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It is not possible to say that it came in a particularly unexpected way. Still, the news of Diego Maradona’s death is like a blow to the solar plexus.
It no longer makes footballers like Maradona.
The question is whether people are made of his caliber.
Just a few weeks ago, Diego Armando Maradona turned sixty and published a letter in the Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport: “I don’t think that sixty years is the right time to do the math, but I don’t deny anything that has been or what it has done . I do not regret anything. I don’t want to regret anything, ”wrote the birthday boy.
Unfortunately, it was about time for the financial statements. But how do you sum up a life that ranged so far between extremes, from anonymous Argentine working class to material abundance, from world gold to scandalous doping eight years later, from technical brilliance to deep abuse?
The body was no longer carried
Maradona was great, he housed all the complexity of life in his hut at the end as impressive as the wounded body. And maybe everything starts and ends with the body of Diego Maradona.
At the age of sixty, he could hardly wear it anymore. “It is for all the cortisone that they injected me, it was to win at any cost,” he wrote in the letter from Corriere dello Sport.
Everyone who has seen the film Diego Maradona knows what he is talking about. It’s a time document of how the greedy soccer industry, then still in its infancy, sucked in the best of a rare talent and put syringes into his body to compensate for the overload. Maradona partied with the mob in the evenings, snorted cocaine at the best addresses in Naples on weekends, and played soccer on weekends as his family life collapsed at home. Today we call it a substance abuse problem and the employer is obligated to offer help. In the Naples of the eighties, it was as it was: a game of public relations and power as complicated as the alleys of the city center of Naples, where Maradona finally came out as the loser.
Diego’s 60-year-old body could no longer jump, it says in the letter. Thirty years earlier, she had danced across Italy, Europe, and the world. He did it almost alone. Each World Cup has its name to hang the gold medal. A Müller, Romario, Zidane, Iniesta or Mbappé, superstars surrounded by extremely competent team machinery. The 1986 World Cup Maradona won the World Cup in Argentina, with the help of a dominance and superiority that will probably never be repeated in a championship.
Absolute ear for football
Watching Maradona play soccer was like listening to music, even for those of us who are too young to remember the best moment of his career. There are players with bigger trophy collections, players with stronger goalscoring records, and the gods must know that there are footballers with greater continuity in their careers.
But there are few with Diego Maradona’s perfect pitch for football.
There is no one with his nose to create conflict.
The obvious controversies, of course, and here there is no reason to hide the beautiful places: the drugs, the mafia connections, the illegitimate child, the parties with prostituted women during the nights in the wrong company in Naples.
The everyday fights, the ones that barely became newspaper highlights. The only time I met him was when Argentina met Spain in an international friendly in the fall of 2009 in Madrid. Maradona was the captain of the league and highly criticized for the team’s style of play. At a packed press conference following the loss to Spain at the Vicente Calderón Stadium, Maradona said the Argentine press treated him as a waste. “And now I want to ask the women in the room not to take it the wrong way, but they (the media) can suck it and keep sucking. I am black and white, never gray ”.
It was vulgar in Spanish to ask the press to go to hell. I have never taken myself less badly, neither as a woman nor as a journalist.
Diego Maradona was a one-man circus in all situations. When he played soccer the world stopped, when he spoke he almost always shook it a turn.
Obvious political figure
Maradona was also an obvious political figure. He may have lacked the intellectual rigor and verve to be heard by the establishment, but above all, he was almost always on the wrong side of those in power. Runes will be written in major liberal newspapers for the next 24 hours about his legal pathos, his beating heart, and his support for the weak and vulnerable, but let’s be clear: Diego Maradona was a leftist at hand.
The famous photographs with Fidel Castro and other authoritarian socialists certainly cost him many friends over the years, but the commitment was genuine and lasting. In public, he always supported South American anti-imperialist political movements, which actively took early initiatives for union organizing in international professional soccer. Just a couple of years ago, he sent a video greeting to employees who were threatened with an ad in a major Argentine newspaper to show his solidarity. Perhaps they had treated it as garbage a few years before, that did not stop Diego Maradona from defending them as a worker and hanging the owner of the newspaper to dry.
An Argentine friend sends photos from a spring green Buenos Aires where the traffic instructions on the electronic street signs have been replaced by the text “Thank you Diego.” It describes how it is almost completely silent on the streets, how people cry on television in the afternoon.
Much of the vocabulary surrounding the Maradona myth has been about him as a God, an alien, a ball talent from another galaxy. In fact, he was far more human than any other football player alive. His life is a kind of index to all the brilliance and deficiencies, the vanity and the fighting spirit of the entire human race.
Maradona’s superhumanity managed to seduce the whole world, but it was his humanity that made us forgive his mistakes.
Diego Maradona was always larger than life, from every imaginable aspect. One of the greatest artists in the world has just come off the stage. Leave behind a gigantic piece of football history.
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