I found my copy of Pele: the Autobiography and my copy of The Rough Guide to Elvis yesterday morning. The King in front of the king. Beside them was You’re not singing anymore, a book about football chants by the perfectly named Adrian Thrills.
The Rough Guide cost me R40 and nothing for Pele’s book as it was a review copy sent by the publisher. I also didn’t pay for You’re not singing anymore as I nicked it from the office at my previous employer many, many years ago.
It is inscribed “Shaun Johnson, London, 1998”, which means it once belonged — and still belongs, if I’m to be honest (which, obviously, I wasn’t 20 years ago) — to the founding editor of The Sunday Independent.
Perhaps I’ll give it back to him one day, but, then again, it is a cracker of a book, so, well, perhaps not.
I dragged out the Pele book because Gordon Banks, the England goalkeeper, died this week at the age of 81. He was one of the greats of the game, a player who was the best goalkeeper of his generation, who produced one of the enduring and iconic moments of World Cup football.
It has been called the greatest save the tournament has ever seen. Some might argue that it would not be far off the one of the best of all time, but those arguments are moot and a waste of time.
When I think of Banks, I do not think of him being part of the England team that won the 1966 World Cup, but of his save from Pele in 1970.
England were playing Brazil in Guadalajara in searing heat. Pele has drifted away to the left of the England goal, Jairzinho spots him and floats in a perfect cross. The perfect cross is met by the perfect header by Pele, down and hard into the ground so it will bounce up and over the goalkeeper.
Pele thought it was in. England captain Bobby Moore thought it was in. Pele was just about to jump in celebration … but then came Banks…
“It felt like a textbook header,” wrote Pele in his autobiography, “and, as I watched the ball spin towards the net I knew it was a goal. But then, from nowhere — from the other post in fact, which amounted to much the same thing — Banks flung himself towards the ball, managing in an effort of extraordinary agility to scoop it up, out and over the bar. It was a phenomenal save, the save of that tournament and of most other tournaments you could care to mention.”
Pele gets asked about the goal that did not happen more often than the  more than 1,000 goals he did score.
“At that moment I hated Gordon Banks more than any man in soccer. But when I cooled down I had to applaud him with my heart for the greatest save I have ever seen.”
In January 2018, Banks said he had noticed how much more the ball bounced in Mexico than he was used to.
“I knew that I had to come off the line to narrow the angle, then once Pele had punched it with his head down to my right-hand side, I knew I had to get over there very quickly,” Banks told the Football Writers Association website.
“The ball was going in and as I dived I had to anticipate how high it was going to come up from the hard surface. As I reached across, I got it right, the ball hit the top of my hand and went off ... but honestly, I thought it was a goal. I hit the floor and turned around, I saw the ball bounce behind the goal — and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, Banksy, you lucky t***’.”
Legend has it that Pele said: “I thought that was a goal.” With Banks replying, “You and me both,” with England captain Moore chipping in: “You’re getting old, Banksy, you used to hold on to them.”
But, that may just be a legend too far as Pele wrote that he could only speak a tiny amount of English in 1970.
It is best left to Richard Williams, the English sports writer, to sum up that afternoon and how this week’s death of Banks “encourages us to remember the afternoon when he and the greatest player of all time brought the best out of each other in the Mexican sunshine, two men from the working classes of different continents sharing a moment in which they played the game like angels, and in which Gordon Banks achieved immortality”.