Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2655033 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

Review
HEFTY TRIBUTE FIT FOR A SPORT'S KING 'Pelé' arrived for an interview strapped to a luggage cart and wheeled around by a publisher named Ovais Naqvi, who parked the parcel in a conference room. Naqvi stripped the tape from the carton to reveal 'Pelé', the megabook, resting inside a silk-covered wooden box. 'Pelé: Edson Arantes do Nascimento' is a Soccer tribute to Pelé, the man who entranced Brazil and the world with his soccer artistry and incandescent personality. When praise for him expanded beyond comparisons to other mortals, his admirers likened him to Saturn, or God. Pelé himself has said that God sent him to earth to play soccer and compared himself to Beethoven. So how better to celebrate the man at 66 than with a silk-swaddled tome of 720 pages that is 2 and three quarter inches thick, weighs 35 pounds and measures nearly 18 by 14 inches? It contains 1,700 images and 300,000 words by numerous sportswriters and interviews with some of Pelé s teammates between covers in the green and yellow of Brazil s national team. Pelé was paid a fee to sign each copy of the book and will receive royalties for providing autobiographical text. 'Other than Muhammad Ali, Pelé is the only other figure who has achieved the same international renown,' said Naqvi, the president and chief executive of Gloria, as he flipped through 'Pelé's glossy pages. Pelé's link to Ali goes beyond their global appeals. In early 2004, Taschen Books published 10,000 copies of 'GOAT: Greatest of All Time,' a 75-pound, 20-by-20-inch book that originally cost from $3,000 to $7,500 (because 1,000 books came with a bizarre porpoise sculpture by Jeff Koons). 'GOAT' has not yet sold out. Naqvi served as an editorial consultant to 'GOAT' and said he understood how to produce industrial-strength luxury books that he believed would produce high profits. 'I felt there was an opportunity to create a business from scratch and to focus on particular subjects,' he said. He added, 'Coming fro --Richard Sandomir, New York Times, 18th Nov 06

About the Author
Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known to the world as Pele, won the World Cup with Brazil in 1958, 1962 and 1970. He scored nearly 1,300 goals in his professional career and is Brazil's record goalscorer with 97 goals. He lives in Brazil and the United States.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Boy from Bauru

'The greatest goal I scored was a one-two with Celeste: we named him Edson Arantes do Nascimento: Pelé'

DONDINHO, PELÉ'S FATHER

However long we may live, we never forget the time when we were young. Memory is like a film which we alone can watch. For me, childhood is the best part of that film: time and again my thoughts return to my experiences, the innocence and mischief of that time, and the dreams and nightmares too.

I was born in Três Corações in Minas Gerais, a state in the south-east of Brazil just to the north of Rio de Janeiro. It is an area very rich in minerals, especially gold -- the early Portuguese explorers were thrilled at the abundance and brilliance of that rich yellow mineral and settled there to exploit it. Among them was a farmer. He was a responsible man, a hard worker, and was dedicated to the land he'd acquired on the banks of the Rio Verde. He asked his superior for permission to build a chapel there, and permission was granted; when it was ready he named it the Holy Hearts of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The name he gave the chapel was in tribute to the three Sacred Hearts in which the farmer had such faith, and which in turn became the name of the place -- Três Corações, the three hearts.

Brazil, though, is a land of stories, and as you will discover throughout this book, a story in Brazil isn't worth telling unless there are alternative versions to call upon. And the three hearts are no different: some have it that the name refers to the love of three cowboys who were prevented from marrying three local girls; others hold that it is related to the fact that as the Rio Verde approaches the town it forms little curves like three little hearts. I'm sticking with the farmer, though -- it's the story I was brought up with, and one that has always appealed to me.

The first records of the current town date from 1760, with the foundation of the chapel of the Sacred Hearts. But for some reason there was a problem with the land deeds, and the area on which the chapel was built was sold. The chapel itself was destroyed, and it wasn't until the end of the eighteenth century that a replacement was built, when a Captain Antônio Dias de Barros provided a new one. The then village of Rio Verde which was developing around it was established as a parish, and renamed Três Corações do Rio Verde. In 1884, after a visit from Brazil's last emperor, Dom Pedro II, and his family, and the opening of a rail link to the city of Cruzeiro in Minas Gerais, Três Corações became a town.

Even though I only lived there a couple of years it remains a village in my memory, and whatever the legends that people spread about the name, there's one thing I feel sure of -- it feels completely natural to me, it makes complete sense, that I should have been born in a place called 'three hearts'. Looking back on my life for this book has revealed to me many occasions of confusion and uncertainty, but what has also become clear is an underlying coherence to my life, and I think it can be seen here too, for this name Três Corações has always been an important signpost for me. I feel it above all in relation to my religion, because within it beat those three sacred hearts that are so beloved and revered by all of us who are Catholics. But I see it too in the other places that informed my upbringing and whatever I went on to achieve in the world -- in Bauru, deep in the middle of the state of São Paulo, where my family moved and where my love of football was born; and in Santos, along the coast from Rio, where I experienced such happiness as a player and won so many championships. The places where I was born, where I grew up and where I played football -- they have given me three hearts too.

It has now been more than sixty-five years since I came into the world, on 23 October 1940, in Três Corações. My journey has been a long one, but strangely there's almost nothing about it that I cannot remember. I was born poor, in a small house built from second-hand bricks, but although this makes it sound sturdy, from the outside you could tell how ramshackle it really was. Although I'm honoured that the street has been named after me and there's even a plaque on that house saying that's where I was born, it hasn't changed much and still looks pretty run-down. Perhaps the plaque even helps hold the thing together. When I went back to visit this house later in life it brought to mind vividly what the scene of my birth must have been like -- a scene that has been described to me by my grandmother, Ambrosina, who was there to help my young mother Celeste through the pains and stresses of childbirth. Eventually, the tiny wriggling infant that was me was held up to the world, prompting my uncle Jorge to exclaim, 'He's certainly black enough!' -- perhaps this answered my father's first question about whether I was a boy or a girl. Apparently pleased at the knowledge of my sex my father prodded my scrawny legs and said, 'This one will be a great footballer.' My mother's reaction is not recorded, although I can imagine she was none too pleased with this prediction.

My mum, Celeste, was a local girl, the daughter of a cart-driver. She was petite, with a glistening head of hair and a beautiful smile. My dad, João Ramos do Nascimento -- everyone knows him as Dondinho -- was from a small town about sixty miles away. He was doing military service in Três Corações when they met. He was also centre-forward for Atlético of Três Corações. It wasn't a properly professional club and it hardly made him any money. There were no victory bonuses or anything like that. And in those days being a footballer meant you had a kind of reputation, it gave you -- how shall I say -- a certain notoriety. Anyway, my parents married when she was fifteen and by sixteen she was pregnant with me.

Shortly before I came along, there was another arrival in Três Corações: electricity. In order to celebrate this great improvement to our daily lives, Dondinho named me Edson, a tribute to Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. In fact, on my birth certificate I am actually called Edison with an 'i', a mistake that persists to this day. I'm Edson with no 'i', but to my eternal annoyance quite often the 'i' appears on official or personal documents and time after time I have to explain why. As if that wasn't confusing enough, they got the date wrong on my birth certificate as well -- it says 21 October. I'm not sure how this came about; probably because in Brazil we're not so fussy about accuracy. This is another mistake that carries on to this day. When I took out my first passport, the date was put in as 21 October and each time I have renewed it the date has stayed the same.

Life wasn't easy in Três Corações and soon there were more mouths to feed. My brother Jair, known as Zoca, was born in the same house I was. I'm sure my mother was thinking, 'I hope neither of my sons decides to become a footballer. There's no money in it. A doctor, perhaps? Now there's a sensible job!' Well, we know what happened. I would grow to love the game as my father did -- it was the thing he knew best and he hoped, like tens of thousands of other footballers in Brazil, that one day he would get the break that meant he could finally support us through scoring goals.

And it almost happened. In 1942 he was called up to play for Atlético Mineiro, the biggest club in the state, based in the capital Belo Horizonte. It seemed that this was the stroke of luck he needed. This was a proper professional club that was known nationally, not like its much poorer namesake Atlético of Três Corações. Atlético played against strong teams. His first try-out was a friendly against the Rio team São Cristóvão. They had a defender, Augusto, who would later get a national call-up and captain Brazil in the 1950 World Cup. Unfortunately, Augusto became known in our family for another reason: in a collision with Dondinho during the match, my dad came off the worst. He damaged his knee -- ligaments, I think. He was unable to play the next game and his flirtation with the big time was over.

Back he came to Três Corações and his journeyman career. We also lived in the nearby towns of São Lourenço and Lorena, where he played for the clubs Hepacaré and Vasco -- not the famous Rio club, but one named after it. In Lorena, a moutainside spa resort, my sister Maria Lúcia was born.

Dondinho was a good player. He was a striker, a big guy -- almost six foot -- and was a great header of the ball. Usually this sort of player would, typically, be English, but at that time Brazil had a footballer who scored some amazing headers called Baltazar. Everyone said that my dad was the 'up-country Baltazar'. I think that football already ran in the family. He had a brother, Francisco, who I never met because he died young, who was also a striker and who was apparently even better than he was.

It was said that Dondinho once headed five goals in the same match. It happened when I was too young to remember. Later in my career, when I reached a thousand goals, some journalists started to research this claim to see if it was true or not. And it was -- they reported that the only goal-scoring record that didn't belong to Pelé belonged to his own father! Now only God can explain that one...

It was in São Lourenço in 1944 that something happened that would change all our lives -- mine especially. My father received an invitation from the football club in Bauru, north-west of São Paulo, to play there but also, crucially, to take on a job as a local government functionary. He went to Bauru to find out more about the city and the proposal. He liked it, and my mother was delighted at the prospect of the non-football job, which would bring the family some security and improve our financial circumstances. We would...

Customer Reviews

Non soccer players please read this....
Being a soccer fan I loved this but I think non-soccer fans will love this book. Pele was the first ever million $ a year athlete. This book starts with Pele's humble beginnings in Brazil. Pele is his nickname, taken from a goalie he admired. Pele always wanted to be a goalie and in the days before substituions were allowed (pre- 1970) he was the reserve goalie.

Very good book, and once you've read it you'll understand how brutal soccer was before the referees started clamping down on bad tackles. A few times Pele thought his career was over. He was "butchered" in the 1966 World Cup.

I think most US readers will come away with a sense of how soccer is more than just a sport in the rest of the world. Pele relates how after Brazil lost to Uruguay in the World Cup final his father (a good soccer player) cried for weeks and never seemed to be the same again.

And how on the eve of the 70 World Cup final, Pele (a veteran at 27. Soccer really is a kid's game) preached at length to the rest of the team about their responsibilites to everyone back in Brazil and how a loss wouble be unthinkable (sounded like they were landing at Normandy). Needless to say, Brazil won 4-1 over Italy, and the 70's Brazil team is still acknowledged to be the best team ever. The Brazil vs England quarter final game from the same world cup is the game most viewed by coaches to teach players. That game was played at such a high level that they still analyze it to death. For you bookworms, think Shakespeare's Hamlet. How would the 70 Brazil team rank against the Beckhams and Ronaldos of today? Hard to say, but personally I'd put my money on the Brazilians of 1970......