QR – Cure – Quizzing Realms - 34

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Here’s a dry question for a change.

The following are hints about a certain person who is considered a legend in his field.

1. The name that we know him by has no proper meaning in his own language, but is the name of a goddess in another language, and a name related to his profession in Irish.
2. His real name was an inspiration from Thomas Alva Edison.
3. His given name was the cause of his mispronunciation of his favourite person in the same field in which he would achieve legendary status.
4. He has appeared in several films, including one with Michael Cane and Sylvester Stallone, about a bunch of prisoners of war during the World War II.

Enough hints. Who is he?

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Answered by several of you out there. And four correct answers! Five, actually, if one counts Rajiv Sen’s answer on Facebook.

Yes, its Pele! And Pele incidentally happens to be the name of a Hawaiian volcano goddess, and the Irish word peile means Football.

His full name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento. The first name is an insipiration from Thomas Alva Edison, but the parents did not want the ‘i’ in the name, so it became ‘Edson’. However, a ‘mistake’ in his birth certificate included the ‘i’, and the ‘Edison’ continued.

His favourite footballer, as a child, was Bile, a goalkeeper from the local club Vasco da Gama. However, he could not pronounce it properly, and said ‘Pele’, which stuck on as his name. Legend has it that he disliked this new name so much that he even punched and broke the nose of a friend who kept addressing him by that name! But the angrier he got, the more the name stuck to him!

The film, meanwhile, is a World War II drama named ‘Escape to victory’. It starred many footballers other than Pele, and Gordon ‘Black Octopus’ * Banks, himself credited with making the ‘save of the century’ against a Pele shot in real life, coached Sylvester Stallone, who was the goalkeeper of the prisoners of war. Bobby Moore was also part of the film.

* Sorry about this gaffe. ‘Black Octopus’ was a nickname given to legendary Russian goalkeeper Lev Yashin, who would invariably wear a black T-shirt while playing, and was reputed to have arms as long, as flexible and as numerous as an octopus!