Pele: One Of The World's Greatest Entertainers

[RonPrice]

DREAMS AND ICONS

 

Pele was the name of soccer’s first superstar and its finest player in the twentieth century. Pele is also the name of the Hawaiian goddess of the volcano. The home of this goddess is a place called ‘the fire pit’ on the island of Hawaii. This name ‘Pele’ will be associated--by those who were interested in soccer and the Baha’i Faith--with Brazil and the opening years of the tenth and final stage of a Baha’i paradigm of history. Pele’s soccer career is also associated with my adolescence and the first years of my early adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s.-Ron Price with thanks to “Pele: World Cup Hero,” ABC TV, 11:10-12:00, July 18th 2005.

 

You changed from poor slum boy

to soccer’s story of ultimate dream

making your start the year he died—

he who with the genius of divine

interpretation defined our dream,

our grand design in his 36 years.1

 

Back in those interregnum years(1957-1963)2

you were becoming a superstar while

I was becoming a Baha’i,

finishing high school and starting

my pioneering life back in ’62.

 

When the tenth and final stage of history

made its world stage entrance in 1964

you had become “The King of Soccer”

on your way to more than a thousand

goals in your lifelong scoring career.

 

Pele, I heard tonight you were still

around, still making a name for yourself,

still extending the meaning of that icon

you had become long ago when I was

attaching myself to my first icons.

 

And me, Pele, I found other icons

of meaning, never watched any soccer

games in my adult life, never got involved

in business, never made much money,

but, Pele, I watched the first forty years4

of that 10th stage of history unfold

in that great climacteric, turbulence,

and its catalogue of global horrors.

1 1921-1957

2 Years between the death of the Guardian and the election of the Universal House of Justice.

3 1957-1977

4 1964-2004

 

Ron Price

July 19th 2005