Being a soccer player carried a certain stigma - Pele

My earliest memories of soccer are of pickup games on our street, weaving through small brick houses and potholed dirt roads, scoring goals and laughing like crazy between gasps of cold, heavy air. We would play for hours, until our feet hurt, and the sun went down, and our mothers called us back inside. No fancy gear, no expensive jerseys. Just a ball or something like it. Therein lies much of the beauty of the game.

As for what I did with that ball…well, I learned almost everything I know from my father, Joao Ramos do Nascimento. Like virtually everyone in Brazil, he was known by his nickname - Dondinho.

Dondinho was from a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, literally “General Mines”, where much of Brazil’s gold was found during colonial times. When Dondinho met my mother, Celeste, he was still performing his mandatory military service. She was in school at the time.

They married when she was just fifteen; by sixteen she was pregnant with me. They gave me the name “Edson”- after Thomas Edison, because when I was born in 1940, the electric light bulb had only recently come to their town. They were so impressed that they wanted to pay homage to its inventor. It turned out they missed a letter-but I’ve always loved the name anyway.

"So being a soccer player carried a certain stigma - it was like being a dancer, or an artist, or any profession that people pursue out of love, not because there’s any real money in it"

Dondinho too his soldiering seriously, but soccer was his true passion. He was six feet tall, huge for Brazil, especially in those days, and very skilled with the ball. He had a particular talent for jumping high into the air and scoring goals with his head, something he once did an amazing five times in one game.

That probably was and is a national record. Years later, people would say, with some exaggeration - the only goal-scoring record in Brazil that doesn’t belong to Pele is held by his own father!

It was no coincidence. I’m certain that Dondinho could have been one of the all-time Brazilian greats. He just never got a chance t prove it.

When I was born, my dad was playing semiprofessional ball in a town in Minas Gerais called Tres Coracoes - “Three Hearts”, in English.

Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a living. While a few elite soccer clubs paid decent salaries back then, the vast majority didn’t. So being a soccer player carried a certain stigma - it was like being a dancer, or an artist, or any profession that people pursue out of love, not because there’s any real money in it.

Our young family drifted from town to town, always in search of the next paycheck. At one point, we spent a whole year living in a hotel - but not quite the luxury kind, let’s say. It was, as we later joked, a zero-star resort for soccer players - as well as traveling salesmen and outright bums.