The game was nationally televised on CBS, and the decrepit stadium had been spruced up for the occasion. In fact, it's become part of the folklore of Pele's time in the U.S. that the dirt patches on the field had been painted green for the cameras, prompting a worried Pele to return to the locker room at halftime fretting that he'd picked up a fungal infection.
That those cameras were pointed at the field at all was something of a miracle. In 1970, Clive Toye and Phil Woosnam paid $1,500 for the U.S. television rights for the World Cup, and they had been forced to show the games on close-circuit TV in major cities, with no network willing to touch them.
Toye, the Cosmos' president, and Woosnam, the NASL commissioner, had conceived of the idea of signing Pele -- along with the ambition to host a World Cup -- as early as 1971. The reasoning was that an imaginative move of that magnitude was needed to shake the U.S. out of its mass indifference to the sport.
Toye in particular then spent years badgering Pele at every opportunity, from Santos exhibition games in Jamaica to the point in March 1975 when he secured a "commitment" from the player, scribbled on a Belgian airport hotel notepad.
Pele's chaotic unveiling at Manhattan's famous 21 Club on June 10, 1975, has become the stuff of U.S. soccer legend.
It's perhaps telling that Pele's actual debut for the Cosmos, while still an important part of the story, is rarely the first memory people have of his arrival. In some ways, just as with the arrival of David Beckham decades later, the symbolism of his arrival and the imprimatur it granted the league was simpler to process than the more prosaic details of how to integrate his outsized presence into the still-fledgling league.
That's not a comparison between Pele and Beckham, other than acknowledging that the arrival of their outsized presences in their respective moments in history set a bar that permitted other deals to take place. These seminal signings allowed for the arrivals of Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff, George Best, Thierry Henry, David Villa, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard.
The players who followed Pele were greeted by an infrastructure that was far from the gleaming corporate stadiums we take for granted today. And Manhattan was not the sanitized playground for the wealthy either. The city was teetering on bankruptcy. Only a few months after Pele's arrival, President Gerald Ford vowed to veto a bailout for the city to pay its employees, prompting the infamous "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline in the Daily News.
Ironically enough, when the city's bankers bailed out the city on condition of widespread deregulation of their industry, it helped to set the economy on its current path. For better or worse, global soccer has been one of the most successful cultural movers and has integrated certain aspects of U.S. culture with the wider world to a far greater degree than seemed possible in 1975.
Now when we talk about the U.S. game, it's a complicated mix of acknowledging the spirit of American exceptionalism and global (read: European) best practices, all while juggling the need to grow the domestic game amid the reality of European teams and leagues actively empire-building on U.S. soil. If you want a perfect illustration of how far perception of the game has come in the U.S., unpack the symbolism of Chevrolet sponsoring Manchester United.
But when Pele strode out onto the Downing Stadium Field in 1975, that new paradigm was still a long way away. Yet 22,500 people attended, not counting the thousands reportedly locked out or the rubberneckers who jammed the Triborough Bridge overlooking the stadium. Beyond that, the game was televised in 22 countries and covered by more than 300 journalists.
If it started awkwardly, with Kyle Rote Jr. holding the Brazilian flag upside down in the introductions, it ended with Pele scoring a header 10 minutes from time to send the crowd home happy. As he would go on to show, Pele would actually play for the Cosmos.
That fact would never quite stop seeming surreal. Even when the team moved to Giants Stadium, there was always something incongruous about Pele appearing for the Cosmos. As one reporter put it the day after the Dallas game, seeing Pele at Downing Stadium was like "watching Nureyev dance in a Times Square honky-tonk joint."
Those juxtapositions would never again seem quite so radical after Pele. With all due respect, David Villa at Yankee Stadium doesn't come close.
That's a good thing. The Deus ex machina image of Pele being flown over Randall's Island by helicopter, to view his new sporting home upon his arrival in the U.S., was a necessary one-off.
By the time Beckham arrived amid the second coming of top-flight U.S. club soccer, the need for a "savior" was already a concept that could be, and was, examined critically -- because the notion had been tested by an incomparable figure.
Oh, and the game finished 2-2.
Graham Parker writes for ESPN FC, Grantland, The Guardian US and Howler. He covers MLS and the U.S. national teams. Follow him on Twitter @KidWeil.
