BY KUNLE SOLAJA

Pele, the globally acclaimed King of Soccer, who died last week and will be buried in Brazil on Tuesday, visited Nigeria at least four times in his life time.

The last time was in October 2000 when he was in the office of the Nigerian sports minister, Damishi Sango and Patrick Ekeji was introduced to him as an ex-international who featured for the P&T Vasco da Gama, Enugu.

Pele was excited as there is another prominent club in Brazil, called Vasco da Gama.

He was also billed to at the inauguration of the Godswill Akpabio Stadium, Uyo on 7 November 2014 but recorded a ‘no show’.

Before then, the football legend was first in Nigeria in January 1969 and later in 1976 and 1978.

In 1969, he was the star attraction in the 2-2 drawn friendly match with the Nigerian national team, Green Eagles had with his cub, Santos. He scored the two goals for his side while Muyiwa Oshode and Baba Alli scored for Nigeria.

In his memoir published in “Pele: My Life and the Beautiful Game”, he recalled that the visit to Africa was very important to him.

It was the first time he visited Africa. “It was with very strong and strange emotions that I first saw Africa. It was a completely different experience from seeing the cities of Europe for the first time.

“Everywhere I went I was looked upon and treated as a god, almost certainly because I represented the blacks in those countries. What a black man could accomplish in a country where there was little racial prejudice, as well as providing physical evidence that a black man could become rich even in a white man’s country.

“To these people, who had little possibility of ever escaping the crushing poverty in which they found themselves, I somehow represented a ray of hope, however faint.”

If his first trip to Nigeria in 1969 was incident free, certainly it was not so, in the second one in February 1976.

At the time, he was on a Pepsi-Cola fueled trip that took him and Steve Richards of the Pepsi Cola company in the US to Japan, India and then the African continent.

According to Pele’s account, the delegation flew from India to Mauritius and then to Uganda before heading to Lagos where they were to conduct a training clinic for footballers in Lagos and Ibadan.

“We had finished our work in Lagos and were planning to leave the following day.

“We were in the hotel, taking it easy when someone came in and announced that there had been a revolutionary attempt to take over the government, and that the president of the country (General Murtala Mohammed) had been assasinated!

“We stared at one another, wondering what the situation would mean for us.

“We soon found out. The coup had failed, but the killers were still at large, and as a result the airport was closed indefinately, a rigid 6pm to 6am curfew was instituted, and all foreigners were were advised to stay in their hotels.

“So we stayed… and trying to find out what was happening from the radio.”

At the time, there was also a World Tennis Championship at the Lagos Tennis Club opposite the Tafawa Balewa Square. It attracted notable stars like Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, Bob Lutz and Tom Ocker.

Although they stayed in the same hotel with Pele and his delegation, the tennis players soon moved to the American Embassy.

According to Pele, “we had agreed that whoever got permission to leave first would take along the others…

“A few days later, we were informed that the tennis group had received that permission and was flying out.

“However, we told not to move until we received the word from Dr. Saraki (father of the former Senate President, Bukola Saraki), the appointed contact man.

“The good doctor never showed up and of course, we were still in the hotel when the plane with the tennis players took off.

“On the sixth day, the city was calm again and we received our permission to depart for home.”

Pele, then a retired footballer came back in 1978 with Brazilian club,  Fluminense, a household appliance brand. As his name had been dropped for the proposed matches Fluminense were to play in Nigeria, he had to feature for the club in one half of the first encounter with Raccah Rovers of Kano.

Forty years later, he joked in a tweet: “Once I accidentally played for Fluminense! As a guest of a game in Nigeria, so many people came to see me that the police made me play to keep the peace!” A message accompanied by a photo of the time reads: “Flu had the honour of having the King of Football for a day.”