A name, a magic. Pele who didn’t want to be Pele

Perhaps nothing would have changed if everyone had called him Arantes, after his mother’s surname, Maria Celeste; o do Nascimento, the patronymic of his father, João Ramos, who, moreover, everyone knew as Dondinho. Or if, as he himself said several times, somewhat resentfully, he had become famous under his first name, Edson, an error in transcribing his personal data for Edison, the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, 1,093 patents registered in his career, although being remembered above all for only one of them, although of controversial attribution: the light bulb. Perhaps they would have liked him more if they had crowned him O Rei do Futebol, “The King of Football”, calling him Dico, the nickname with which he was called in the family as a child. But perhaps nothing would have changed and Edson Arantes do Nascimento, 1,281 goals in 1,363 games in his career – according to what Fifa itself recognizes him: many more than Edison’s patents… – would still have been one of the greatest footballers of all time , perhaps the strongest, even without calling each other Pele.

But Edson Arantes do Nascimento never liked the name Pele. When they called him that as a boy, he got very angry. “Why, I bear the name of a great father of modernity and they call me with a stupid child’s name!”. Nevertheless Pelé was a perfect name for someone who was destined to play football and do it better than anyone else.

As in every new nomination, there is something magical in the word Pele, almost like in Macondo’s One Hundred Years of Solitude where the world was so new that many things could only be named by pointing a finger at them. That there is magic in that name is told by Edson himself in his autobiography. When he was three or four years old, Edson was taken by his father – who had had to stop playing football at a very young age due to a bad knee injury – to attend the games of his former Vasco de São Lourenço teammates. Among these, a man called Bilé played in goal. When he made a good save, Edson heard the cheers of the fans: “Bravo Bilé, grande Bilé!”. That was enough for Bilé to become the idol of little Edson who one day declared that when he grew up he too would be a goalkeeper like Bilé.

It must have been the Mineiro accent – ​​Edson was born in Três Corações, a city in the state of Minas Gerais – or a childish language distortion, but Bilé first became Pilé and then Pelé. Little Edson, who wanted to be Bilé, became Pelé despite him and that nickname stuck to him for life. Apart from that, the magical realism lies in the origin of the nickname of that almost anonymous goalkeeper Vasco de São Lourenço. That his name was José Lino and he was the son of a widow, Dona Maria Rosalina, who had been very worried about him years before. José Lino was two years old and still didn’t utter a word. He was silent. Dona Maria Rosalina decided to ask for help from the benzedeiras, the women-shamans who knew how to solve illnesses and misfortunes by coming into contact with spirits. The healers set to work and staged a ritual around little José Lino that involved a litany of mysterious magic formulas. Among these one said: “Bili, bilu, tetéia!”. One meeting was not enough, and not even two. José Lino did not speak. But even Dona Maria Rosalina did not give up. Until, after weeks of meetings, José Lino, who was perhaps fed up with seeing all that incomprehensible liturgy around him, uttered one word: “Bilé!”. Which from that day also became his new name. Without knowing that, involuntarily, that word would become one of the most pronounced in the world thanks to little Edson who, twenty years later, started rooting for him.

I believe that to become great champions you need to be lucky even with the names you wear. The word Cruijff had the sound of an air burin that gave shape to a material never seen before. The word Maradona enclosed, as in a small tabernacle, the tenacious faith in the miracle that sooner or later becomes reality.

Pelé, on the other hand, is a word that in Portuguese means nothing. But since sixty-five, or since Edson Arantes do Nascimento turned on like Edison’s light bulb and simply became Pelé, sub species aeternitatis Eupallaemeans everything: a shot, a feint, a shot, a dribble, an assist, a header, a slight but elusive run on the green lawn of the stadium of our childhood dreams.