few decimal places off “perfection” when viewed through the prism of, well, the decimal system. But the difference between him and his contemporaries (in nearly every case study undertaken on cricket) seems unanimous about Bradman. His is a very fitting comparison with Pele.
Maradona as Sauron?! Maradona is clearly Gollum. He’s small, surprisingly strong, given to rants and cursing out perceived and actual foes and, let’s not forget, an unabashed cheater. But in the end his selfishness brings about the triumph of good.
the only link I can think of between Sauron and Maradona are their resiliency. Sauron was defeated many several times throughout history but never fully vanquished. And so Maradona falls from grace repeatedly before emerging again and again, seemingly stronger than ever before.
Also, apropos of nothing, Fernando Duarte on yesterday’s Football Weekly intimated that it was a commonly known in Brazil that Pele was a dirty bastard. Which is kind of fun.
@Red Ranter the duck in the last match cannot count as a failure/blemish. But for many people it does: “Oh, what a terrible way for such a great batsman to go out.” And people do pay attention to the decimals: an average in three digits just feels more titanic than 99 — feels like another level of achievement, even though it really isn’t and (as you point out) Bradman is so far ahead of the field it’s ridiculous. My point is just that even these tiny “blemishes” (real or perceived) that humanize Bradman a bit, and this didn’t happen to Pelé.
(There are personality differences too: Bradman could be a little prissy at times, and lacked Pelé’s pretty-much-unbroken equanimity. But in terms of substantive achievement over time, Bradman is surely an even more dominant figure than Pelé was.) (Well, maybe I shouldn’t say “surely.”)
@Brian Phillips I’m working on a post called “Maradona as the Mouth of Sauron.” Check your email frequently.
One aspect of greatness that I think is being overlooked in respect to Pele is that he was the leading light (at 17 years old) of a team (Brasil) that played soccer in a way that a large number of people had never seen or imagined. Soccer, to a large part of the world who could watch that World Cup in 1958 (I wasn’t born yet) from what I could tell, was played in a range of styles but a range that had had certain tactical and technical similarities. Out of the blue, more or less, came this audacious youngster and his merry men who played in a way that was so skillful and different that it changed everything about how people perceived the game. It was an epiphinous moment for a lot of soccer fans.
Although I was not born yet, I can relate to how it must have felt. I was a 13 year old kid living in England in 1974, accustomed to watching English soccer and thinking it was the be-all end-all of the sport…. Until I saw Johann Cruyff and his Dutch teammates. I saw soccer like I had never seen it played before in a way I never even imagined it could be. And because it crossed new boundaries (at least in my mind) of how a sport could be played, it will always be considered the greatest team I ever saw play, even if it wasn’t.
It’s easy to forget nowadays, with soccer on all the time and being able to see so many gifted players who have learned their craft from watching their predecessors, how seemingly extraordinarily unprecedented was the way Pele and his teammates played to a lot of people. These (now) elderly people pass down the wonderous tale of what they saw, forgetting the foibles and errors until Pele and the team have become as much myth and legend as real people.
Speaking of 1974, the game between Brazil and Holland that year was something else. The Brazilians had no answer to Total Football. The Dutch would swarm them like killer bees when they were trying to build an offense. The Brazilians, dominant for so long, were not used to being treated this way and completely lost their shit. It wasn’t dissimilar to this year’s match between the two, except that in ’74 it was a game between two competing visions of the Beautiful Game, while in South Africa it was a battle between the world’s foremost practitioners of Death Football.
Supriya, thank you for a provocative read, as usual. I’d just like to offer an anecdote. In 1977, Pele visited Calcutta as part of the American football club Cosmos, playing against Mohun Bagan Club. Pele was a shadow of himself in that game, though that mattered not a whit during those 90 minutes to the 100,000-and-odd spectators. (I was there.) Afterwards, though, we became critical of his indifferent performance, and a joke began to circulate: it wasn’t really Pele who had played that game, but a local actor named Shantigopal who was well-known for impersonating celebrities (including Hitler, Lenin and Stalin) convincingly on stage. Such was the sense of betrayal.
@Kári Tulinius I am so intrigued by this proposition that I would like to offer you a meal of your choice the next time you are in Mumbai, India.
Ooh, that’s exciting! Sadly my foreseeable future doesn’t include a trip to Mumbai.
Maradonna as Sauron: Both have so much power that it seems impossible that either could lose, yet it is also clear that a flaw related to achieving that power is part of the issue. Neither do very well running a team. Both can lose focus on the big picture by privileging the narrow.
Perhaps most relevantly, in the overall conception of evil, Maradona:Sauron::Pele:Morgoth – the more recent one, all over the screen, easy to see, so all the current generation of kids don’t quite get that he flows (figuratively) out of a more epic era in which there was an Original Baddie who was even stronger and more impressive…
@Timoteo “of a team (Brasil) that played soccer in a way that a large number of people had never seen or imagined”
Another comparison would be to the Indian hockey teams of the thirties and ‘the immortal’ Dyand Chand. He holds a place in hockey up there with the likes of Bradman and Pele.
The connection between Sauron and Maradona: Sauron made Maradona in his orc factory; oh wait, that was Tevez. And it wasn’t Sauron at all, it was the other one whom Christopher Lee played.