It was 1975, and in his wildest imagination, Pedro Garay never dreamed he would wind up in the middle of this wild, almost surreal scenario. There he was, draped over the greatest football player to ever walk the Earth, protecting him from a horde of pitch invaders.

The Cuban refugee was guarding American soccer’s most precious jewel at the time, the incomparable Pelé. Pelé’s shirt, shorts and sneakers had been ripped off by the over-zealous fans who had come to Boston’s Nickerson Field stadium to watch the New York Cosmos superstar in his first season in North American Soccer League game. “The fans were around the field like ants,” Garay said.

Only moments prior, Pelé had had a goal disallowed. “The fans raced onto the field and went after Pelé, who had fallen to the ground,” Garay told me a few years later. “I found him and I draped over him. At that particular time, it was a matter of ducking and trying not to get hurt.”

Pelé suffered injuries to his right knee and ankle. Evidence, if any was needed, that Garay was there for a good reason: he was Pelé’s bodyguard during his time with the Cosmos, from 1975-77.

“In the beginning, he was primarily a bodyguard, but as time passed, he also became Pelé’s private secretary,” Professor Julio Mazzei, Pelé’s confidant, said at the time. “He is with Pelé most of the time. He has become a great brother.”

Garay, however, always downplayed his role. “I think the word is a little bit misused. Pelé doesn’t need any bodyguard. I’m not armed,” he said. “I like security, but I’m not inclined to make a stadium a police state.”

Garay had an interesting path to the Cosmos. Born in Cuba, he left during the 1959 revolution for the USA. He worked for a while as a credit and collections manager for New York hotels, according to newspaper reports. There also were reports that Garay was part of the United States’ Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Garay was moonlighting as a security man for Warner Communications (the Cosmos’ owners) when he was asked to be Pelé’s bodyguard. “Rumor was that he had been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, but I never got any sort of proof’” said Jim Trecker, who was the Cosmos public relations director at the time. “I always wondered whether it was a self-mythology.”

Garay’s introduction to the job was unforgettable – at the Brazilian’s public signing with the team at the swank 21 Club in New York City in June 1975. “He needed to keep us a little bit away from this horde of photographers who were coming in,” the former Cosmos president Clive Toye said. “So some tables were shoved together in front of the stage. It was a very low stage and it was covered by some very nice table cloths ... the photographers were all, good God, jackasses, some of them. Pedro stepped forward to try to calm things down. He stepped on the table cloth, which happened to be between the two tables. He happened to step, unfortunately, right where there was no table, only table cloth covering the space and went boom, right down on the floor.”

A few days later, Pelé made his much-anticipated Cosmos debut in an exhibition match against the Dallas Tornado at rickety Downing Stadium on Randalls Island. On 20 June, came the Boston encounter. The hosts, the Minutemen, wanted to squeeze as much money as much as possible out of a confrontation between Pelé and their star, the great Eusebio, considered by many observers to be the second-best player in the world.

There was one slight problem. The Minutemen had got the ticketing wrong: an estimated 20,000 people crammed into a venue that could hold but 12,500. “You could not have gotten another feather into the stadium, it was so packed full of people,” said Toye. “They were all across the touchlines. If someone wanted to take a throw-in, they had ask to someone to move because they couldn’t step over the line.”

The crowd was well behaved until the Pelé incident in the 79th minute. The Cosmos pulled their team off the field because of safety fears. If there was any sort silver lining to the Nickerson incident though, it was that it helped set the standard for security around Pelé. There were no replays of the Boston fracas. “The Boston incident was the worst security problem we’ve had,” Garay said. “It was just an over-reaction of people wanting to see and touch Pelé. Most of the teams in the league really cooperate. They really understand where you’re coming from.”

Still, Toye was adamant about security. “Unless I am personally assured he is going to be safe, Pelé will not play in Rochester or any other place in America,” he said at the time. “He is too precious a person to be treated like he was here [Boston]. I am going to make sure of his safety, even if I have to get the United States Marines.”

Marines were not needed for the next game in Rochester, New York. A strong police presence prevented any security scares during the game, as Pelé tallied his first official league goal in a 3-0 triumph over the Lancers. Getting out of Holleder Stadium, however, was another matter. Instead of going home, fans stood outside the Cosmos locker room, hoping for a look at the superstar and an autograph. Garay was forced to use another strategy.

“There were so many people hanging around trying to get to Pelé to touch him or get an autograph, that to him to the bus, Pedro, [Warner Communications head of security] Lou Luca and myself made a three-man wedge like blocking for a running back, with Pelé in the center,” said Sports Vue Interactive executive editor Charlie Cuttone, who worked for the Cosmos at the time. “I was 16, but a pretty big kid.”

At 5ft 6in and 150lbs, Garay hardly looked like the stereotypical bodyguard, something that helped him blend in with the crowd. And protecting the three-time World Cup winner was serious business. “[Garay was a] typical security man: paranoid!,” Trecker said, remembering his first road match at the San Antonio Thunder with Pelé and Garay.

“As we were making pre-game plans about how to get Pelé safely off the field and into the car,” he added. “The fans were going to be enthusiastic to say the least, and a pitch invasion was certain. In the middle of these discussions with Gordon [Bradley, the coach] and Professor Mazzei, Pedro admonished: ‘Remember, do not wear shoes with laces. They can tie them together and then you are caught.’ To this day, I’m not sure where that came from, but it was loafers for that evening!”

Not surprisingly, Garay formed a great bond with Pelé. “I remember when [Mazzei] used to say, ‘Those guys look like they were married because they would argue sometimes,’” said former Long Island University men’s coach Arnie Ramirez, who worked at the Pelé Soccer Camps for many years. “He always was very positive and even though he worked so hard and he traveled with him all over, I never saw Pedro down or in a bad mood.”

The former Cosmos goalkeeper Shep Messing, now a TV commentator, remembered one playful incident that almost cost the team the services of defender Werner Roth in 1977. “No one could ever forget Pedro Garay. He was the best,” Messing said. “We were playing in Vancouver and left the hotel on the bus to go to the stadium. We fooled around with Pedro all the time – and he always carried handcuffs inside his jacket as part of his protection detail guarding Pelé. We were in the locker room getting ready for the game and Pedro put the handcuffs on Werner Roth to show us how they worked. When he went to take them off - he realized that he had left the keys back in his hotel room!

“Pedro dashed to grab a taxi back to the hotel. It took forever and we were panicked because now we had all been introduced, were lined up at midfield for the national anthems with Werner having his arms handcuffed behind his back. Just before the anthem ended Pedro came flying out of the tunnel and ran to midfield waving the key, just in time to release Werner before kickoff. We all loved Pedro.”

Garay, who died some years ago, once gave some insight into the Brazilian.

“Oh, it is easy to wake Pelé. He is not really slow, he is just a philosopher,” Garay was quoted as saying in Peter Bodo and David Hirshey’s book, Pele’s New World. “You see him in a game and he is totally different, intense, swift, cutting like a knife at every opportunity. In his private life, he does not like to pushed or rushed into anything. ‘What is there to hurry for’ he says, ‘everything will be ‘OK anyway.’

“I only see him when we must go out of town. In New York he is with his family all the time. He likes to live a quiet, secluded, intimate life. Family life is sacred for him. I think it would be impossible for him to enjoy his life without the peace he finds with his family.”

Garay’s responsibilities did not only include the Pelé’s safety, but also making sure he got on the team bus after games. He was forced to play bad cop to Pelé’s good cop. Pelé, who has the patience of a saint, would talk to and sign autographs for fans all day.

”That was the kind of thing that Pedro had to do again and again and again. Here and there, here and there and here and there,” Toye said. “It wasn’t so much protecting Pelé from hostility, it was protecting Pelé from enormous appreciation, enormous love. People just wanted to be near and touch him and get his autograph. And if you left Pelé alone without someone pushing and shoving and pulling [to get on the bus], he probably would still be standing outside Randall’s Island right now and the same people around him.”

Toye and the Cosmos could thank Pedro Garay that that never happened – and for making sure the world’s greatest player retired in 1977 in one piece.