A barber who first met Brazilian football legend Pele in the 1950s and cut his hair for decades said yesterday he hoped God would take care of the late athlete. Pele, who died on Thursday aged 82, rose from poverty to become one of the greatest athletes in modern history and the only man to win three World Cups as a player. “He came to have his hair cut a couple of times a month and to cut his beard it was every two days,” said Joao Araujo, who said he first met Pele in 1956 or 1957 and whose barber shop in the city of Santos houses memorabilia of the star. Pele spent most of his playing career at Santos club.
Araujo said he last saw Pele, who suffered colon cancer, last year. “(I hope) God takes care of him.”

Global media bows to ‘King’ Pele
His face appeared on televisions around the world and dominated the homepages of news outlets everywhere as global media bowed to the late, great Pele, the undisputed “King” of football. News organisations across the planet hailed the legendary Brazilian, who was widely considered the greatest footballer to ever play the game.
To the Brazilian daily O Globo, Pele may have died, but he remained the “immortal king of football”. The Folha de S.Paulo quoted the late Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who said: “The difficulty, the extraordinary, is not to score 1,000 goals like Pele — it’s to score one goal like Pele.”
Their obituary suggested that while Edson Arantes do Nascimento — Pele’s birth name — may have passed on, “it isn’t true that Pele is dead”. In Argentina — home of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, both also contenders for the title of greatest of all time — the Clarin remembered Pele as “a supreme symbol of football’s spectacle” and a “great among the greats”.