Hamilton’s John McGrane had a tough job in his first pro start: covering Pelé

As the world continues to mourn the death of the first universally transcendent sports star, Hamilton’s John McGrane’s mind keeps wandering back more than 45 years.

To July 26, 1977 at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, when injuries forced the 24-year-old North American Soccer League rookie into his very first professional starting assignment after 15 games riding the Los Angeles Aztecs bench.

McGrane, the best “outfield” player ever to emerge from Hamilton, was a right fullback, so he was charged with checking the prolific New York Cosmos forwards, led by Edson Arantes do Nascimento.

Aka Pele.

It was the incomparable Pelé’s final pro season, but McGrane’s first, and his first real game after some injury-substitute time four nights earlier against Rochester. There were 57,191 raucous fans in the building, drawn by the flashy Cosmos offense but primarily by Pelé.

“I’m this kid from Hamilton who just the year before was playing at Brian Timmis Stadium in front of 50 people, three dogs and two cats,” McGrane recalls.

“It was incredibly intimidating, waiting in the stadium runway. It was so daunting it felt surreal. I wasn’t intimidated by the crowd as much as by the quality of the players I was seeing around me and I just didn’t feel like I deserved to be there. I felt like I was way out of my depth.”

Understandable, given that the Cosmos featured not only Pelé but, among many notables, midfield legend Franz Beckenbauer, who had captained West Germany to the 1974 World Cup title, and Carlos Alberto, who captained Brazil’s and Pelé’s, 1970 World Cup triumph. And the Aztecs themselves had the immortal George Best, the reason McGrane chose to play for Los Angeles rather than Tampa Bay, who’d offered him more money. Those four players are among just about every soccer insider’s all-time top dozen, including Pelé’s personal list he revealed in 2020.

McGrane, who’d already been a two-time college all-star and played well in the 1976 Olympics, went on to a tremendous NASL career that lasted nearly a decade, without ever spending another game on the bench, but in that debut featuring the galaxy of marquee names playing for the two biggest cities in the league, he was overwhelmed.

In the opening minutes, he flipped Pelé into the air with an adrenalin-charged check from behind which felled both players. It wasn’t until Pelé turned to face him that McGrane realized he’d capsized an icon and, ignoring the ball still in play, immediately went over to help him to his feet.

“Most of the old pros on my team gave me a right roasting at halftime because of that,” McGrane laughs. “They said, ‘Get your autographs later.'”

McGrane had been specifically ordered to “mark” Pele when he ventured into the right side of the box, which was often.

“He scored three goals, so I was s–t,” McGrane recalls honestly. “With any young player in his first couple of real big games, your legs feel like concrete. And as the crowd starts to get louder you become a bit more nervous. I was the only first-year player on the field, it was my debut and I felt the enormity of the task before me.”

Pele drilled a seeing-eye shot through middle traffic, scissored in another ball and converted a penalty kick for the 93rd hat-trick of his career, third of the season and second in eight days.

If you’re the defender, you don’t forget that kind of stat line. But you also don’t forget that you scored your first professional goal in the same game. McGrane headed in Best’s set piece for LA’s second goal in the 5-2 loss.

McGrane jokes that because of injuries on the backline, the Aztecs were forced to continue playing him, and after another start a couple of nights later, he was feeling more acclimatized to the pros — and had a better feel for Pelé’s deep repertoire — when the The Aztecs hosted the Cosmos just a week later in front of 32,165, four times their average gate, at the sprawling Los Angeles Coliseum. This time, the Aztecs prevailed 4-1.

“I was more prepared and more comfortable playing at home,” McGrane says. “To keep that team to one goal was a great achievement and it was a great job by all four defensemen. When you play well against stars like that, especially Pelé, I think it maybe opened a lot of people’s eyes to a young Canadian playing fullback.”

He says that the superlatives we’ve all heard about Pelé’s skill were “absolutely true”: he was “a bull,” enormously physical and also endured absurd corporal punishment from opponents; he had unprecedented ball control and changes of pace; he exuded joy for the game; and you quickly learned not to play too tight to him or his slick moves might separate you from your clothes.

Despite the disheartening start, McGrane was named the Aztecs’ 1977 rookie of the year and played four more seasons in LA before moving on to the Montreal Manic and then the Minnesota Strikers. He has been inducted into the Hamilton and Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame and the Hamilton Sports Hall of Fame, was a founding executive with Forge FC, and currently is partnering with Redeemer University to maximize the use of its dome and outdoor pitches to elevate local organizational and individual talent.

As he followed Pelé’s health decline, McGrane “went back to both games I played against him, but particularly that first one and I thought, ‘Has it been that long since I played against him?’ Pelé was without a doubt the greatest player of the 20th century. Soccer owes him everything. He made the game what it has become around the world. Without him playing in the US we wouldn’t have had an NASL, we don’t have an MLS, we don’t have a Canadian Premier League.

“When George passed away it really hurt me because I really liked him, and when John Cruyff (his teammate later in LA) died it affected me because I learned more from him than anyone else.

“When Pelé passed away it was the end of an era, the end of my era. You face your own mortality when those greats you played with and against leave us, you know you’re on the downhill. But the memories will always linger and you find yourself going back to when you were one of the very few people on this earth who were allowed to grace the field with this unbelievable legend.”

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