Pelé brought unrivaled star power, following to New York

This was a warm summer day in 2001, and a man named Edson Arantes do Nascimento at birth walked with a slight limp on the turf at old Giants Stadium. He bent down, pulled a few blades of freshly mowed grass from the ground, smiled. 

“I wish,” the man, by now known in every corner of the globe as Pelé, said, the smile widening. 

Twenty-four years earlier, Pelé had filled this building, as impossible as it was to believe, because while the old stadium at the Meadowlands would sell every seat in its 35-year existence for American football games, the notion that the other futbol would ever draw a tenth of that was fanciful and farcical. 

Until Pelé, that is. Until the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League began playing their games here after stops at Downing Stadium and Yankee Stadium, choosing the vast football grounds because the public demanded it to see one of the most star-studded soccer teams ever assembled. There were other brilliant players — Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, Carlos Alberto, Shep Messing — but only one global phenomenon. 

Only one Pelé. 

“I wish we could have played our games on grass,” Pelé said 24 years after his final game within these walls, “because this beautiful game was supposed to be played on grass, as God intended it. It’s a different game on the …” He laughed, looking for the right word. 

“Astroturf?” someone said. 

He nodded. And smiled again. 

“Grass,” he replied. “As God intended.” 

Pelé didn’t invent the term “the beautiful game” to describe soccer, but he certainly popularized it and whenever he played in a career that spanned his teens, 20s and deep into his 30s, he absolutely embodied it. You didn’t have to know a thing about soccer to understand that Pelé — who died Thursday at age 82 after a battle with cancer — was a beautiful, bountiful master of it. You just knew. 

“I always thought that you could bring someone from the moon to Candlestick Park, and within five minutes he’d tell you that Willie Mays was just different than anyone else on the field,” Reggie Jackson told me at Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field one spring not long ago. “That’s what Pelé was like. You watched him for five seconds and said to yourself: ‘That is just spectacular.’ ” 

They were the two biggest stars in New York City that summer and fall of 1977. On Oct. 1, 1977 — 34 days after the Cosmos had defeated the Seattle Sounders 2-1 for the NASL title in Pele’s final competitive game — 75,646 people jammed into Giants Stadium to witness Pelé’s farewell, a friendly between the Cosmos and Santos, Pelé’s longtime Brazilian club team. 

He played the first half for the Cosmos, and scored the 1,283rd and final goal of his career — in 1,367 pro matches, an extraordinary total — on a direct kick from 30 yards away. He played the second half for Santos. The Cosmos won 2-1, and at match’s end he took the microphone. 

“I believe that love is the most important thing we can take from life, because everything else passes,” he said, before exhorting the masses: “Say with me three times: Love! Love! Love!” 

And the masses complied. 

Seventeen days later, Jackson hit three home runs to clinch Game 6 of the World Series, and while the 55,407 at Yankee Stadium accompanied Jackson’s third bomb — to the fabled black at the old Stadium — with a roar that tried to match the one Pelé had heard, it didn’t quite get there. 

“I didn’t come to New York to be a star,” Reggie had famously said, “I brought my star with me.” 

Pelé did too, of course. He and Muhammad Ali were far and away the most famous athletes worldwide in the 20th century, and he was adored by soccer fans of every color and creed. He won three World Cups for Brazil, in 1958, 1962 and 1970. He won 10 club titles with Santos. When he scored his 1,000th career goal on Nov. 19, 1969, the event drew more than 80,000 fans to Rio’s Maracana Stadium. 

The NASL — whose humble roots began with players earning $75 per game — wooed Pelé for several years and when he finally debuted for the Cosmos on Randall’s Island on June 15, 1975, there were 21,273 people squeezed into Downing Stadium, three times as many as had ever seen a soccer game there. The 34-year-old Pelé had a goal and an assist. The Cosmos tied the Dallas Tornado, 2-2. And an improbable love affair was born. 

Three years later, 77,691 would come to the Meadowlands to watch the Cosmos beat the Fort Lauderdale Strikers 8-3 in a playoff game. Pelé’s dream had been recognized. Soccer’s emergence into the American sporting mainstream can be directly traced to one man, who wore No. 10 for the Cosmos and lit up rooms, stadiums and playing fields all over the earth. 

Twenty-four years later, he took a long look around his last soccer home, Giants Stadium, stared at the upper deck, craned his neck to see the very last row. 

“When I close my eyes,” he said, “I can hear the roar still.”