‘Best ever to grace the field’

Through the eyes of the St George’s College coach Neville ‘Bertis’ Bell and Harbour View FC general manager Clyde Jureidini, the life of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pele, is being celebrated not only for how he has influenced Jamaica’s fandom with Brazilian football but how he influenced their own journeys into the game.

Pele died yesterday after a yearlong battle with colon cancer, having been hospitalised for the last month with multiple ailments. His family gathered in the previous few days at the Albert Einstein hospital in Sao Paulo as his condition worsened.

Pele is the only player to have won three World Cup titles, in 1958, 1962 and 1970, and was the youngest to score in a World Cup match at 17 in 1958, his tournament debut. Praised for dynamic play and style for the sport that he called “the beautiful game”, Bell said that Pele was the reason why he wanted to wear the iconic number 10 in his youth football days, to mirror his idol in how he played and, later on, how he coached the game.

“There was a Brazilian coach, Jorge Pena, when I was a little boy, and we used to have Saturday morning training. And he wanted to know who wanted the number 10 and everybody put up their hand. I ended up wearing the number 10 and playing in the middle of the park. But, in my opinion, I wanted to play football because of Pele, I wanted to play football the way he played football. I didn’t even come close. He was an amazing player and a very humble person, and that’s what I loved about him,” Bell told The Gleaner.

For Jureidini, the connection played a big role for him as a player, having watched him at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico City, at a time when Jamaicans for the first time were able to watch the tournament live, to see his brilliance unfold.

“That was my first real World Cup, watching as many games as I could see because they were now being transmitted into Jamaica at places like the National Arena and such, so we could go and watch and get a feel of it,” Jureidini recalled.

It would also set the foundation for Harbour View Football Club, which was created four years later, with the Brazilian identity being engrained in the club, something that Jureidini treasures.

“When we started to play in the Kington and St Andrew Football Association (KSAFA) Major League, we wore the Brazilian colours, the gold and blue. Our current chairman, Carvel Stewart, gave us all as players who lived and grew up in Harbour View the responsibility to go two or three roads to your left or right, get all the youngsters together and start coaching in what we called a mini-league,” Jureidini said. “And so my mini league was named appropriately Arantes, for obvious reasons. That is where the association and the admiration and, for me, the legacy around him and his lifestyle, I think, was the best knowledge to pass on to the next generation of youngsters. And many of those youngsters became national players and superstars and national captains in their own right. I think that is where it started, where it has been and, to this day, is respected.”

Though many eras of the game have passed, both Bell and Jureidini were adamant about his place in the game, the best to ever grace the field.

“In my opinion, the best ever to play this beautiful game, as he called it. He did things back then that no one else could do,” Bell said.

“I grew up with Pele as the superstar. We tend to, I think, judge the person who you think as the greatest of your era and the greatest of all time. I have no hesitation in saying that he is the greatest player that I have seen play,” Jureidini said.