Sócrates is dead, at 57. He taught me to love an entire sport, and that is no small thing.

Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira was trained as an orthopedic surgeon. He could have been operating a clinic for the poor of Brazil, but instead he needed a clinic for the treatment of his excesses.

He was also a folk singer and an activist, as well as a creative soccer player who has loomed in my mind since the summer of 1982 in Barcelona.

Was his charisma a figment of my imagination? Did I overreact to the couple of times I met him? Turns out, a whole swath of the world is grieving for Sócrates, for what he was, and what he could have been.

On Sunday, an Arsenal fan in Brooklyn sent me the Brian Glanville obituary from The Guardian. I heard from a Lebanese-born reader named Ibrahim who knows I adored Sócrates. And I heard from my cousin-in-law, Samuel Guttenplan, an American-born philosopher who has been teaching in Europe long enough to understand the metaphysics of the Sócrates of soccer.