Crowned by Nelson Rodrigues, Pelé was ‘the greatest player to appear, both in heaven and on earth’

The best football player of all time had the best sportswriter of all time.

If only prophets see the obvious, Nelson Rodrigues (1912-1980) was the first enlightened being to observe the evident, clear, manifest, unequivocal and screaming royalty of Pelé (1940-2022).

It went down in history that the boy became king at the 1958 World Cup, aged 17, by scoring three goals in France, punishing Sweden in the final and being named so by Paris Match magazine. In March of that year —therefore a few months before the World Cup—, someone had already registered the ululating reality.

“He would say a king, I don’t know if Lear, if Emperor Jones, if Ethiopian”, wrote Nelson in Manchete Esportiva, delighted with what the teenager had done in Santos’ victory over America.

“Pelé has a considerable advantage over the other players: – that of feeling like a king, from head to toe. When he catches the ball, and dribbles an opponent, it’s like someone shooing away an ignorant and lousy commoner”, he described.

Not that hyperbole, extravagant metaphors and baroque aesthetics —as researcher José Carlos Marques, author of the master’s thesis “Football in Nelson Rodrigues”—classifies were directed only at Pelé. But there seems to be no doubt that no player (not even the idol Castilho, who “made supernatural saves”, or Garrincha, who was “saint, yes, without rhetorical effect, without literary arrangement, as holy as a half-naked Saint Sebastian and arrow”) has so filled the short-sighted eyes of the Pernambuco journalist.

On Nelson’s typewriter, “Pelé was a force of nature”. “He was raining, windy, thundering, lightning. His steps were clean, exact, soft. He either scored or scored goals”, he described, before putting into words what the star said on his foot: “What were certain moves by Pelé if not cynical and shameless miracles?

In his baroque style, Rodrigues played with the established order and saw in the “creole” “the greatest player who appeared in heaven as well as on earth”. Note that he was not like that on earth as he was in heaven, as is learned in the Our Father. “He IS a player both human and divine or more divine than human.”

Even the “grandma with cadaver nostrils” noticed this. The character was the one who appeared in the journalist’s chronicles asking who the ball was. But even the caricature that didn’t understand anything about football was fascinated by Santos’ number 10 shirt and showed up at Maracanã in 1969 to see the thousandth goal, crossing Nelson’s path.

“In the queue for the elevators, my first glance discovered the fine woman with the nostrils of a corpse. Do you understand? She still doesn’t know who the ball is. But what magnetized her was Pelé as a man, myth and hero”, he wrote, noting then the fury at the moment of the penalty that achieved the historic mark.

“And then, 100,000 people, in a gigantic choral cadence, began to demand: – ‘Pelé, Pelé, Pelé!’ – ‘I would marry that one!’.”

It is not surprising that Nelson came to Pelé’s defense in the rare moments of questioning.

Strongly influenced by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), the man from Pernambuco frequently evoked the character Raskólnikov, from “Crime and Punishment”, who asks: “If the soul is mortal and God does not exist, is everything allowed?”.

In mockery of his friend Otto Lara Resende, Rodrigues attributed the remark to him: “Mineiro people are only supportive of cancer”. It was a cheese bread version of Raskolnikov’s saying. If the mineiro was only supportive of cancer, as Otto would have said —who always denied the phrase, to Nelson’s mocking delirium—, it was possible to give up all ethical principles. This is what revolves around one of the most famous Brazilian plays, “Otto Lara Resende ou Bonitinha, mas Ordinária”, adapted multiple times to the cinema.

In football, the equivalent of the non-existence of God or limited solidarity at the time of cancer was questioning Pelé. In 1966, when shirt number 10 and the entire national team were booed in a 1-0 victory over Chile, in Rio de Janeiro, in preparation for the World Cup, the columnist showed his indignation.

“Well then. If Dostoiésvski had been at the Maracanã the day before yesterday, he would have roared: – ‘If Pelé can be booed, anything is allowed!'”, he wrote in O Globo. “They jeered at the black man. And if Pelé can be crucified in boos, all moral values ​​cease. We can invade nurseries and strangle little children.”

Not that the ace needed help dealing with detractors and opponents.

“I want to believe that his greatest virtue is precisely his absolute immodesty. He puts himself above everything and everyone. And he ends up intimidating the ball itself, which comes to his feet with a docile lick like a little bitch”, wrote Rodrigues, still in 1958, in the first chronicle in which he observed Pelé’s royalty.

The time has passed. Royalty, no.

Nelson insisted that “time is a convention that doesn’t exist for the star player, nor for the pretty woman”, “it exists for the wooden leg and for the bucho”. If, “in the privacy of the alcove, no one would remember to ask the queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, for a birth certificate”, questioning whether Pelé was old at 30 made no sense.

Again, in an inversion of the “in heaven as it is on earth” type, the journalist did not say that Pelé was younger than he indicated his age. He was older.

“His thirty years, which seem to be worth forty, are actually much more. The authority with which he controls the ball, the opponent and the referee depends, I would even say, on centuries or even millennia. The sublime Creole has of football, not thirty or forty years, but 6 thousand. That is its mystery: – it is the experience, it is the wisdom of sixty centuries.”

“What we call royalty is, above all, a state of mind,” observed Nelson. Hence the King continues to be King, even though his body has stopped. Nonsense sentimentality, but avoiding sentimentality is difficult in the face of “the greatest player who appeared in heaven as on earth”.

It was also with affectation that Nelson Rodrigues suggested watching Pelé’s farewell from the Brazilian national team, in 1971, for him as dramatic as “Love Story”, a tragedy that had been successful in cinema in 1970.

“We cry in goodbye, as in the Love story. Amen.”