When the immortals leave the world of the living, mortals gather to pay homage, celebrate life, sing of deeds, and define memories that will last forever. Hail Pele, “morituri te salutant”.
This ritual, a benign manifestation that reveals belonging to the universal cause of good, shows the best of humanity at work. When the immortals depart, we can in that instant connect our mortal existence to their eternal genius.
On the day that Pelé leaves, we, mere mortals, remember the moments in history in which our lives and memories intersected. We are all closer to God.
The year I was born, 1966, was also the year that Pelé was not tri. This happened because of the “fault” of the national team of Portugal and, particularly, of a certain Eusébio da Silva Ferreira — who, on the afternoon of that 17th of July, temporarily postponed his eternity.
Because of this friendship, Pelé only reached the third (four years later, in 1970), but never the fourth. And Brazil would have to wait 24 years (until the 1994 World Cup, in the United States) to become one.
That afternoon at Goodison Park, in Liverpool, was definitely marked in his career. It was his only defeat in a World Cup, in a game in which Eusébio scored two of the goals with which Portugal won (3-1) and eliminated Brazil, then two-time champion and favorite.
Pelé, at the end of the match, went to greet all the players of the “team of the corners”, recognizing the Portuguese superiority. That day, he lost the possibility of becoming world champion again, but gained a friendship with Eusébio, whom he treated as a brother. “We became friends at the 1966 World Cup in England”, said Pelé on the day of the Black Panther’s death.
However, Pelé’s first contact with Portuguese football happened almost a decade earlier. It was June 19, 1957 and he, still 16 years old, was chosen to join a mix of Santos and Vasco da Gama players to compete in the Morumbi Cup.
Pelé faced the Lisbon team Belenenses, in which two other Portuguese Africans played —Matateu and Vicente—, and scored three goals in a 6-1 rout. They were the king’s first goals at Maracanã.
Apart from football, during those years Portugal and Brazil were following difficult political paths and committing themselves to the path of anachronistic dictatorships, in a world that was rapidly changing in the opposite direction, driven by the post-World War II baby boom.
A thorn of beautiful roses, football, with its aggregating and transversal force, served both as an escape valve and as a poster child for that social blindness that the latter dictatorships, which affected Portuguese-speaking countries, used to keep their peoples out. of democracy.
Soccer stars and stars occupied the space stolen from the social debate on television, impoverishing it with the complicity of all, helping the dictatorial policies of Portugal —still a colonialist country at the time— and Brazil, then recently swallowed by the military, to hide from the future.
Today, many years later, concatenating the memories of those who made us dream, we learn that they are much bigger than any bad dream. When the immortals leave us in the world of the living, we are all closer to God.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
