Letters: How times have changed since I met Pele in Troon

On a lovely summer’s day in 1966 I was cycling through Troon when I happened to come upon the Brazilian national football team training on Troon Juniors Portland Park. I stopped in disbelief because the first person I saw, standing at the gate, was Pele.

As I entered Portland Park I was fortunate enough to shake the great man’s hand. I sat my bike on the grass and watched Brazil, with Garrincha, Jairzhino, Gerson, Tostao, Zico etc – the greatest players in the world – training for an hour, and not a soul asked me who I was or what I was doing there.

There was, quite literally, no security, and the point I wish to make is that there was no need for any.

There was I, watching probably the most famous person on the planet, and probably the best football team ever, with one solitary Scottish bobby in attendance, and no-one bothered with me or questioned what I was doing. Brazil were in Scotland to play the Scottish team at Hampden the following Wednesday in a warm-up game for the World Cup in England that year, and were staying in one of Troon’s hotels.

I am now conscious that I was living in different world then. Can you imagine Brazil training on a junior park anywhere today, or being able to stroll in and watch them unchallenged and unquestioned?

Can you imagine that situation devoid of security guards with weapons, cameras and all the other paraphernalia that appears to be standard equipment?

So I ask myself, what has brought about such fundamental change in such a relatively short period?

I recall HL Mencken’s famous observation that: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Mencken was scarily prophetic and should have added Westminster, as there is one common denominator underpinning the increasing collapse of civilised society: a dominant ideology that promotes greed, hatred, division and conflict, an ideology that has produced a moron in the White House, a clown in No 10 and a set of incompetent buffoons in government.

My meeting with Pele was in 1966 BT (Before Thatcher), before the official adoption of greed, class and racist warfare, the cult of the individual and an open and vicious assault on our rights, before the era of the policies to reduce working people to a modern state of slavery and deny them pensions, healthcare, employment rights etc, before the normalisation of hatred, abusive language from the political class and media, and a persistent and corrosive dialogue designed to demonise large sections of society.

The day I met Pele was the beginning of the end of an era.

I now live in a very different world, a world in which the elite has shed all norms of decency and rule-based conduct. It begins at the top and permeates down throughout society. It was not an accident, and today’s norms of conduct and human behaviour, particularly in the political and public spheres, have been quite deliberately debased and corrupted.

I fear today that if I met Pele and tried to shake his hand I may well be arrested for terrorism. Thank you very much Margaret, you did indeed shape society as a reflection of your own character.

Peter Kerr
Kilmarnock