A football legend died on Thursday Pelé has been remembered worldwide as well as in Finland. Photographer Juha Tamminen met the football hero, who died at the age of 82, a few times. Few Finns got to meet the three-time world champion as many times.
The veteran photographer especially remembers the interview he and a Swedish colleague got during the soccer World Cup in Mexico in 1986. The two of them got to talk to Pelé, who commented on the games on TV, before the World Cup final.
– We were told that Pelé has five minutes. We ended up talking for half an hour. There was a time limit, otherwise we would have talked longer. A story would have been enough for Pelé, Tamminen happily recalls in an interview with .
There was an hour until the start of the World Cup final, so both the journalists and Pelé, who commented on the match on television, were in a hurry. Tamminen says that he still has that interview tape at home.
The brass legend visited Finland in the same year. According to Tamminen, it was also understood here how big a star Pelé was.
– In Finland, it was going hard and spinning for a couple of days. There was enough of a crowd around him and Pelé could sign autographs, Tamminen describes.
Humility exuded from the football legend
According to Tamminen, Pelé did not place himself above others, even though on the field he was, as his nickname suggests, the king.
– Success never dawned on him. He was always humble and down to earth, which you also noticed when talking to him, Tamminen says.
Pelé was sometimes criticized in Brazil for not taking a strong stance on politics, for example. Tamminen thinks this was part of the reason why he was so widely liked.
Pelé, who represented Brazilian Santos except for the last years of his career, was a beloved hero due to his achievements and style of play. According to Tamminen, his conscientiousness is also remembered. There were always people around the star.
– Traffic stopped where Pelé was moving. He was one above the others in Brazil, says Tamminen.
Atik Ismail remembers the skill
For one of the legends of Finnish football For Atik Ismail Pelé was one of the great heroes of childhood. A boxer of international stars Muhammad Ali belonged to the same category.
– There weren’t that many idols at that time. These were such worshiped people, Ismail describes.
There were examples of domestic artists Aulis Rytkönen and Kai Pahlman.
– Role models were of great importance. I wanted to store in my brain their excerpts when I rarely saw them. They were then imitated in parks and elsewhere, recalls Ismail, who scored 112 goals in the SM series.
Ismail regrets that he never saw the brass player in person. He had just moved from Helsinki to Kuopio when Pelé came to the Finnish capital in the fall of 1986.
Rytkönen even had time to meet Pelé and the Brazilian national team while playing in France. The modest Kuopio resident did not tell Ismail about this.
– If I had played with Pelé or against him, I would have told everyone every day that Pelé had a bit of a fight, Ismail laughs.
Ismail remembers seeing a documentary about the 1966 World Cup. Ismail says that the documentary aroused strong emotions, because Pelé was injured in the tournament due to the hard grips of his opponents.
– As a ten-year-old boy, I cried in the cinema, Ismail recalls.
Comparison of the best of all time
When talking about the world’s best soccer player of all time, Pelé and the great players of Argentina Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi’s the names are repeated.
Ismail sees a lot of similarities between Messi and Pelé, who just won the world championship.
– Both have fantastic game intelligence and surprise. They have such a spatial perception, that is, they can see 360 degrees in every direction, which is a huge source of creativity.
Especially in the 1980s, Maradona, who charmed on the playing fields, was phenomenally skilled, but already during his playing career off the field it hurt and happened. The pace picked up after his career, but that didn’t happen to Pelé.
– Pelé didn’t fool around the way Maradona fooled around after his career with drug deals and hanging out with dictators. Both were from poor backgrounds, but after their careers, they parted ways over time, Tamminen reflects.
Pelé was one of the first global football superstars. The significance of the brass legend for future generations was extraordinary.
– There hasn’t been another player like that. An era ended when Pelé left, Tamminen describes.