Sports psychologists are recognizing that excellence in sports is more mental than physical. Arnold Schwarzenegger, seven-time winner of the Mr. Olympia title, who built one of the greatest physiques through gruelling workouts, once observed, “When the going gets tough, it’s always the mind that fails first, not the body.” Indeed, it’s the mind that drives and guides the body, but what is this mental component possessed by the athletic phenoms who rise above all others in performance and achievement, and how is it acquired?
For a dozen years or more, no man was so revered throughout the world as Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known to his fans as Pelé. Only Babe Ruth, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan ever came close to the god-like reverence in which he was held and their spheres of influence did not reach as far and wide as the brilliant Brazilian’s.. His world-wide impact transcended national boundaries as well as race and class barriers. The Shah of Iran, when at the peak of his power, waited patiently for three hours to have his picture taken with Pelé. When Pelé visited Pope Paul VI, the Italian newspapers reported that the Pope declared that he was more nervous of meeting Pelé than was the soccer superstar at meeting him. Queen Elizabeth II conferred an honorary knighthood on Pelé, the highest honor granted by British royalty.
Born on October 23, 1940 in the small town of Três Corações in eastern Brazil, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, rose in three decades to the status of “best-known athlete in the world.” However, his formative years were spent in the depressing squalor of a two-room shack into which were crammed 13 members of his extended family. Pelé’s father Dondinho was an itinerant soccer player who had been injured and was therefore unable to play at a professional level. Unwilling or unable to train for an alternative career, he insisted on pursuing his passion for soccer though it brought little money into the household. The young Pelé absorbed his father’s passion and Dondinho became his first mentor in developing the lad’s soccer skills. Pelé’s mother Dona Celeste was a strong-willed woman who served as the glue that bonded the family during those challenging times. Fearing that her son would become injured and penniless like his father, she made her son promise never to play the game for money.
By the time he was six, Pelé was competing in street games and on pick-up teams in the village of Baurú, where the family had moved in search of employment. He had become a street urchin who kicked anything that moved. There was no money to buy a real soccer ball, so Pelé and his friends would stuff a man’s sock with rags or newspaper until it was round enough to roll. The sock that served as the outer skin of the makeshift ball was sometimes appropriated from a neighbor’s clothesline and the theft was justified on the grounds that the sock served a higher purpose as a ball than as a garment. In his memoir, Pelé wrote of the thrill he derived from kicking that ball (p. 16):
It took skill to kick our ball, since it varied in weight depending on how lately it had been stuffed, and also whether it ran through many mud puddles as we kicked it. But it made no difference; the pleasure of kicking that ball, making it move, making it respond to an action of mine, was the greatest feeling of power I had ever had to that time.
Every waking hour was spent exploring the nuances of kicking and controlling a moving ball. Years later, Pelé reflected, “[The streets are] where I learned the attacking style.” Training the conscious or rational mind to get out of the way in order to enable the intuitive or subconscious to control the execution of a skill requires that the athlete assume a disposition that master coach Timothy Gallwey calls relaxed concentration (The Inner Game of Golf, p. 172):
What is relaxed concentration? It is simply the capacity to focus totally. It occurs when commitment, abilities, and attention can be channeled in a single direction. It is being truly conscious and free of fear, doubt and confusion. It is what enabled Ted Williams to say that sometimes he could see the ball so well “that it almost stands still for me.”…Or as the master in Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery says, “A single conscious thought through the mind diverts the arrow from its course toward the target.”
In an interview for the New York Times Magazine, Pelé spoke passionately about the “near mystical state” he entered while in the midst of action in the 1958 World Cup game against Sweden:
I felt a strange calmness…It was a type of euphoria; I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their team or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically. I felt I could not be hurt. It was a very strange feeling and one I had never felt before. Perhaps it was merely confidence, but I have felt confident many times without that strange feeling of invincibility.
What experiences had contributed to Pelé’s ability to transcend the intensity of the moment and move to a higher, more sublime state where the instincts function with greater focus? Some have suggested that Pelé was merely gifted with an innate talent, but Pelé himself sensed that it was rooted in his early imprints and his experiences. In a training manual on soccer skills, he wrote:
I don’t believe there is such a thing as a born soccer player. Perhaps you are born with certain skills and talents, but quite frankly it seems impossible to me that one is actually born to be an ace soccer player. Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, a love of what you are doing.
But if such phenomenal success is merely the result of passionate commitment and hard work, then why do so few athletes qualify as “phenoms?” In part 2 of this trilogy, we’ll study another athletic phenom who will help us move closer to the answer to this conundrum.
