At the end of the last game of his career, Pele approached Muhammad Ali on the pitch of the Giants Stadium in New York and place a kiss on his cheek. It was a meeting in October 1977 of two men who bestrode 20th-century sport and yet who, when it came to confronting the racism that blighted both their lives, took different paths.
Pele later recalled that at the match which ended his time as a player for New York Cosmos, Ali had told him he accepted that football was “more beautiful than boxing”, before adding with a trademark glint in his eye: “But I am more beautiful than you.”
The Gordian knot of just which of the pair was the more accomplished practitioner of their art will rightly remain forever unresolved. But it was the boxer who enjoyed the reputation as being outspoken on issues of race and prejudice, harnessing his fame to the cause of throwing injustice back in the faces of those who would impose it.
The death of Edson Arantes do Nascimento – the name with which Pele was born but, it seems, rarely even as a child the moniker by which he was known – brought what was at first blush a more muted response in terms of the great man’s activism off the pitch.
Pele, whose greatest triumph was to recast world football from 1958 onwards in the image of Brazil and the on-the-pitch alchemy of body and ball achieved by its young black star, had long been criticised by some in his native country for a lifelong stance which chose to spurn rather than confront racial intolerance.
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One of his autobiographies recounts the story of how, at the age of 12, the father of a childhood sweetheart named Elena arrived at their school to publicly beat her for writing notes to Pele, who was described to all who could hear as a “black tramp”.
When he first started playing football, Pele was known to his fellow players as “Gasolina” – a term which he later insisted referred to a well-known singer but which others have pointed out is Portuguese for “crude oil”.
Either way, the point for Pelé would appear to have been not that racial abuse existed but that it was so prevalent, so depressingly and oppressively mundane, that it was somehow a mistake to dignify it with a response.
Speaking in 2014 to a Brazilian television channel, the player criticised Aranha, a goalkeeper for his old club Santos, for confronting opposing fans who had called him a monkey. Pele, who also highlighted routine racist abuse on the pitch, said: “If I had to stop or shout every time I was racially abused, every game would have to be stopped.”
Instead, Pele made it among his life’s purposes to rise above the slurs and those crass enough to make them.
As he saw it, his retort to the haters – and his inspiration to others from minority backgrounds – was to succeed: to become the first player to lift three World Cups; to be the first footballing star to have an agent (albeit one who took him to the brink of ruin); to be a businessman beyond football (again, with at best patchy success) and to be the sort of generation-blurring celebrity who still reduced men to tears to be in his presence for many, many decades after he had last graced a pitch.
As he once put it to his detractors in 1988: “Can’t they see, modesty apart, I have made people proud of my blackness wherever I went? In all the countries that I have visited they know that I am Brazilian but they know that I am black. When they pay me tribute, they are also paying homage to us. Isn’t that important?”
If he chose to lead by example, he also chose on occasion to speak out.
In 1959, after being confined to the terminal building at Johannesburg airport due to the rules of South African apartheid, a young Pele publicly vowed to visit thee country again only after its racist system of government was no more – his return came only when Nelson Mandela, whom he described as a friend, was freed from prison and became president. Later, while serving as his country’s sports minister in 1994, Pele called for more black people to be elected to Brazil’s parliament.
But ultimately, the 82-year-old, whose at-times almost bashful humility was perhaps another reason why he stood in contrast to the more pugnacious campaigning of Ali, decided he stood for the idea that intolerance, racial or otherwise, should not be allowed to lessen the joy he felt and was able to give those who watched him.
In September, Pele used Twitter to come to the defence of his compatriot, Vinicius Junior, after he attracted racism-tinged criticism for the nature of his dance-led goal celebrations as a Real Madrid player.
In words that may yet serve as an epitaph for his outlook on life. Pele wrote: “Football is joy. It’s a dance. It’s a real party. Although racism still exists, we will not allow that to stop us from continuing to smile. And we will continue to fight racism in this way: fighting for our right to be happy.”
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