SPECTATOR SPORT
Two very rich peas
Frank Keating
TWO very different peas from almost the same pod. Pele was 50 on Tuesday, just two days after Geoffrey Boycott had also raised his bat to acknowledge his most even for him — time-consuming half- century. Pele played for Brazil between 1957 and 1972 and remains the most opulently gifted all-round footballer the game has ever seen: no one before or since has scored more goals. Boycott finished in 1981 with more Test match runs than anyone in history; the most monumentally assiduous, technically diligent, and self- absorbed batsman ever to open the innings for England. They were born within two days of each other at opposite ends of the earth — Boycott the son of a £1-a-day South Yorkshire miner who was almost permanently off sick after a colliery acci- dent; Pele's father was an occasional, semi-pro footballer, and the family lived in one of a shabby row of shacks at Tres Caracoes in central Brazil.
Pele was a shoe-shine boy at 12, and then apprenticed to a cobbler at about the same time as a lonely Yorkshire lad with bad eyesight was embarking on his nightly bus journey after school — two changes, rain, dark and shine — to practise at Johnny Lawrence's ramshackle but roman- tic indoor cricket net some 20 miles away from the village. Forty miles an evening, cuddling his bat on the top-deck as moonily as the other lads fondled their late-night bits of crumpet. Football was dazzled by the tyro Brazi- lian's coruscating entrance at the World Cup finals of 1958. Test cricket had to wait six more years before Boycott first pored, frowning, over the new ball, his swot's glasses glinting in concentration. He was to have umpteen opening partners: his favourites were one of his first, Barber, and his last, Gooch. When he took the affable young Dennis Amiss out with him for the first time, Amiss muttered 'good luck' as they parted for their separate ends. `It's nothing to do with luck, lad,' sneered Geoffrey, 'it's skill.'
So, now, is his different sort of accu- mulation. He smiles that wonky grin and knowingly, affectionately, pats his knitted, honey-bright hairpiece when you ask him how far he is into making his second million. He'll say no more than 'all thanks to skill and "ma creek-it", ain't it?' Pele's commercial enterprises since retirement make him wealthier even than our Geoff. Quite right, too, for in footballing terms Pele's range was worth a dozen of Boycott's at cricket. Pele at soccer was an alliterative amalgam of cricket's Hobbs, Hammond, Hutton, Graveney, Gower and Gooch — that is, he had a relentless grace, a competitive ferocity, a daring invention and a strut and a swagger as well as being a confraternal, team-game fetcher, carrier and charmer. Pele was silkily, sublimely subtle, and as tough as old boots. It made me weep the other day when a tabloid suggested Fleet Street's flavour of the month, Paul Gascoigne, was 'the new Pele', and reminded me of the put-down by John Roberts when he was writing on football for the Guardian at the 1982 World Cup. Some dolt suggested Kevin Keegan was the new George Best. `Keegan', snorted John, 'isn't even fit to lace George's drinks.'
I met Pele once. Oh; shame and sac- rilege. A few years ago he was in London, at the Waldorf Hotel, promoting some- thing or other. Bill Grundy and I were due to interview him for ITV. Perhaps we were nervous: we set off early, but were dis- tracted by a mini pub-crawl on the way. Pele smilingly pretended not to notice. He said he had just come from Rome, where he'd seen the Pope. 'More like you, sir, granting an audience to His Holiness,' I muttered with a tremulous giggle. Pope, eh?', slurringly enunciated dear Bill, who supped faster than I did in those days, `Might that be any relation, sir, to Mr George Pope, the balding former Der- byshire and England all-round cricketer?'
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