Brazilians like to use nicknames. I should know, since I've had a few. First came "Dico". My uncle Jorge thought it up and, for my family, it's the one that has stuck. Dico is still how my mum refers to me. At Santos for a while I was called "Gasolina", after a Brazilian singer. Thankfully, it didn't last. Everyone else, of course, knows me as Pele. I can remember the name really bugged me at first. I was really proud that I was named after Thomas Edison and wanted to be called Edson. I thought Pele sounded horrible. It was a rubbish name. Edson sounded so much more serious and important.
So when someone said, "Hey, Pele," I would shout back and get angry. On one occasion I punched a classmate because of it and earned a two-day suspension. This, predictably, did not have the desired effect. Other kids realised it annoyed me and so they started calling me Pele even more. Then I realised that it wasn't up to me what I'm called. Now I love the name - but back then it wound me up no end.
There have been lots of stories that claim to explain how the name came about. Does it come from the Gaelic for football? A nice story but unlikely. Was it to do with a Turkish immigrant in Bauru, seeing me handball during a match and mangling the Portuguese for "The foot, stupid!" Again it seems far-fetched.
I can never be 100% certain about the origin but the most probable version started with a team-mate of my father's when he played for Vasco de Sao Lourenco. The team-mate was a goalkeeper and was known as "Bilé", for complicated and very Brazilian reasons. His real name was Jose Lino and at the age of two he still wasn't speaking. This worried his mother, a widow called Maria Rosalina, very much. Brazilians are very spiritual people and always believe in the inexplicable, in the supernatural, and Maria Rosalina was no exception.
She decided to call a meeting of benzedeiras, women who performed a kind of witch-doctor ritual on nights when the moon was full. Even when people don't believe, they still don't dare to question the effects of the ritual, and Maria Rosalina hoped it would help cure Jose's silent tongue. The benzedeiras went about their work, beginning with a shout, "Bili-bilu-tetéia!" - something like "Abracadabra!" This didn't happen just once; the story goes that the ritual went on for weeks. And one day, a miracle! The boy shouted out, "Bilé!" There was general rejoicing - he was cured. And that came to be his nickname, a name that stuck when the boy grew up to become the goalie on my father's team.
Some 20 years later when I was three or four my father Dondinho would take me along to Vasco training sessions. Whenever I could I used to nip into the goal and play around, and whenever I managed to stop a shot I'd shout, "Good one, Bilé!" or "Great save, Bilé!"
Because I was only young I somehow distorted the nickname and said that when I grew up I wanted to be a goalie like "Pilé". When we moved to Bauru, this "Pilé" became "Pele". Either I changed it myself or - according to my uncle Jorge - it was because of my thick Minas Gerais accent. I'd speak one way in Bauru and they'd understand me in quite another. And then one boy - I don't remember who - started to tease me by calling me Pele.
So thanks to that goalie Bilé, and a classmate's little joke, I became Pele. Now it's known across the world and I don't mind it so much.