The transcendence of Diego Maradona
His audacious play on the field embodied an ultimately tragic persona
Sports Biblio Reader 11.29.20
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
There was little in the life of Diego Armando Maradona that was polished, rehearsed or measured.
There was much that was impulsive, mercurial and histrionic.
For better and for worse, all of those elements and others often overlapped and almost always ran hot during his storied soccer career and in the troubled life he led away from the field, especially after his playing days were over.
That the hero of Argentina’s 1986 World Cup championship lived until the age of 60 could be regarded as something of a miracle, given many recent years of bad health. The heart attack that fatally struck him on Wednesday came three weeks after he had surgery for a blood clot on his brain.
But decades of hard living that included drug and alcohol addiction, weight issues and constant social and political melodrama took a physical and emotional toll on the underclass kid from Buenos Aires whose streetwise game and audacity inspired millions.
As Jonathan Wilson, author of the 2016 book “Angels With Dirty Faces,” a history of Argentinian soccer, wrote this week at UnHerd, Maradona’s chief burden was in his homeland, and it was immense, due to a longstanding messianic complex:
“El Diego arrived with the force of prophecy behind him. He was celebrated and indulged. Exam results were fixed, his excesses and occasional tantrums ignored. Laws and conventions did not apply to him, either metaphorically on the pitch, or actually, off it. Nobody inspired such faith. In Mexico in 1986, he was recovering from hepatitis and injury, he was doubted on all sides, he had been sent off in the previous tournament, and yet he won them the World Cup. His talent was otherworldly; he was not a man to whom the usual rules applied. In crisis, turn to the Messiah.”
His “Hand of God” goal against England in a brilliant semifinal performance embodied that rule-breaking lifestyle, and Maradona basked in the glory in shockingly indulgent ways.
As one of his earliest biographers, Jimmy Burns, recalled in 2019, the dark side of Maradona was apparent early on:
“There was the sheer brilliance of his natural talents but an extraordinary story of self-destruction and a kind of tragic comedy, really.”
After leaving Barcelona, he was revered in Napoli, which he led to its only Italian Serie A scudetto in 1987. He was a late addition to Argentina’s World Cup squad for USA ‘94, but was sent home due to a positive drug test.
More from Burns, speaking to The 42 sports site in Ireland at the release of a Maradona documentary on HBO:
“But in my experience of him, I do see this pretty bipolar, schizophrenic character, who was paranoid and neurotic at times. There was one aspect of him popularised and mythologized and that was ‘the people’s player’ who was taking on Fifa and speaking out against corruption. But he was the beginning of the real commercialisation of the modern age of football. And he, in some ways, personified its corruption because of the mingling of drugs with the sport and his failure to match his talent with any sense of social responsibility.”
His international fame took on a new dimension in the years that followed, especially in the political realm. Maradona’s poor upbringing and eagerness to defy convention made him a popular figure on the hard left.
He became fast friends with Fidel Castro, admired Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, sported a massive tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm, and denounced the United States.
In 2000 he sought medical attention in Cuba. Massively obese, deep in a hole of addiction and spiraling out of control once again, many feared for his life at the age of 39.
Maradona cleaned himself up enough to return to the sport and, in 2010, coached Lionel Messi’s Argentina team in the World Cup. It was hardly an ideal relationship, and in the final decade of his life Maradona was plagued by financial as well as health problems. In September he signed on to coach the Gimnasia y Esgrima club in Argentina, an unmanageable figure’s last stab at managing.
He died exactly four years to the day after Castro and 15 years to the day that George Best, whom Maradona called one of his inspirations for his instinctive street play, passed away.
In my mind, only Pelé can be regarded as a greater player than Maradona, and like his fellow No. 10 compatriot from Brazil, he transcended the game and sports, for very different reasons.
As Brian Phillips, the proprietor of the shuttered soccer blog Run of Play noted last year, the many facets of Diego Maradona were in almost constant conflict, and ultimately proved unsustainable:
“Diego pointed the way to the corporatized future, but his roots were in the older, more populist game that he himself was helping to overwrite. In that tension lay much future heartache. He wanted to be the slum kid who never forgot his roots, but he also wanted the marble birdbath and the Lamborghini. For a while in the 1970s, a significant number of Argentine fans turned on him for doing stuff like ‘taking a vacation to Las Vegas and being photographed in a swimming pool.’ It wasn’t always easy being the golden child.”
Argentinians defied harsh COVID-19 lockdowns and took to the streets in mourning. As Maradona was laid to rest on Saturday, new complications emerged about his inheritance, and as controversies over his death also came to light.
Maradona may be gone, but his unforgettable presence on earth exemplified a man who was all too human.
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