Pelé’s iconic Cosmos tenure sparked long sportswriting career

By the time you read this I don’t know if Pele, 82, will be alive. But as I wrote, he was in Sao Paulo’s Albert Einstein Hospital, fading from colon cancer and blood disorders. 

I was still wet behind the ears and years when I spoke a flagrant lie that assigned me to be with Pele as he traveled North America during his final competitive year. 

It was March 1977. I was just a kid — 24, that’s 12 in newspaper years — who told a whopper. 

Joe Marcus, who marginally covered soccer for The Post during the Cosmos’ earliest years on gritty, granular, glass-strewn, blood-stained Randalls Island to Yankee Stadium in 1975 when Pele signed out of retirement in Brazil, had died. 

I was a clerk in sports, a gopher risen to 90 take-home bucks a week, that often included six days per week. 

Ike Gellis, our tough, gruff Edward G. Robinson lookalike, act-alike sports editor — so help me, straight out of central casting — one morning asked a question aloud: Who knows anything about soccer? 

The Cosmos were moving to Giants Stadium and he needed a replacement for Marcus. 

I wasn’t heir apparent to the next beat, but I took a quick, blind shot: “I do!” All I knew about soccer was that I worked summers as a lifeguard for swim club manager Bill Leid, soccer and wrestling coach at Wagner College. 

I’d committed fraud. 

And so it was settled. As the Cosmos moved into Giants Stadium and with more immediate, sellout success than the North American Soccer League could sustain, I was The Post’s new soccer beat man, sans credentials or a clue. 

And within days, I was shoulder-to-shoulder and pen-to-paper with the one man everyone on every continent knew about soccer, the world’s most renown and admired athlete, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known from Timbuktu to Totowa as Pele. 

Oddly, Pele didn’t like his nickname, given him in school as he mangled the name Bilé for his favorite player, the goalkeeper on Brazil’s Vasco da Gama team. He said he was named after Thomas Edison and preferred “Edson” as it was both serious and dignified. 

Hmm, Pele’s favorite as a kid was a player who prevented goals. 

It was impossible to not like Pele. We in the local press corps didn’t bother him beyond soccer matters. He appreciated that, thus came to know us by our first names. The world media dogged him, schlepping cameras and sound crews to capture the married man’s latest love interest, real and imaginary. 

Even Pele’s pint-sized, anvil-solid bodyguard, Pedro Garay, a Cuban who invaded his homeland to oust Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs, knew we could be trusted, that we were no threat to Pele in public or private. 

Garay was another spectacular character in the Cosmos’ retinue. One night in Vancouver, B.C., just before…