Columnist Ron Kantowski: The legend of soccer is still a big kick

Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2004 | 10:20 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

At a little past 2 p.m. Tuesday, the main hall at the Globing Gaming Expo at the Las Vegas Convention Center was transformed into something akin to the United Nations by a sturdy man sporting a pale green polyester leisure suit and a retro Afro hairstyle.

Edson Arantes do Nasimento was in the house, and people of all creeds and colors were there to greet him.

They pumped his hand, slapped him on the back, hugged him, and kissed his cheeks.

They put an arm around him and said "cheese" while business partners, colleagues, husbands, wives and shapely assistants pretending to be wives recorded the moment with every sort of camera known to mankind, including many that looked like telephones.

And they wouldn't leave until he had signed his name to something -- a scrap of paper, an article of clothing, the bare midriff of a shapely assistant pretending to be a wife. Or one of the miniature soccer balls provided by his new business associate, Aristocrat Technologies Inc., which Tuesday introduced a new line of slot machines bearing his likeness.

To (insert name here). Good luck. Pele.

Now I know the real reason why great Brazilian soccer players are bestowed with nicknames. If Pele signed his real name every time somebody asked for an autograph, he would have developed carpal tunnel syndrome as a teenager in 1958, when he led Brazil to the first of an unprecedented five World Cup championships.

He's not a teenager anymore. In fact, later this month he will celebrate his 64th birthday. But if anything, based on the mob scene I witnessed Tuesday, his legend seems to be growing, even in a country where football is primarily played with the hands instead of the feet.

"This man is not just a soccer legend. He's an institution," said Frank Quinlan, a 40-year-old independent news channel reporter from Los Angeles, clutching the June 21, 1975 edition of Sports Illustrated with Pele's picture on the cover that the man himself had signed a few minutes earlier.

We were standing near a bank of Pele Legendary Goals slot machines. Above, a monitor was showing highlights of Pele weaving through virtually the entire Argentina side en route to one of 1,280 goals he scored over a spectacular 19-year career, the last three of which were spent with the New York Cosmos of the old North American Soccer League.

But it was Quinlan who looked as if he had just been kicked in the shin. When he heard that Pele was going to be appearing here, he jumped in his car, unshowered and unshaven, and headed for the desert.

"I didn't even change my underwear," he said.

"I've just wanted to meet him all my life. We never get to see him in L.A. and this was just an incredible opportunity. He's the best in world. The best to ever (kick) a soccer ball."

Amazingly, as I discovered during our brief chat Tuesday, he still looks fit enough to kick a soccer ball.

Fearing that any significant movement by Pele would cause a seismic shift of mankind that could shake the Convention Center from its foundation, I was asked to interview him in a tiny space alongside the autograph podium, just in front of the slot machines that were clanging and whistling like a bunch of angry English football supporters. With dozens of envious spectators looking on, it wasn't exactly the ideal circumstance under which to interview a world icon.

This is what it must have been like to queue up at Pele's locker after a big match, I thought. Only he wasn't sweating (not that he did much of that in the NASL). And he wasn't wearing that famous yellow jersey with the bright green No. 10 on it, the one that was purchased at auction in 2002 for $202,850.

The first thing Pele did was hug me, as if I had just set him up in the 6-yard box with a teasing cross. Figuring he already has been asked every possible question in every possible language, I asked him a predictable one in English.

I asked Edson Arantes do Nascimento if he ever gets tired of being Pele.

"My first World Cup, I was 17 years old," he said in halting English (which is better than my Portuguese) of his universal popularity. "From then, until now, I keep doing the same. I thank God for that.

"When I stopped playing with the Cosmos ... it has been 25 years since I stopped to play. But it looks like I still play today. It looks like I scored the goal yesterday."

Today's transcendental soccer sensation is David Beckham, a stylish Englishman who Pele respects almost as much for his business acumen as his mastery of the "beautiful game," as Pele refers to his beloved "futbol."

"The big star today is Beckham. Ronaldo (his Brazilian countryman) is a big star, too. But they didn't get the goals like I did," Pele added with a belly laugh. "I just wish that I got the money they did."

But those guys could walk down the middle of the Las Vegas Strip and the Average Joe wouldn't know it. OK, maybe the Average Joan might ask Becks, as he is called in the British tabloids, to bend it with them.

Pele, on the other hand, draws a crowd wherever he roams. And, boy, does he ever roam. Since retiring, he has worked as a broadcaster, a reporter, a global pitchman for Coca-Cola, MasterCard and Viagra, and in 1994 was named Brazil's Minister of Sport, a position he held until last year.

Today if Pele carried a business card, it would probably read: Pele. Ambassador of Soccer. In the past two weeks alone, he has visited South Africa, Japan, Switzerland and his native Brazil, drumming up support for the 2006 World Cup in Germany through the auspices of FIFA, soccer's worldwide sanctioning body.

On Tuesday, he had breakfast in New York and lunch in Las Vegas. Just a typical day in the life of your friendly neighborhood soccer ambassador.

"This is what I am used to doing. I am used to travel," Pele said. "Maybe after the next World Cup in two years, then I am going to relax. I want to be a coach of youth in Brazil. Maybe from 8- to 15-years old. This is my retirement."

And that, says the greatest soccer player of all time, whose skills were so extraordinary that the warring nations of Nigeria and Biafra once declared a two-day truce so both sides could watch him play, is the way it should be.

"I was born on that," he said of his legacy that began on a dusty football pitch in the backwoods of Brazil. "And I want to die on that."