Tolofari Football History - Pele faints under threat of armed 'man'

... continued from last post

Pele's modest three bedroom apartment was a short distance from the Estadio Urbano Caldiera, Santos' home ground and Pele liked to walk to work- there's nothing like an early morning walk to help clear one's head.

Noticeable as he was, he dared not show his face on the main street. He opted instead to follow the less populous back streets.

It was here, one morning in June of 1959 that he had an experience that would drastically alter the course of his life.

The back streets could be a dangerous place. Pele knew this, but he figured that the odds of him getting robbed in the back streets were about the same as him getting hit by a car on the main streets.

He'd figured wrong; in the past six months, the rate of car accidents had reduced by thirty-seven percent. In the same period, robbery had gone up by a whooping forty-three percent.

As Pele walked to work that early morning, he was totally unaware of the fact that he was about to become a statistic.

His assailant was a tall, dark man just like himself. The man's head was shaved and he had a bushy beard.

Standing face to face with this haggard, knife-wielding man, Pele felt a singular- and you could say strange- emotion. He did not feel fear or panic. Instead he felt confusion.

The man confused him. Looking at the man, Pele was suddenly not sure if he was awake or dreaming. He couldn't really be seeing the man. There was absolutely no way that he could really be seeing the man.

He couldn't be seeing the man because the man was him.

From the look on the man's face, Pele could tell that he too was confused. But the man wasn't really a man, was he? He was an apparition.

It was the stress, Pele thought. He was hallucinating as a result of the stress he was going through. Still, this apparition looked so real.

The apparition even had an odour, but hey, this was a smelly alley he was standing in.

The odour he was perceiving was probably coming from a gutter or a dumpster. Pele was convinced that the haggard, smelly man standing in front of him wasn't really there. Or was he? There was only one way to find out.

Pele began to move his right arm. Or rather, Pele felt his right hand begin to move itself. Without its owner's permission, the arm started to move towards the man.

Pele tried to pull his arm back but it would not be stopped. It had made up its mind.

Half a second before impact, Pele didn't think that there would be any impact at all. He was sure that his hand would pass right through the apparition.

He would faint, he thought, if he actually made contact with the man. And that was exactly what he did when he felt the man's heartbeat against his palm.