The Cosmos

In the summer of 1966, I was home on vacation before my final year of college.  On July 30th, I was curious to watch on TV the final game of that year's World Cup broadcast live from London.  

It was my first experience with what we call soccer.  England won its first and only championship, defeating West Germany 4-2 in overtime.

I did not realize that Brazil, the team that had won the previous two World Cups (1958 and 1962), had been eliminated in the group stage by losing to both Hungary and Portugal.  However, it went on to win the World Cup again in 1970.  

Those Brazilian teams were led by Edson Arantes de Nascimento (known by the nickname Pelé), considered the greatest soccer player of all time.  After retiring from his Brazilian club team (Santos) in 1974, Pelé brought his soccer talent to the United States in 1975 by signing to play with the fledgling New York Cosmos.

On June 15, 1975, Pelé made his New York Cosmos debut in a Father’s Day friendly game against the Dallas Tornado (which ended in a 2-2 tie) played at Downing Stadium (built during the Depression as a WPA project) on Randalls Island located between Queens and Manhattan.  

21,278 lucky souls (including my ex-wife Bonita and me) can truly claim to have witnessed the match live, setting an attendance record that would be broken several times over the next three years for the Cosmos. 

Ten million viewers were watching on CBS, shattering the record for a United States audience for soccer on TV, plus countless other viewers in another twelve countries watching a live match played in the United States for the first time.

I remember two things about that game.  One was Pelé's bicycle kick and the other was the awful traffic jam we suffered while trying to exit the Downing Stadium parking lot.

When the New York Cosmos moved into the magnificent new Giants Stadium in New Jersey in 1977, it looked as though they, and soccer, had finally arrived in the USA. Before then the Cosmos rarely attracted crowds larger than 15,000.  In the 1977 season, they averaged more than twice that figure and three times surpassed 60,000.

The sudden change could be credited to one man: the incomparable Pelé, who had come out of retirement three years earlier, at age 34, to join the Cosmos and try to turbocharge soccer’s popularity in the United States. 

Pelé led the Cosmos to the 1977 Soccer Bowl, in his third and final season with the club.  Pelé finished his official playing career on the 28th of August 1977, by leading the New York Cosmos to their second Soccer Bowl title with a 2–1 win over the Seattle Sounders at the Civic Stadium in Portland, Oregon.

Pelé died in Sao Paulo, Brazil on the 29th of December 2022, at the age of 82, as a result of colon cancer.