_{Pele helped Brazil win the World Cup in 1958, 1962 and 1970. (Image: Hans-Jürgen Schmidt/HJS-Sportfotos/picture alliance)}

(shared by Evan X Hyde)

It begins in 1940 on the frontier west of Rio, in an impoverished town called Tres Coracoes. With his slight frame (145 pounds at the start of his career), Edson Arantes’s body seemed more suited to shoe shining and the resale of tobacco gathered from discarded cigarettes, his first vocations. But he had a pushy father, Dondinho, whose own aspirations to soccer greatness and social mobility ended with the ripping of right knee ligaments in his first and only professional appearance. From the start, it was clear Dondinho had quite a target to push. Despite his physical limitations, Pele possessed an uncanny ability to shoot from an impossible angle, a manner of handling the ball that looked more like a caress than a dribble, a charismatic style. By dint of flute injuries to his teammates, at age sixteen, he started for the prestigious Santos Football Club in Brazil’s booming coffee port. At age seventeen, in 1958, with a flick over the head of the Swedish keeper Anders Svensson, he clinched his first World Cup.

– from pg. 122, How Soccer Explains The World, by Franklin Foer, HarperCollins, 2004

The Maracana, like a duomo, is filled with memorials to heroes, martyrs, and its patron saint, Pele. It was here that he scored his thousandth goal on November 19, 1969. And it was here, in 1961, as a plaque at the stadium’s entrance commemorates, that Pele scored “the most beautiful goal ever.” Collecting the ball in front of his own keeper, he traversed the length of the field. Without a pass, but many feints at passing, he juked his way past six separate defenders. The ball never really left his feet until he put it in the net. Like much of Pele’s highlight reel — the time he dribbled two circles around a Senegalese keeper, the eight goals he put past a top Rio club in a single game — it doesn’t exist on film, only in fading memories and folklore.

– pgs. 128, 129, ibid.