WORLD CUP ‘94: 30 DAYS AND COUNTING : LASTING GOODBY : Pele’s Fete Magical : His Exit in ’77 Game Recalled as Touching Moment in Soccer History

The gates of Giants Stadium opened Oct. 1, 1977, flooding the Meadowlands with 75,646 well-wishers and worshipers. Later, the gates of heaven would break, soaking the field with raindrops.

“God was crying,” Julio Mazzei, a witness, contends.

Outpourings marking the occasion of Pele’s last soccer game were emotional and spontaneous, dispensed from above and below.

Werner Roth, then-captain of the New York Cosmos, lifted a triumphant Pele after the 36-year-old star had scored the last goal of his career in the first half.

“We felt like we were losing someone,” Roth says today. “I felt it. Players retire all the time. Players come and go. But Pele was a special player. It was almost a little bit like a funeral. We were celebrating something ultimately we would miss.”

After 22 years of Brazilian brilliance, Pele would no longer share his gift after that final command performance.

His mother, Celeste, who had wished Pele would become a physician and wore out several rosaries praying for her son’s safe deliverance from soccer, sat nervously in the stands to witness him play in person--for the first time.

To her, Pele was always her vulnerable baby, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, not the prodigy who would earn his legendary nickname in the streets of Bauru.

That Oct. 1 was heavy with clouds and symbolism.

Pele believed he owed the game’s first half to New York, the soccer surrogate that had lured him out of retirement for what he considered the final sojourn of his missionary work.

Pele donned the Cosmos’ shirt partly for Americans who had embraced an import, if not his sport.

Mostly, though, he played the first 45 minutes for his father, Goao, better known as Dondinho, who toiled for years in the Brazilian soccer leagues, taking his family from town to town, never remotely approaching his son’s success.

After scoring his 1,281st and last goal on a free kick, Pele offered Dondinho the shirt off his back.

After intermission, Pele emerged in the jersey of Santos, the Brazilian club for which he had played since 1956. At game’s end, the shirt was presented to Valdemar de Brito, Pele’s youth coach from Bauru. It was Valdemar who hand-delivered the wonder boy to Santos, after a six-hour bus trip. Santos then passed Pele on to the world.

Pele, stripped to the waist after his final stand, his skin glistening in the rain, was paraded around the field on the shoulders of teammates as choruses of “Auld Lang Syne” were sung.

The largely umbrella-less crowd, rich and rogues alike, stood unaffected by the downpour.

Mazzei, a Cosmos assistant coach and Pele’s longtime friend, was among those singing. Mazzei had followed Pele to the States from Brazil and now works in Pele’s New York offices.

Friends for 32 years, Mazzei is known to Pele as “the Professor.”

“You know how it feels to graduate a son from college?” Mazzei asked, trying to find a comparable feeling to that day. “And then he goes on to the world? You know what I mean? I felt that way. It was like seeing the coronation of a brilliant, fantastic, genius career. It was very emotional. He cried a lot. It was really, for me, in my soccer career as a coach, assistant coach, manager, administrator, the biggest thing that happened to me in my life.”

*

As naturally as emotions flowed at Giants Stadium, the blueprint for Pele’s last waltz had been mapped out years before by Clive Toye, then the Cosmos’ general manager.

Toye and Phil Woosnam, head of the North American Soccer League, had been in hot pursuit of Pele since 1971, first approaching the world’s greatest player in Kingston, Jamaica.

Pele had already retired from the Brazilian national team, which he had helped to three World Cup championships.

Pele tentatively had planned to retire from Santos in 1974, but the Cosmos wanted to sign the star in the hope he might breathe life into the young and struggling NASL.

Mazzei, who served as interpreter at the Kingston meeting, remembers sitting by a hotel swimming pool as he relayed to Pele the Americans’ intentions.

“Tell them they are so crazy,” Pele told Mazzei. “I’m never going to play in America. Tell them to say hello for me.”

Pele could not justify to his Brazilian fans how he could retire from the national team, then turn around and defect to the United States.

But Toye pressed on and Pele slowly came around. Toye eventually sold the star on the vital role he might play as a soccer missionary.

Pele agonized over the decision, soliciting the opinions of hometown taxi drivers and waiters.

“He was not worried about the president of Brazil,” Mazzei says. “He was worried about the Brazilian people.”

Toye made another run at Pele in the spring of 1974, traveling to Santos, to attend a club game.

After the match, Modesto Roma, Santos team president, told Toye he thought Pele was about to cave in.

But what was in it for Roma?

Pele wanted to make only a two-year commitment to New York, but Toye insisted on a three-year deal so Pele could play his last season in Giants Stadium, scheduled to open in 1977.

Then Toye dangled an irresistible carrot.

“I remember it was a dusty, hot day in Santos,” said Toye, now president of the World Cup’s New York Host Committee. “I was leaning against a car. And that’s where it happened.”

Toye promised that if Pele would play in America for three years, his last game would be played against Santos. After playing one half for the Cosmos, Pele would switch uniforms at intermission and play the last 45 minutes of his career for Santos.

“I’ll give him back to you,” Toye explained.

Roma’s eyes lit up.

“We never had a contract on it,” Toye said. “Just a handshake. But 3 1/2 years later, that’s exactly what happened.”

In the summer of 1975, Pele signed a three-year, $4.5-million contract with the Cosmos.

During his last game in Brazil, though, Pele bade an emotional farewell to Santos, which he had helped to two world club championships.

His final club game was played Oct. 1, 1974, exactly three years before his Meadowlands farewell. It was, in some ways, more dramatic than his North American farewell because Pele had refused to reveal the time or date of his retirement.

“He kept everyone guessing,” Mazzei remembered. “Then, 20 minutes before that game is finished, Pele stopped action in the middle of the field. Then he grabbed the ball, knelt on the kickoff spot and opened his arms like a cross. Then, he faced the VIP area, then then the south stands, then the east stands, then the north stands, and then the game is stopped. That’s the way he finished in Santos.”

The next day, a Brazilian soccer paper ran a full-page picture of a deflated soccer ball.

“The ball was sad,” Mazzei said. “It don’t want to jump no more.”

On to New York.

*

Werner Roth, a Cosmos’ defenseman from 1972 through ‘79, was on the receiving end of the first and last goals Pele scored for the Cosmos.

When Pele scored in his debut against the Dallas Tornado in 1975, he jumped into Roth’s arms.

Roth had the whole soccer world in his hands.

“A lot of us were in awe, being on the same field,” recalled Roth from his home on Long Island. “I caught myself just watching him on a number of occasions. We overplayed to him the first couple of games. We gave him the ball all the time. He’d come off the field and say, ‘Fellas, there are 11 guys on the field, let’s use them all.’ ”

As much as by his talent, Roth was impressed by Pele’s humility.

“I’d seen college players who joined the Cosmos who had bigger ego problems,” Roth said. “He doesn’t come across as a legend.”

By Pele’s last game, professional soccer in America had seemingly come of age after years of struggle. Pele might have thought his missionary work was done. So popular were the Cosmos, in fact, that they often outdrew the New York Yankees and Mets.

Soccer was never more popular, more viable, in America then it was when Pele played his last game. You might have expected the sport to blossom in Pele’s wake.

But it didn’t. It had always been more popular in New York than elsewhere in the country, and greedy, short-sighted ownership and expansion eventually took down the NASL, which folded in 1984.

“Too many of the new owners that were attracted by the glamour of Giants Stadium and Pele,” Toye reflected. “They did not understand the hard labor that went into making it a success. It’s not just one day you sign Pele and the next day there’s success. We worked many years developing the market and then signed Pele at the appropriate time.”

Roth said the shame is that soccer failed to take advantage of one of its crowning moments.

Pele’s last game was televised to 40 countries and attracted 760 journalists from around the world.

“It was one of the greatest opportunities to establish pro soccer as a major sport in this country,” Roth said. “You look back at the number of mistakes that were made. It could have been different, if we hadn’t been so cocky at that point. We assumed, after 1977, that the game was here, that we didn’t have to try as hard.

“But Pele’s little shoes were impossible to fill.”

All that’s left now are memories.

Roth remembers running with teammates alongside Pele after the game, and not wanting to leave the field.

“Most of us were crying,” he said.

Toye, the man who had brought Pele to the States, watched the culmination of his dream from a private box on the mezzanine level.

“I don’t think anyone’s quite transcended any sport worldwide the way Pele has transcended soccer,” he said. “It was a great first day when he first stepped on the field with the Cosmos shirt on and a great last day when it all came to an end.”

Afterward, in the locker room, Mazzei sat next to Pele and wondered if the day could have been more perfect.

In the second half, Pele nearly scored for Santos.

“(The shot) hit the back of one of his Santos teammates,” Mazzei remembered clearly, as though Pele had put foot to ball only yesterday. “It was over the goal line and ricocheted out. In the locker room, I say to him, ‘Pele, why that goal not go in? It would be great that you scored a goal for the Cosmos and one for Santos in the second half. It would be perfect.’ ”

Pele looked Mazzei in the eye.

“Professor,” Pele said, “it would be asking too much of God.”