“The end of my years as a teenager is approaching, which means I am soon to leave behind my life’s last opportunity to believe that I know everything. Already I can feel uncertainty slipping into parts of my mind that were once ironclad, airtight. “Is America really the best country on earth?” I ask myself. “Is there any substantive evidence to suggest that my 8th grade Social Studies teacher is the devil?” The perfect life I designed for myself seems increasingly unlikely by the day.” (Run of Play)

Pelé in Brazil
“When I asked to interview Pablo and Dennis about Pelé they both responded with furrowed brows. Neither one liked Pelé, they explained. Pablo called him an idiot. ‘Perfect!’ I said. I chose Dennis and Pablo because they are both Brazilian. That’s it. Just being Brazilian may not seem like much to go on, but it’s a start. If we are really going to figure this Pelé thing out, we need to explore as many perspectives as possible. This is the perspective of two regular dudes that happen to be from Brazil.” (Run of Play)

“The 1950 FIFA World Cup was the first since 1938, mostly because of an intercontinental dust-up commonly known as World War II. Brazil was selected to host the tournament on the back of a third-place performance in the previous World Cup, and it was eagerly anticipated by the newly democratic country, which was looking to establish itself as a global power, in football and otherwise. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro was able to push forward construction His Socks Are Flagsof a controversial stadium named after the Maracanã neighbourhood, opening it about a week before the World Cup began.” (Run of Play)

“At the end of the episode entitled ‘Brazil’ in the excellent documentary series The History of Football, Pelé offers the interviewer a few comments on his own footballing genius. He declares that just as there can only ever be one Michaelangelo and one Beethoven, so can there only ever be one Pelé. Why? Because, he says in Portuguese, “my father is a closed shop.” When the female interviewer fails to laugh, he repeats his words in English, and adds a snipping motion with his finger. ‘Do you understand?’ he says, now staring at the camera with his world famous grin. ‘My father is a closed machine.'” (Run of Play)

Pelé v. the Animals
“Why do you watch ESPN instead of Animal Planet? Cute uniforms aside, bears are stronger, giraffes are faster, and kangaroos can jump much higher. Why watch a species that struggles to lift over 300 pounds or run a mile in under four minutes? More intriguingly, how did such a feeble runt of a species come to rule the planet? Luckily, two classic moments from Pelé provide answers.” (Run of Play)

(Run of Play – Pelé)

“I owned a football encyclopaedia as a child, dating from around 1980 and now sadly lost, in which Jimmy Greaves rates the top ten footballers of all time. Pelé is number two. Greaves notes that he can’t be considered the best ever, because he was never tested in the English League, the toughest competition in the world. So George Best gets the accolade instead.” (Run of Play)

“When People Who Don’t Like Football ask me why I do, I invariably answer: ‘You know Pelé? Well, it’s not because of him.’ Then I launch straight into the tragic story that is Garrincha’s life. I explain how he was Pelé’s direct opposite in so many ways. I’ve gotten pretty good at telling that story over the years. I try to make the game tangible for those poor lost souls. Lots of passion. Lots of Alegria do povo.” (Run of Play)

“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.” (Run of Play)

“Science fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock has written an enormous sequence of novels about the Eternal Champion, the same hero reborn in dozens of different persons. Whether the Eternal Champion is named Elric of Melniboné, Oswald Bastable or Ulrich von Bek, he is always first and foremost the Eternal Champion. The particularities of each champion’s life and personality are different, but their role is the same every time, to restore balance to an off-kilter world.” (Run of Play)