The Greatest Soccer Star of All Time and the Worst Soccer Movie Ever

The U.S. soccer team's astonishing second-half surge to overcome a two-goal lead by Slovenia and stave off elimination in the World Cup has even the casual soccer fans among us--me, for example--pretty excited.

As a child of the 1950s and 1960s who can remember a time when soccer was only slightly less alien to much of America than, say, the Scottish sport of haggis hurling, it's amazing to see how pervasive the world's favorite sport has become in this country. Youth soccer clearly has supplanted Little League among many in my 10-year-old son's generation and Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo is so well known that Nike pairs him with Homer Simpson in a TV commercial.

As I surfed obscure high-numbered digital TV channels the other night, though, I was reminded of the international soccer superstar who first resonated decades ago in our collective baby boomer consciousness.

I came upon director John Huston's 1981 Victory, a film about Allied POWs in a German prison camp who forced to put together a soccer team to play the Germans as a propaganda stunt. There have been a few good soccer-themed movies over the years--2002's Bend It Like Beckham comes to mind--but Victory wasn't one of them; it definitely ranks among the lesser works of the man who created such classics asThe Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But it has a few fun moments, such as the scene where a youthful Sylvester Stallone--whose towering late disco-era pompadour, pumped-up musculature and orange tan made him deliciously incongruous as a WWII American GI--tries out for the position of goalkeeper. Despite his apparent lack of familiarity with the game, Sly thrusts out his pecs confidently and somehow manages to deflect most of the shots from his teammates. That is until one of the prisoners, played by Edson Arantes do Nascimento, gives it a try.

If the unfamilar name of that actor sends you rushing to search the Internet Movie Database, you might know him by his more familiar moniker, Pelé--the superstar Brazilian athlete who played from the 1950s to the 1970s. In 2000, international soccer coaches, officials and journalists selected him as the top player of the 20th Century. With seeming effortlessness,O Rei do Futebol, as he was known in his native land, taps the ball to-and-fro between his feet with a speed that the camera seems barely able to catch, and then scoots it past the flummoxed, stumbling future Rambo. All the while, Pele smiles pleasantly, as if a bartender was mixing him a caipirinha, the Brazilian national cocktail.

Pele has a unique significance to many of us boomers, particularly those who, like me, grew up in parts of the country where soccer still was largely unknown. He was the first world-class soccer player whose name I ever knew and probably for years the only one. The first time I saw him was on my parents' grainy black-and-white TV, back in the days when ABC's Wide World of Sports occasionally augmented its fare of minor sports--trick water skiing, bodybuilding, rail dragsters, whatever--by showing Americans a glimpse of the sport that the rest of the world loved so intensely.

The rules, strategy and techniques of this unfamiliar game were as much a mystery to me as Simon Bar Sinister's puzzling inability to figure out Underdog's secret identity. But you didn't really need to understand the nuances of soccer to be able to spot Pele's astonishing ability--the way he raced downfield, changing direction at sharp angles to evade opponents, controlling the ball rolling in front of him as if it was wired for remote control. He could shake and bake like Earl "The Pearl" Monroe did on the basketball court, but he did it with his feet, instead of his hands. And in an era when all but a few NBA players still played below the rim, it was astonishing to see Pele rise up from the midst of a pack of opposing jerseys, acrobatically twist his slim body, and knock the ball at the goal with his head. It was a revelation, like chancing upon Picasso's Guernica for the first time in an art history book, or hearing James Brown and his band break it down.

I'm not sure how Pele ended up playing a soccer-star POW in that John Huston movie. The Brazilians did send troops to fight on the Allied side in Europe, so I guess it's remotely plausible--at least as much as Sly was believable as a goalkeeper.