Today it was time to write about life: about the resurrection of the league and parrots and culés. But the grim reaper imposes its random and unpredictable agenda without paying attention to the forecasts and obligations of others. So finally you have to travel to the cemetery to deal with death. Farewell to Pelé, the man who was King before others were in an uninterrupted monarchical succession that always finds a head to crown. The last one, that of Messi.
Elegies can only be composed by those who knew the deceased. Those who saw him play, dribble and score on the playing fields. For the rest, the footballer Pelé has been just a story that our elders told us with enthusiasm. We did not arrive in time for his reign and other sovereigns already governed us. Pelé for us is just a YouTube video with his best plays and an older man constantly grumbling about the possibility that there could be a better player than him, as has ended up happening.
For a few days we will deal with the adjectives eternal and immortal to remember Pelé's sports career and especially his three world championships, a mark that can hardly be matched. We actually know that this will only be true for football historians and geeks who have a computer inside their heads. The double rotation of the earth is not at all comprehensive with the memory of women and men, no matter how great their feats and epics may have been. The ash of the flesh is followed by the dust of memory. With few exceptions that are not reserved for footballers.
I read with envy the texts of colleagues who are one, and even two, generations above me. In those lines if lived admiration nests, not heard or learned, for what Pelé was. There are paragraphs in which we can glimpse the sob for the loss and for the farewell to childhood through the last goodbye to the one they idolized. They were lucky that later we had others with different players. The history of generations can be written through their idols. In a free version of the proverb, tell me who you're going with and I'll tell you who you are could be rewritten as tell me who you idolize and I'll guess the year you were born.
But those texts fully lived by those who sign them are enough to know that today, no matter what poster hung on the wall of your room as a child, you have to stand up to join the mourning of people from all over the football planet, although You don't need a handkerchief to dry a single tear and you can't stop thinking about how many goals your team will score against Espanyol. Today's respect for Pelé is the same that children still without memory will owe to our kings and to us when the hour of heartfelt crying does come.
