The beautiful man

 He didn't bring soccer to America, first of all. We only think he did.

We only think soccer was born in this country when Edson Arantes do Nascimento came to America in 1975, decades removed from the small town in Brazil where he was born.  By then the world knew him as Pele, and he was the greatest soccer player who'd ever lived. Even here, where the game was still mostly an immigrant curiosity, we knew Pele.

So when he joined the New York Cosmos in the last years of his glittering career, even those who thought soccer was just some weird foot fetish ("Whadda you mean you can't use your hands?") sat up and took notice. Pele? Hey, I've heard of that guy!

By then, ironically, he was in his mid-thirties and his skills had begun to erode, but that didn't really matter.  He was still the King, the foremost ambassador of the Beautiful Game, a phrase he himself coined. And it was beautiful the way he played it, with a flair and artistry that left soccer fans constantly hitting rewind because how the hell did he do THAT?

And now he's gone.

He died yesterday at 82 of colon cancer, a citizen of the world so famous that when he once met a president of the United States, the president -- Ronald Reagan -- introduced himself to him. He knew presidents and monarchs and world leaders of every stripe, an athlete who transcended athletics in a way no athlete ever has with the possible exception of Muhammad Ali.

With whom, of course, Pele was great friends.

Doubtless they recognized in one another what sport can do for a man or woman, how it can lift them to heights utterly unimagined. Ali grew up as Cassius Clay in a working-class neighborhood in Louisville, Ky.; Pele grew up kicking around a sock stuffed with newspapers, an actual ball being something beyond his imagining. Later, as his talent grew, he shined shoes to pay for his kit.

A few years after, he burst onto the world stage as a 17-year-old phenom leading Brazil to the World Cup in 1958. By the time he led Brazil to its third World Cup in 12 years in 1970, he was the acknowledged greatest player in the world, and even guys in America huddled around TV sets watching the Celtics or the World Series or "real" football on Sunday afternoons knew his name.

No, he didn't bring soccer to America, but we can date its entrance into the American  consciousness to the day he came to New York. The Beautiful Game, after all, had the perfect beautiful man to sell it to a nation built on selling: A joyous soul with a neon smile whose love for his game was so infectious it got us to wondering why Pele found it so damn much fun.

And so American kids started finding the game, sporadically.  They find it to this day.

Pele died less than two weeks after one of the most scintillating World Cup finals in history, a circumstance that seems both curiously appropriate and a tribute of sorts.  Messi and Mbappe and the rest, after all, confirmed what Pele had been telling us all these years about his game, and why he found so much joy in it. 

On the day of the final, I wound up at a local sports bar watching the overtimes and shootout. While I was sitting there, an acquaintance showed up and sat down next to me. He's an Ohio State football fan who, as far as I know, has only a nodding acquaintance with soccer. But when he sat down, he looked up at the screen with obvious relief.

"Oh, man," he said. "I didn't think I was gonna get here in time to see this."

I have to think Edson Arantes do Nascimento would have smiled, hearing that. I have to think he would have smiled forever.