Argentine football legend Diego Maradona is dead

Diego Armando Maradona, recorded in 1987.

Ferdi Hartung / Imago

The magical Argentine footballer died shortly after his sixtieth birthday and a wild and tragic life as an incessant serial between glamor and self-destruction. For the Pibe de oro, the golden boy, football was a childish seriousness, he remained an eternal child prodigy, intelligent and provocative, proud and playful. With the ball he was the seducer of the masses and without the ball he was seduced by the downside of fame. The game with death, which has often come very close to him, has always seemed to him capable of winning with his inexhaustible vitality. On Wednesday, according to his doctors, Diego Maradona’s life in his home in Tigre on the Rio Parana delta was no longer medically salvable due to complications after a brain operation.

Intelligence is essential

The unforgettable scenes of his career corresponded to some extent with the football moon landing. In a period of just under five minutes, Maradona committed the small ruse at the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup against the English (what it meant against the shameful withdrawal of the Argentine military from the Falkland Islands), a goal by sneaking in with a clenched hand, with the “fist of God”, as he blasphemedly proclaimed. “Football is the game of deception,” he says. Intelligence is more important than any tactics, philosophy or guilty conscience.

But after the deception maneuver, Maradona shows the world the other side of his character, courage and self-denial, putting everything on a paper, which perhaps reminds the Swiss of the mythical figure of Winkelried. He makes a run-up with the ball and chain in his own half, overtakes seven Englishmen as if in a trance and has also fooled the deplorable goalkeeper Peter Shilton, still angry for the goal. Maradona finally leads his team to the title with a 3-2 final victory against German Franz Beckenbauers.

For Maradona, under the coach Carlos Bilardo, pediatrician, it is the compensation for the crime of the child that the then national coach Luis Cesar Menotti had inflicted on him in his country in 1978 before the World Cup, removing the squad at the last moment. sixteen year old Dieguito. had canceled. This was also the reason for his jealous enmity with Pele, the other, the Brazilian world star, whose star had risen at the age of 17 at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden – a rivalry for life, even though the two had 20 years and have never played against each other.

A touching gesture went almost unnoticed outside Argentina: Maradona had insisted that his young idol Ricardo Bochini, a veteran bald and weight problems, be brought to the World Cup, and in the semifinals against Belgium the two performed a little. of dancing with the ball in the last few minutes. His teams went through the fire for him.

In the devil’s kitchen in Barcelona

While Pele had spent his career in Brazil, Maradona arrived at Barcelona at the age of 22 after a fiasco at the 1982 World Cup under Menotti and ended up in the devil’s kitchen, first with severe hepatitis, then the “Basque butcher” Andoni Goikoetxea crushed his ankle. During the months of healing in the strange city, Maradona apparently received encouraging doses of cocaine from the doctor, and has since been considered a drug addict. His private celebrity cult devoured huge sums of money, but in Argentina he already owned three palaces, three sports cars, forty pairs of Italian shoes, and 50 tailored shirts. His departure was traumatic: under the eyes of King Juan Carlos, he instigated a private revenge against his tormentor in the Spanish Cup final.

Barcelona president Josep Lluis Nuñez received a single offer for Maradona, $ 10.5 million, but it was a record amount and he was from Naples. That he then survived in the metropolis on Vesuvius was one of the wonders of his life. Residents celebrated him as a savior, he was a hero and victim of his uniqueness. Maradona is Naples, Naples is Maradona, even though it comes from Villa Fiorita, a Villa Miseria in the outer belt of the Moloch Buenos Aires, where the sky never gets very bright due to burning landfills. His father is of Indian origin and works in a bone mill. At the age of three, Diego received a real, huge soccer ball from an uncle, with which he slept on the ground at night and played like a dog during the day.

In the wonderful, frantic and melancholy documentary by British director Asif Kapadia, screened in cinemas last year, a true race to hell with accidents and scandals, Maradona has commented on his life in images with a voice that is sometimes missing. How does the Argentinos Juniors’ break attraction become at the age of eleven. The story of her childhood friend Jorge Cyterszpiler, who finances her studies and becomes her first manager – and how the number gets too big for her (Cyterszpiler committed suicide two years ago). At 15 he was playing in the first team, soon he was taken by Boca Juniors, then his young fame spread to Spain.

Naples as a destiny

But his destiny is Naples. With Maradona, Napoli can break the domination of the big clubs Juventus, Milan and Internazionale, win the championship in 1987 and 1990, and Maradona’s doping tests disappear somewhere or are traded by other players. This complicity is also motivation. Maradona is around at night, the young generation of the Camorra, the local mafia, adorns itself with the darling of the gods. In the late afternoon he often trains alone with the private coach in the underground parking. At the 1990 World Cup in Italy it is suddenly the foreigner and the enemy, Argentina chases Italy out of the tournament in the semifinals. Love over. The coca cola scandal. In 1991 he fled to Buenos Aires overnight and ended up in prison.

He gets up, a big comeback seems imminent at the 1994 World Cup, but he gets stuck in doping control, among all due to an emaciation pill. A year later, while he is Racing’s player-coach, doctors help him under the oxygen tent as he fights a cocaine overdose. Maradona plays football until the age of 36. The taxman asks him for millions of euros, because in Naples they have deceived him over the years with a gross contract instead of a net one.

Recognizes an illegitimate child. He has taken on a huge burden, tormented by hunger and abstinence cures in Havana, where Fidel Castro, who wanted to become a professional baseball player in his youth, welcomes him fascinated by nighttime conversations. He shot reporters in Buenos Aires and suffered his first heart attack twenty years ago.

Diseases accumulate, his source of health is football, he becomes the national team manager, he recognizes the size of the little Messi he admires and Messi could fail because of Maradona, the failed coach who then makes money in the Emirates and Belarus Maradona it is.

But Maradona’s magic is shifting from football to transcendental. Argentina is a young country with a short history of tragic heroes who have not long died. His national identification figures are measured by the tragedy of their biography, by the quickly burnt life. There are survival figures like the tango singer Carlos Gardel, who died in Caracas in 1935 and is expected by a million people. Like the beautiful Evita Peron, who died of cancer at 33, like the revolutionary and doctor Che Guevara from Rosario.

Macabre cult of the dead

This grisly death cult of death wish and self-destruction transforms wonderfully gifted footballer Diego Armando Maradona into the national hero that the country mourns and the whole world regrets. Adios, Diego.