Word: mythicize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pele is therefore a different phenomenon from the baseball or football star. Soccer stars are dependent on their teams even while transcending them. To achieve mythic status as a soccer player is especially difficult because the peak performance is generally quite short--only the fewest players perform at the top of their game for more than five years. Incredibly, Pele performed at the highest level for 18 years, scoring 52 goals in 1973, his 17th year. Contemporary soccer superstars never reach even 50 goals a season. For Pele, who had thrice scored more than 100 goals a year, it signaled...
...mythic status of Pele derives as well from the way he incarnated the character of Brazil's national team. Its style affirms that virtue without joy is a contradiction in terms. Its players are the most acrobatic, if not always the most proficient. Brazilian teams play with a contagious exuberance. When those yellow shirts go on the attack--which is most of the time--and their fans cheer to the intoxicating beat of samba bands, soccer becomes a ritual of fluidity and grace. In Pele's day, the Brazilians epitomized soccer as fantasy...
...York Cosmos. He was no longer as fast, but he was as exuberant as ever. By then, Pele had become an institution. Most modern fans never saw him play, yet they somehow feel he is part of their lives. He made the transition from superstar to mythic figure...
Indeed this sort of mythic lore about the law school has been a thorn in the side of HLS administrators for more than two decades. Thanks in part to commercially-successful works like One L. by Scott F. Turow (HLS '78), or The Paper Chase, a book-turned-movie about the darker side of HLS, Harvard has struggled with the notion that one of its most prized graduate schools is less than perfect...
...story has assumed mythic proportions, like the sinking of the Titanic or Robert Falcon Scott's doomed race to the South Pole. Shortly after noon on June 8, 1924, the 38-year-old English schoolmaster and Alpinist George Leigh Mallory, along with a young companion, an Oxford engineering student and oarsman named Andrew ("Sandy") Irvine, 22, vanished into the mists surrounding the summit of 29,028-ft. Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, never to be heard from again...