Big-league soccer hit the U.S.A. on Father’s Day, and television audiences all over this country, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Panama, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil turned their attention to a small patch of green-painted ground halfway between Manhattan and Astoria. Pelé, the King of Soccer, the Black Pearl, lured from Brazil by four million seven hundred thousand Yanqui dollars and his own sense of duty, was here to play his first game for Warner Communications’ New York Cosmos, 3–6 on the season and trailing only the Boston Minutemen and the Rochester Lancers in the Northern Division of the North American Soccer League. The game drew a paying crowd of 21,278 locals to Randall’s Island’s quaint New Deal Downing Stadium, and this was the fourth-largest metropolitan Father’s Day crowd, trailing only the Americana ’75 antiques fair on Fifty-second Street, a Yankee bat day at Shea, and the second-ever Sunday card at Belmont Park.
Abandoning our cab to a previously unheard-of traffic jam at the Randall’s Island exit of the Triborough Bridge, we clambered over a guardrail and joined a steady stream of eager aficionados heel-and-toeing it over the bridge from Harlem. Across fields of white clover, past chuck wagons vending comidas criollas whose proprietors were tuning in the Bronx Bombers on the radio, around Cosmos ticket booths doing brisk business in six-dollar reserved and four-dollar general-admission seats, to our own concrete perch, atop the only New York stadium adorned in fading stencil with the legend “KATᘯ H XOYNTA,” which means “BOO, JUNTA” in Greek. An unusual assortment of advertising signs around a field of play where bald spots are daubed with Kelly-green paint: “En mi casa toman BUSTELO;” Grand Marnier Liqueur; Ciro, Brooklyn’s More for Your Money Store; DRESSLER Export Beer; Jack in the Box; Warner Brothers Jungle Habitat; and six Pepsi signs. Dressler’s boast is “We’re Keeping the Quality Up by Keeping the Sales Down.” Pepsi has a worldwide promotional contract with Pelé. The two teams took the field—the Cosmos and Lamar Hunt’s Dallas Tornado, starring ABC Superstars winner Kyle Rote, Jr. Last man on the field: New York’s No. 10, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, who does business as Pelé, his right arm aloft in the victory salute.
It was Pelé’s sixth day in New York. A superbly muscled, hugely smiling, and completely relaxed thirty-four-year-old, Pelé was five feet nine when he got to town, according to the papers, and then lost an inch of height a day in the sports pages until he levelled out at five feet six. Kyle Rote, Jr., the first native-American soccer player of any note, is six feet even and is considered pretty good for a big fellow. Most soccer players are quick, strong, savvy, and below average height. Pelé, in his eighteen years of pro ball in Brazil, racked up an incredible twelve hundred and twenty goals in twelve hundred and fifty-three games—which is approximately like hitting a hundred and sixty-two home runs a season—and notched ninety hat tricks in his career and an eight-goal game in 1964. He led the Brazilian National Team to three quadrennial World Cup titles. When he retired, last year, the Cosmos—who, according to their president, Nesuhi Ertegun, had decided to rebuild and get good—went to work on him, and eventually hooked him by persuading him that he was the only man who could spark an interest among heathen gringos in the world’s most popular game.
Dallas kicked off the first forty-five-minute half, which in soccer simply means they put the ball in play, and lost control to New York in a few seconds. The Cosmos immediately passed the ball to Pelé, who muffed it. Two hundred photographers were drawn up along the Tornado goal line waiting for the Black Pearl’s first Big Apple goal. Nine minutes into the game, Dallas’s Altamont McKenzie, an All-American from Oneonta, scored the game’s first goal, on a breakaway. The New York fans started whistling—soccer’s raspberry. New York then proceeded not to score on a number of opportunities. Pelé, on a good shot, headed the ball into the goal post instead of the goal. “Blew the chippie,” said a hardened U.P.I. man by our side. Pelé also set up a number of other shots, which were either frittered away by his teammates or miraculously saved by Tornado goalie Ken Cooper, a native of Blackpool, Lancashire. A new rule of the North American Soccer League requires that each team roster of eighteen include at least five American or Canadian citizens, but most of the English-speakers in the twenty-team league, which includes something called the Tampa Bay Rowdies, hail from Blighty. Five and a half minutes before the end of the half, Dallas picked up a Texas League goal when, in a mixup in front of the Cosmos goal, the ball bounded off the foot of New York defender Mike Dillon into the net. “C’mon,” moaned a fan in our section. “¡Organización!” Halftime score: Dallas 2, New York 0. Only the fotogs with telephoto lenses had what they needed.
Halftime entertainment by the Brentwood (L.I.) Marching Band. Beethoven. “Ode to Joy.” We nipped into the press box and copped a couple of field passes, so that we could join the image mavens on the painted grass. Dennis Sowers, affable Cosmos P.R. rep, handed us a mimeoed Cosmos cheer. It goes:
Down on the field, we encountered the most interesting apparition of the afternoon: Ray, the White Tornado, a white-tailcoated professional enthusiast for Dallas. Ray struts around irritating opposing rooters and making balloon dachshunds for children. He wears a top hat with a little soccer ball on top and a chrome faucet in front, and he performs the same services, in season, for the Dallas Cowboys. The photographers were now all massed at the other end of the field—the teams change sides at halftime—and we took up a position between the Associated Press and Raff Frano, who takes pix for the Tornado.
New York came alive in the second half, and we watched at eye level a red-white-and-blue ball scooting through a flurry of black and white legs. With twelve minutes gone, Pelé brought the ball deftly upfield and threaded a lateral to Mordechai Shpigler, an Israeli playing his fifth game for the Cosmos, who then kicked a dribbler past Cooper to make the score Dallas 2, New York 1. The A.P. man rushed his shots of the Pelé assist back to town. Pelé made a number of other sensational plays, including a backward bicycle kick over his own shoulder and some fancy heel passes. Then, with the period nearly half gone and just after a leap by Cooper had deflected over the net a shot by the twenty-two-year-old Croatian Cosmo Mark Liveric, who wears a cowrie-shell necklace, Pelé found himself amid three Tornado defenders in front of the Dallas goal with a kick from near the corner coming in high from Shpigler. All leaped for the ball, and it was Pelé’s forehead that met it and sent it crashing into the goal. Tie game. Jubilation. Pelé mobbed. Play resumed. No more fireworks. Raff explained Tornado pooped—Dallas had played San Antonio Thunder previous evening and slept on Red Eye Special to New York. A.P. man reflective: “Nobody can run full out for an hour and a half.” He whistled a few bars of “Fine and Dandy,” and was interrupted by an apoplectic colleague. “Why’d you send off those shots of the first goal? Now all your best film’s out here!” Final score of the game: 2–2. No overtime—CBS wanted to go off the air, and the game was billed as an exhibition.
We slipped into the Dallas dressing room for a word with Ken Cooper, who used to be the backup goalie on a First Division team in England. “Pelé’s vision is tremendous,” Cooper told us. “And because it’s so comprehensive he’s got all the options. I mean, he’s not the kind of player who decides how he’s going to take the ball up the field when he gets it. He just sees what’s going on, and then he knows what’s available.” ♦
