When I was nine years old, my favorite football club in the world, the one that I dreamed of one day playing for, was the New York Cosmos. The reason was obvious. The Cosmos had Pelé, and everybody knew he was the best player in the world. If the Cosmos wouldn’t sign me, I wanted to play for Santos, Pelé’s club in Brazil.
He had just retired, though, but even if I may have known that, it didn’t bother me because my father worked at an appliance store that sold this new invention called a video recorder.
On one of those mysterious black boxes called video recording cassettes, he had recorded a show that told me the story of Pelé, all the way from Edson Arantes do Nascimento’s childhood in poor Brazil to his heroics in the World Cup, to his 1000th goal, to his seven-million dollar contract with the Cosmos, and to his last game in New York, against Santos.
In my head, while shooting a ball against the wall of our apartment building, I was Pelé, but as we all know, just as important as the images in your head is the image you portray to the world.
