HOT CORNER

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What: “Biography: Pele: World Cup Hero.”

Where: A&E;, today at 5 p.m. (repeats at 9)

“World Cup Hero?” In the parlance of the sport, that title is a well-executed dummy, a slick bit of sleight-of-foot, because this excellent documentary about soccer’s most famous player is anything but an exercise in hero worship.

As presented here, Pele’s story is equal parts extraordinary and mundane: A brilliant talent, he was more globally famous than Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan, he changed his sport forever, he broke racist color barriers in his native Brazil, he played on an unprecedented three World Cup championship teams ... and he succumbed to many of the run-of-the-mill trappings of athletic superstardom, both during and after his career.

Pele scored 1,283 goals during a professional career that spanned more than two decades, 1957 to 1977, securing his legend as soccer’s greatest player.

Revisionists have claimed that Pele would not have been nearly so prolific had he played today, against the current breed of faster, more physical defenders carrying out the negative game plans of coaches cynically maneuvering to preserve their own employment at any cost.

This documentary argues just the opposite, providing vivid verbal and visual evidence that Pele was a victim of his time--beginning his career when there were no red or yellow cards, when players were rarely ejected and thus were freer to hack, kick and brutalize Pele because ordinary defensive tactics were never sufficient.

Former teammate Pepe argues that if Pele played today, “he’d score 2,500 or 3,000 goals, because today’s players are better protected [by the referee] and fitter.”

Off the field, Pele was beset by a different array of problems, many of them his own doing. He went bankrupt twice, sold out to the corporate gods, fathered several illegitimate children and is portrayed as an absentee parent who ruined his first marriage by neglecting family concerns in order to further his business career.

Typical of the documentary is the even-handed treatment given Pele’s two-year stint with the New York Cosmos. While crediting Pele for helping spawn “the first American soccer boom,” the program duly notes that Pele signed with the Cosmos--for $6 million--mainly to pay off numerous business debts.