Warhol’s prophecy and Muhammad Ali’s homage – Corriere.it

You will be famous for 15 centuries, everyone else only for 15 minutes, prophesied Andy Warhol, who understood media society better than anyone, observing Pel through the viewfinder of his Polaroids. That image became the meter-by-meter painting Pel, acrylic and silkscreen on linen, 1977 auctioned at Christie’s two years ago, and admirably sums up why considering Pel as, simply, a footballer, it does not convey the idea of ​​its greatness. And it certainly wouldn’t be enough to explain, in the next 15 centuries, to the humanity of the future, why the state – a term abused ad nauseam, for him the only possible one – is an icon.

Maradona ceases to be an atypical figure for the world of football if one begins to analyze it not as a sportsman but as a modern artist: Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Maradona. Pel stops being an atypical figure for the world of football if we begin to analyze him as icon: icon of a nation, of Brazil that before him was not in the global imagination as the homeland of football, beaches and endless joy.

Warhol saw Pel at one with his art: with his head leaning on a football (branded, with the sponsor and Pel’s name next to each other), king not of a sport but of a nation, crowned by himself like Napoleon. Pel who at the heights of global fame never spoke of politics and preferred to do it himself when the military dictatorship no longer existed, in any case immune to the criticisms he dribbled around like full-backs, loved and admired even by Muhammad Ali (My friend, my hero, my idol) who went to pay his respects at Giants Stadium when you leave football.

Ali, who recognized the revolutionaries at first sight, knew that before Pel football belonged to very white Europeans and some South Americans of European origin, until a black boy arrived, almost a child, who had picked up the king’s crown from the lawn of a Swedish stadium and placed it on his head, with a smiled, and had taken her with him.