Word: peled
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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...
...Pele at his peak only once, at the final of the World Cup in 1970. Brazil's opponent was Italy, which played its tough defense coupled with sudden thrusts to tie the game 1-1, demoralizing the Brazilians. Italy could very easily have massed its defense even more, until its frantic opponent began making the mistakes that would encompass its ruin. But, led by Pele, Brazil paid no attention. Attacking as if the Italians were a practice team, the Brazilians ran them into the ground...
...Pele a few times afterward, when he was playing for the New 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...
...fifth installment in our selection of the 100 most important people of the century, TIME has chosen a score who articulate the longings of the time they lived in. There are the extraordinary tales: of Charles Lindbergh's courage, Mother Teresa's selflessness, Marilyn Monroe's exuberance, Pele's superhuman skills, Anne Frank's immortality. And the parables: the Kennedy melodrama, the latter-day silence of Muhammad Ali, the brutal grace of Bruce Lee's art, the all-too-human Diana, Lindbergh's dalliance with Hitler. Iconoclasm is inherent in every icon, and heroes can wear different faces...