An abridged version of this article appeared in the Dutch magazine Hard Gras in April 2010
Buenos Aires, January 2010, the start of World Cup Year. Superficially Maradona is a man transformed, his latest act of irresponsible behaviour-a foul-mouthed rant against some journalists when Argentina quialified- led to a dip in his poll ratings but is turning into a mere blip on a road to redemption in his role as coach of the national team. In the final preparatory stage for the Cup, Argentina beat Germany in a friendly! His past infidelities have been forgiven and he lives openly with his latest girlfriend while his ex-wife Claudia manages his financial affairs. He has reconciled himself with his daughters- doting grandfather to the child of Gianina, the youngest of them, a footballer’s (Kum Aguero of Atletico de Madrid) wife, supportive Dad to the other, Dalma, the eldest, a successful young actress.
I saw Dalma in a three-woman play in Buenos Aires just after Christmas. It was the first night after the opening, and the small theatre was still packed with Maradona’s family and friends. It was gathering of face-lifts, and ostentatious jewellery, and tight-fitting Italian suits and dresses. It was like a scene from the Godfather although there is no suggestion that the Mafia was present. Some of the men, nonetheless, had forgotten to take off their dark-glasses. Some of the women looked as if they had walked in from some high class brothel. The play iwas no Skaespeare. Called ‘Fire of Women’ , it is a tough satire about the generational gaps between a grandmother, mother , and daughter (played by Dalma). The three spent most of the play shouting personal abuse at each other, only stopping occasionally when they hear the music of Sandro, Argentina’s legendary pop star-the Latin American Elvis- who died just as the play was about to be premiered.
Dalma has the dark somewhat demonic eyes of her father and seems to fit quite naturally into the role of a spoilt little bitch, mouthing bad language. She is overweight, and wears a permament expression of an adolescent pout, which makes her perfect for the role of a bulimic teenager, obsessed about her weight, her mother’s lesbianism, and her grandmother’s endless facelifts. The play ends with the grandmother tricking daughter and granddaughter into a enclosed room, and setting light to the gas, so that all presumably perish. It is nihilistic end to a terrible play which shows Argentina at its worst. On the first night Maradona came along with his ex-wife, Claudia, and posed for snappy family snaps with Dalma clutching his gift of a large teddy bear. Maradona was on his best behaviour, charming with the media, and playing the part of a doting Dad almost to perfection.
Such is the public persona. And yet dig beneath the surface and Maradona remains the same unpredictable, erratic genius I first encountered as his biographer. His occasional descent into violence- of word or deed-is the product as much of his environment as of his inner demons-his upbringing in the lawless lands of the shanty town, his long-term drug abuse , the hangers-on and opportunists who have made their own habit of making use of him.
Argentina is Latin America’s failed state,for ever falling short of its huge economic potential. It is noted for the corruption prevalent among its politicians and businessmen, and the wheeler dealers that pervade the football industry, from top to bottom. It is a world Maradona moves in and out of with ease, the vested interests ensuring that despite his human failings and his wasted brilliance he is allowed to give more of himself. For all his public raging against the establishment, Maradona has spent most of his adult life being nourished as much by the powerful as by the hard-core fans that venerate him from Buenos Aires to Baghdad. His arrogance and natural vindictiveness have dented his popularity around the world. But among his loyal fans, the collective memory hangs on the moments of sheer magic he produced as a player, a natural talent that learnt to control a ball in the dust before becoming rich.
It is in the southern Buenos Aires neighbourhood of La Boca, where the myth of Maradona as the people’s idol has endured the longest. It’s January, the height of summer in the capital city, and bus loads of tourists converge on the area. Amidst the tango dancers and pavement painters, the no less mercenary Maradona-look-alikes –dressed in the Argentina national colours- balance a football on their feet for less than a minute and charge ten dollars. Nearby a statue of Maradona looks out from teh second floor of a brightly coloured house once inhabited by a fisherman. There is either a statue or a mural dedicated to Maradona almost on every corner of la Boca. The most solid remembrance is a large dark metal statue at the entrance to the museum at La Bombonera, the Boca Juniors stadium. It is self-consciously heroic, like that of a Roman general or Rocky Balboa,less work of art than movie prop.
Boca Juniors is the club Maradona has always claimed closest to his soul. Boca likes to see itself as the home of the marginalised, drawing to its bosom to the dark-skinned Maradona look alikes. Murals and sculptures have immortalised Maradona in and around La Bombonera, the stadium that has received him as player and fanatical fan. The museum is dedicated to a litany of eccentric legends from Rattin the ‘Rat’ to Gatti ‘the madman’, although Maradona retains pride of place as the undisputed greatest of them all.
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But rewind this story to an evening in September 1996 when Maradona sat facing me across a table of an Italian restaurant in London, looking at the first edition of this book which the author had just handed him. After months of chasing him around the world, I hoped this would be a defining moment by which I could measure his willingness to come to terms with himself.
And yet this was destined not to be a night of revelations. Maradona was flanked by his then agent Guillermo Coppola, and Giancula Vialli. They collectively conveyed an image of threatened conspiracy-although I could only guess at the nature of the conversation I had interrupted. I imagined it might have something to do with the rumour that Maradona wanted to play for Chelsea. Whatever it was he wasn’t going to talk more about it there, and soon I watched him depart into the night, in the direction of one of the capital’s hot nightspots.
Maradona saved his reaction to my book for a few days later while he was visiting the southern Spanish resort of Alicante for a ‘health cure.’ Pouring out his latest confession about his drug addiction, Maradona slammed all those who had helped me, accusing them of betrayal. ‘Burns has pissed all over me, ‘he declared on Spanish radio.
In Alicante, Maradona went on a bender. In the early hours he returned to his hotel in a state of mind one eye-witness described as ‘very strange and disturbed’. Maradona then got stuck in the left when the electrics failed. He kicked the doors of the lift until his foot bled. After the fire brigade rescued him, he went on kicking out at tables and chairs, screaming until daybreak when the hotel management presented him with a bill for the damage. Approaching the age of 37, past his sell-by date as a player and staring into the abyss, it seemed that this might be the start of the final chapter of Maradona’s turbulent life. But he had fallen from the stars to the shit before, only to get up again. This turned out to be far from the latest twist in his helter-skelter life.
A few weeks earlier Maradona had announced he was quitting Boca Juniors after missing five penalties in a crucial phase of the local league championship. The man who had invoked a benign deity in justifying his cheat goal against the English in Mexico 1986, now blamed ‘witches’ for casting a negative spell on him. Maradona was continuing to struggle with a drug problem for which he was seeking help from an array of doctors Senior officials of Boca Juniors privately warned that they feared Maradona might fatally collapse in the middle of a match, his heart simply giving up under the strain of his drug abuse. In one of his characteristic spontaneous outbursts on national TV, he declared: “Maradona the football player is dead.” He went on playing for Boca until October 1997 but even then news reports that he had finally hung up his boots and beat a dignified retreat from the headlines of world football proved premature.
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In January 2000 Maradona stared death in the face. Grossly overweight and over-dosed and suffering from a heart condition that he had inherited from his father, he collapsed while on vacation in the Uruguayan resort of Punta Del Este. He was admitted into hospital suffering from hypertension and an irregular heartbeat. Coppola was on hand to tell the media that it had nothing to do with drugs, while Maradona’s friend, the Argentine president at the time Carlos Menem put it all down to a ‘stress attack.’ Later the Uruguayan police revealed that analysis of Maradona’s blood and urine showed ‘excessive consumption of cocaine.’
The exclusive bedside TV images which Coppola negotiated on his client’s behalf showed Maradona recovering. But he had put on four stones since he had last quit playing some three years earlier. He was bloated and puffy-eyed, and was hanging on. If it had been almost anybody else, Maradona would have died that day. But then his resilience or mere good fortune have always baffled his doctors. The phone-call informing the author that Maradona would go on living in the new millennium caught me in conversation with some of his fans on the worldwide net. Micky from Liverpool said that Maradona was wanted by more clubs than Michael Owen would ever be. Charly from San Jose, California, said that Maradona was greater than Pele. Someone in Kathmandu insisted that Maradona was the king of football, while an Argentine doctor recalled being freed after being held at gunpoint by Afghan tribesmen and shouting Maradona’s name. He was still adored by the universal fan for the player he was once.
It was about that time that Jon Smith, the international football agent that had represented Maradona between 1987-1993- had concluded that the footballer had ceased to be the internationally marketable product he once was. Smith told me that towards the end of the 20th century he had approached three English Premiership clubs with an offer of Maradona as coach, and was promptly told to get lost.
But nothing with Maradona ever turned out quite like others would have it, and within days of his collapse in Uruguay, he was residing in Havana, Cuba, courtesy of his friend Fidel Castro with the financial support system in overdrive as Maradona’s agent touted more exclusive interviews and photographs to a hungry world media. Maradona himself spoke of himself in the third person, mocking the self-delusion of those who had predicted his imminent demise. ‘Diego Maradona will only ascend to heaven when all four Beatles are waiting to meet him, ‘he declared. From Havana, British journalist David Jones suggested that the man a worldwide FIFA poll of fans had found the greatest footballer of the 20th century, ‘isn’t merely suffering delusions of grandeur, but is also stark raving bonkers.’
Maradona’s latest existence at the La Pradera health spa-come-holiday complex verged on farce. He rose late each morning, somewhat groggily from Valium-induced slumbers, before brunching on fruit and juice brought to him by two white-hatted chefs on a silver service trolley. Occasionally Maradona made his way into a small gym where four sets of ten press-ups, four sets of ten leg-raises and a few half-hearted rolls of the shoulders, left him ‘panting like an asthmatic walrus.’ Maradona, with a shock of died orange hair, a tattoo of Che Guevara on his flabby arm and a heart monitor round his ample girth, also looked like a wasted clown, an inflated Harpo Marx. In his early days in Havana Maradona punched the windscreen of a reporter’s car.
None of this seemed to worry Castro who found ways of making political capital out of Maradona’s presence on the island. The local media portrayed him as the good leader of the people, in contrast to the Goliath of the North (the United States) who had refused to give Maradona a visa since the 1994 World Cup doping scandal. ‘With meetings like the one I have just had with Fidel, my heart will hold out, and this Diego will be around for a while,’ Maradona declared after meeting with the Cuban leader, with whom he shared an apparent air of immortality.
Within a year, in 2001, Maradona-not for the first or last time in his life-was shedding public tears. He was crying with the emotion of knowing there were still enough Argentines around who respected him so much that they couldn’t accept anybody else taking his Number 10 shirt, even at this point in his life when he was really saying goodbye, again. The shirt, signed by Argentina’s class of 2001-the likes not just of Saviola, but of Batitusta, Zanetti, Hernan Crespo, Juan Roman Riquelme, Andrew D’Alessandro, Marcelo Gallardo, Pablo Aimar, and Veron- was handed to Maradona at a testimonial match between an Argentine X1 led by himself and a Rest of the World X1, part of which seemed like a rogue’s gallery- bad boys, gifted players, legends of the past- men like Carlos Valderrama, Hristo Stoichkov, Eric Cantona, and Rene Higuita.
It was November in Buenos Aires-late Spring/early summer, warm and sunny and sweetly smelling of faded jacaranda. Prior to the match, Maradona, wearing a turban, had paid a visit to his friend, now ex-President Menem who was under house arrest for alleged corruption. It was later reported that in the Buenos Aires Hilton, where he and his entourage had set up camp, Maradona had stalked the corridors in a bin Laden mask which he had purchased after 9/11 and worn at fancy dress parties in Havana.
The day of the testimonial Maradona wore his Number 10 shirt, and waited until a local rock group called ‘The Paranoid Rats’ finished their dedicatory verse: ‘I want Diego to play for ever’, they sang. He then walked out into La Bombonera, his beloved coliseum, just as he had done on countless occasions before, to the roar of 60,000 fanatical fans, gladiator of the people, sacrificed on the altar of popular adulation, with his two young daughters at his side. The stadium was as steamy and frenetic as a caravan caught up in a desert storm, draped with the blue and yellow Boca, and blue and white, Argentine colours. The barras bravas packed the terraces. They bounced with joy, chantingMaradoo, Maradoo, unfurling a giant banner with the words, ‘Thank You, Diego’. It was a sign of their indebtedness to the eternal memory of the genius in the midst of the worst political and economic crisis afflicting Argentina in years. That the event had been sold as Maradona’s definitive farewell appearance in the midst of such a national mess was an achievement akin to Don King’s staging of the Ali-Foreman fight in Mobutu’s Zaire. This was Maradona’s version of a global people’s sporting event, his very own rumble in the jungle.
And yet there was no championship at stake this time in La Bombonera. Maradona’s enduring self-belief was focused on the uncontested crown as the greatest player that ever graced the turf. The reality check showed that the man trotting across the pitch looked a trifle overweight for his forty years, at 84 kilos.
There remained in Maradona a desperate unfulfilled need to find a meaning t his life, to recover a sense of purpose, to harness his talent and genius for the game. Back in 1997, just before another decent into drugs, overeating, and over drinking, Diego had not only promised to help Boca become great again. He also pledged to help Argentina qualify for the 1998 World Cup in France, with him playing in the national team. It didn’t turn our quite that way at the time. The fulfilment of the dream was postponed for another day although the urge for self-justification persisted.
In Yo Diego, his autobiography, published in 2000, Maradona talked about his natural talent: his ability, to rotate his ankles was one factor that enabled him to do things with his left foot most mortals struggled to do with their right hand. The extreme rotation of the ankle was accompanied by his panoramic field of vision on the pitch, with an ability to see the outcome of a move as it developed. Jorge Valdano famously liked to tell the story that after that second goal against England in 1986, Maradona said to him: ‘I could see you running along, but I didn’t pass because I thought I could do it.” Valdano said: ‘Son a of a bitch, on top of everything he was doing he could see me!’
But only Maradona himself could really describe the second goal as the kind that you dream of as child, dribbling down the right of the field, beating Beardsley, Reid and Butcher, seeing Valdano unmarked to the left but deciding to go it alone, shaking off Fenwick by feinting inside and going outside, pulling Shilton out of position, then scoring, leaving Butcher to pick up the pieces as a late arrival. Maradona recalled: ‘Everytime I see it again, it seems almost a lie that I achieved it. It’s almost a dream…but I scored the best goal in my life.’
For Maradona, his performance and Argentina’s victory that summer of 1986 was a slap in the face for all those who had criticised the team coached by Carlos Bilardo in the final weeks leading to the tournament. “Once we had the cup in our hands, we went back into the changing room and started singing the rudest chants from the terraces, ‘ he remembered, ‘We were directing them at everybody…we were all standing on the benches, screaming like madmen: “ And this one is for all you motherfuckers out there!”’
While admitting to his own drugs addiction, he put at least two dope tests down to fabrication, part of an unspecified conspiracy, and denied he had ever taken drugs to enhance his performance. As for that game with England in the Aztec stadium, he admitted using his hand in the first goal against the English only to feel no regret or need to apologise. The goal he said was sweet revenge after all the Argentine chicos who were killed like ‘little birds’ in the Falklands War. It made him feel, an Argentine version of the artful dodger, stealing an Englishman’s wallet.
Maradona hit out at referees, FIFA, money-grabbing players, and corrupt politicians, and placed himself, predictably, on the side of the genuine fan, the true believer of the beautiful game. ‘I am the voice of those who have no voice, the voice of many people who feel represented by me because I always have a microphone in front of me while they’ll never get the chance to have one in their godforsaken lives.’ He felt no need to justify the fact that he remained remarkably silent during the military regime that cost the lives of between 9,000-30,000 disappeared. After playing not far from the killing fields (Maradona’s flat at that time was one street away from one of the junta’s notorious detention camps), Maradona was happy to have his picture taken with leading members of the local Mafia in Naples, the Camorra, not because he was in their pay, but because he felt entertained. He ended his autobiography by insisting that having reached the age of forty he could will all honesty claims he had harmed no one but himself and owed nothing to anyone but his family.
In 2001 when he returned to La Bombonera for his testimonial he did so after another tortured struggle to get fit again, submitting himself to surgery on his knee in a clinic in Colombia. The irony of getting into shape in the land of white powder seemed lost on Maradona’s most fanatical fans. Only when the game got under way did one realise the extent to which Maradona had been sacrificed on the altar of collective self-delusion. From the outset it is clear that Maradona was not fit enough to play much more than a small part of the full 90 minutes at a competitive pace. So the game was choreographed to accommodate him as he was then. The other players slowed their pace, took the sting out of their tackles, and made sure that Maradona got the ball as often as possible. Maradona himself seemed so slow in mind and body that he barely tackled and let passes go awry. There seemed something deeply sad about the best player the world had ever known being shown the kind of charity a kind teacher shows a child with learning difficulties-only at Maradona’s age other players could still play keep their end up in competitive football. .But to say that the pathos was resolved in pantomime was to belittle the emotion that swelled up around Maradona to protect his dignity, and the complicity of players to ensure that it was so.
In his condition, everyone knew that Maradona was incapable of scoring a goal on his own merit. So with the Argentina X1 ahead on goals, scored by others, a penalty was created so that Maradona could take it. He strode forward, chest puffed out and legs moving like tree trunks, and kicked the ball into the back of the net, with a little help from Higuita the goalkeeper who barely made any attempt to save. Later, when presented with another opportunity in front of the goal, Maradona tried to chip Higuita from thirty meters. This time Higuita turned the failing missile into a moment of brilliant riposte, gesturing to Maradona with a scorpion kick similar to the one the Columbian employed against England at Wembley.
By then the match was well into its second half and Maradona could hardly walk, let alone trot. He was limping badly and drenched in sweat. He looked wasted. Only a cold bastard did not feel for the man, reduced to a fractured prop in the game that he loved so much, acted out in his honour but not played as he knew it should be. But Maradona had been there before, struggling to reconcile his love of football with the personal wreck he had become he carried within, and yet always surviving. Looking dangerously out of breath, he took a bottle of water, and emptied it over his head. It was a ritual baptism, the hand of God touching Maradona’s testimonial just when the match seemed to be deflating like a punctured balloon. Temporarily refreshed, Maradona delivered himself to the home crowd, ripping off his Argentine shirt and revealing the Boca Juniors one below. It was as if his whole life was being played out in slow motion, tears welling up in his eyes again, giving two fingers to the celebrities and politicians and football executives who had paid for comfortable VIP seats, and gesturing in solidarity to the stands where the dark-skinned and the unemployed, the thugs and the thiefs, the sharp brutal edge to Argentina’s failings as a nation was looking itself the mirror.
And it was at that precise point that Maradona’s most loyal fans, the wild, lawless, shirtless ones of the standing-only packed terrace known as La Doce , ‘the Twelve’ (because the passion is equivalent to having a twelfth player), already pogoing their tribal dance and vibrating La Bombonera, let off a stream of firecrackers like a battle offensive, so that the whole stadium was enveloped with the smell and reverberation of gunpowder. The cacophony of song and chant gained such frenzy and energy that it broke through the stadium, across the country, and across the globe, leaving TV commentators worldwide speechless or repeating inanities like, ‘This is incredible’. And Maradona like a true spirit amidst the smoke was carried on his team-mates’ shoulders, eyes to the heaven, arms outstretched in supplication, crying as he’d never done before for his failures and his victories, for times past and passing, and the sheer mesmerising seduction of immortality.
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Beyond the stadium, Argentina as a nation sunk into its deepest crisis in living memory under the presidency of Fernando de La Rua, of the centrist Radical party. A crisis of confidence in the government’s ability to tackle a souring public sector deficit and high unemployment led to a run on bank deposits which in turn led to the highly unpopular corralito , an official ban on withdrawals of savings. Riots ensued in Buenos Aires and other parts of Argentina. In the capital, shops and banks were looted and the Congress building set on fire. Clashes between protestors and riot police left twenty-seven civilians dead and hundreds injured in the worst outbreak of political violence since the end of the Falklands War.
The Argentine national football team were preparing themselves for the 2002 World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea, hoping that a win raise the nation’s morale, as it had done in 1978. In a climate of political disintegration, there was loose talk of Maradona standing for the Argentine vice-presidency, on a joint ticket with his friend, the former Peronist president Carlos Menem who had escaped being sent to jail. There were football fans who imagined that Maradona havingto hide his fleet of luxury cars and the other riches he had accumulated over many years. Cretainly, for a while, Maradona must have felt safer in Cuba.
After de La Rua was forced to resign, Argentina entered a period of political limbo as a series of interim presidents struggled to keep a measure of control. Protestors and sectors of the media publicly blamed the political class with the slogan que se vayan todos (“away with them all”). In January 2002 a new interim president Eduardo Duhalde, the former Peronist governor of Buenos Aires abolished a fixed exchange rate which had been in place since 1991 and allowed the Argentine peso to devalue by more than two-thirds of its value, throwing over half the population into deepening poverty. The following year fresh elections were brought forward, and Nestor Kirchner, another Peronist was sworn in as president on May 25, 2003. Argentina, a country that had once surpassed Europe in terms of prosperity and was supposed to be self-sufficient in food and oil , found itself with a depleted middle-class and growing signs of malnutrition across significant swathes of the population.
In a political language that echoed the populism of General Juan Peron and Evita, Kirchner promised to tackle his country’s social problems, embarked on a radical renegotiation of the country’s massive debt, and announced a realignment of foreign policy away from the United Sates and towards other emerging nationalist Latin American leaders like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Despite moving quickly to pursue outstanding cases of human rights violations by the military, and curbing the judiciary of alleged corrupt judges, Kirschner’s style of politics reflected that of his past as a governor of the oil rich province of Santa Cruz. He began to rule Argentina as a personal fiefdom, handing out favours, including lucrative business contracts, to friends, and building power blocks beyond congress, in local authorities, sectors of the trade union movement and a disenfranchised social underclass.
Maradona began to warm to the new political environment, finding that it suited his own personal interests. In 2004, Maradona and his child-hood fiancée and long suffering wife Claudia Villafane divorced after proceedings during which he admitted being the father of an Italian boy called Diego Sinagra, conceived while he had a player in Naples. Maradona eventually moved to a new house in the expanding luxury residential neighbourhood of Ezeiza near to acres of land owned by the Argentine National Football Association where the national squad had its impressive training quarters.. In 2004 the area was a strong Peronist fiefdom, allied with the government. It was rumoured that Maradona’s house purchase had been facilitated by the local mayor Alejandro Granados whose son owned a local football club- flush with funds- and other similarly shadowy business interests.. Only later would it emerge how Maradona had followed up his move into high value real estate by an alliance with Granados, his friends, the ruling Kirchners and the Peronist party that had dominated Argentine politics since General Peron’s coming to power in 1945.In April 2008, Granados announced that Maradona had become a member of the Peronist Party, and registered with the number 10, the figure with which he had become a legend as a footballer. In August 2009, Maradona, enthusiastically backed the government in its efforts to win back state control over the financially lucrative TV football coverage.
Four years before officially being signed up as a Peronist, on the 18th April 2004 Maradona was admitted into the intensive care unit of a Buenos Aires hospital suffering a suspected heart attack following a cocaine overdose, the latest in a series of near-death heaths. And yet reports of Maradona’s death once again proved exaggerated. Within a year, looking obese and unfit, he submitted himself in Colombia, to a gastric bypass surgery in order to deflate his stomach and reduce his appetite. In its aftermath he was put on a strict diet of lightly mashed easily-digestible foods and no alcohol. One of the stories circulated in the past suggested that one of Maradona’s blow-outs had involved the ingestion of seven pizzas, several cakes, and champagne by the gallon. And yet within weeks of having his stomach stapled by a Columbian doctor, Maradona was looking notably thinner as he embarked on a brief and yet financially lucrative career as a TV celebrity presenter.
During a thirty-episode chat show, called La Noche del Diez (The Night of the Number 10) Maradona enticed a range of international sports stars –from Pele to Mike Tyson-musicians-from Robbie Wiliams to Julio Iglesias- and his favourite politician Fidel Castro to play, say a few words, or serenade. In the opening show, Maradona and Pele exchanged personally autographed national shirts, headed a ball to each other for nearly a minute, and played a tango song-with Pele on guitar, and Maradona singing. Pele praised Maradona as an example of how to beat addiction, calling him an inspiration for his son, who had been jailed on a drugs-related charge.Maradona, shed tears as he publicly thanked his family and friends for rebuilding his life after a series of relapses. The performance pushed the TV show to the top of the ratings list although not everyone was convinced. A spoof episode posted days later on YouTube had a puppet Maradona, with some real-life girls in en English pub making a series of indecent proposals before ending his show in a state of debauched abandon, snorting large quantities of cocaine from a sugar bowl.
When Robbie Williams was interviewed by Maradona, the audience was treated to another mutual admiration session with both men agreeing that Argentine women were the world’s sexiest, and that George W. Bush was an ‘idiot and a murderer.’ The political theme persisted when Maradona interviewed Castro for his programme. Maradona told his audience that interviewing the Cuban leader had been his dream although in fact both men had met on several occasions over the years. Maradona’s publicity conscious alliance with the Latin America leader sprung from an instinctive rebellious streak he had carried within him since his childhood days of survival in the shanty town of Villa Fiorito. “For me he is a god,” Maradona said of the veteran communist leader prior to arriving in Havana with his TV crew. The pre-recorded five hour interview (heavily cut for the final programme of the series) showed Castro praising Maradona for his solidarity with the latest Latin America campaign against US imperialism. “We have struggled for various years against the United States, ‘said the Cuba leader, seemingly happy to show the world that contrary to rumour neither he nor Maradona were at death’s door.
Ratings for the final ‘The Night of the Number Ten’ were lower that the series’ start suggesting that Maradona’s popularity remained, as it always had been, based more on football than politics . Viewers were getting tired of a program me that was such a blatant exercise in self-promotion and seemed to get Maradona no nearer to another come-back, away from the studio lights, and on the pitch where he was most loved. And yet the following days saw Maradona stepping into a more crowded stadium of street demonstrators. The latest TV images to accompany him drew the attention of the rest of the world to and an otherwise lackluster and politically sterile conference of talking heads from north and south of the Rio Grande. They showed Maradona leading a colorful trainload of protestors to Mar de Plata to join thousands who had converged on the coastal town in a ‘say no to Bush’ demonstration. The train was temporarily named the Alba Express as a tribute to the ‘Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas’ (Alba was the regional trade pact being promoted by Castro and the Venezuelan President Chavez.) When Chavez took the podium before a 40,000 anti-globalization and anti-Bush demonstration at a nearby stadium, Maradona was at his side. Not everyone was best pleased. Mexican president Vicente Fox, a close ally of Washington, described Maradona as being ideologically confused. “He (Maradona) has a good foot for kicking, but he does not have a good brain for talking,’ Mr Fox told journalists. In the end, Maradona became a conversation issue for the presidents attending the summit. He was again in the limelight.
While still working on his TV show, Maradona returned to his old club Boca Juniors as a sports vice president. His decision to hire Alfio Basile as the new coach, while himself keeping a close relationship with the players, resulted in a marked improvement in the first team’s performance after a disappointing season. Boca went on to win the Argentine league championship and the Copa and Recopa Sudamericana, a success story that prompted the first stage in a drawn-put campaign by Maradona to realize his ambition of coaching the national team.
But before this got under way in earnest, the wheels of global publicity of Maradona Inc received a fresh oiling when BBC TV made a successful bid to have the player agree to an interview with Gary Lineker, the former English international turned sports celebrity. Unless you were prepared to pay huge sums, getting an interview with Maradona had become an increasingly difficult assignment for most journalists since his retirement from full-time football. Lineker himself had the frustrating experience of travelling all the way to Argentina for a TV documentary in 1997 his producers believed they had negotiated with Maradona only for the Argentine star to fail to turn up. This time the BBC calculated that they were dealing with a more predictable subject given his reported success in tackling his weight and drug problems, and the new incentive to his life he had had found as a TV star and back at Boca. The project was timed to coincide with the run-up to the World Cup, an event that ever since 1986 had seen it’s most exemplary moment of football played at its best personified by Maradona.
An advance production team led by BBC sports director Jason Bernard and a ‘fixer’- arrived in Buenos Aires 6 March at the tail end of the local sweltering summer and had an early meeting with Claudia Villafane, Maradona ex-wife who was now his manager. Her biggest initial concern was whether the BBC has brought a along handbag catalogue for her from London, as promised. Lineker flew in within two days after Bernard has established a rapport with Maradona over a dinner he was having with Matias Almeyda, Junior Baino and Careca ahead of a big Masters five-a-side match between Argentina and Brazil.
Over the next five days, the BBC team struck lucky, filming Maradona with his family and friends, playing football, being a TV star, celebrating goals from his box in La Bombonera and talking to Gary as if to a long-lost friend. The two met while Maradona was changing for the Masters game, an event attended by a large contingent of barras bravas who all had free tickets. As Bernard reported later, it was the first time Maradona and Linker had met since a Centenary game at Wembley in 1987, unsurprisingly Gary was apprehensive. But what followed could have almost been scripted. The two hugged and Maradona said, ‘Nice to meet you old friend.’ When they shook hands, Gary joked, ‘was thatthe hand/’ referring to the infamous ‘Hand of God’. Maradona replied, ‘no-it was the left.’
Lineker, in the words of the sports writer Jim White, looked a ‘paradigm of good health: slim , elegant, prosperously arrived in pink shirt and black suit”, in potential contrast to his interview subject who had spent the past decade ‘pursued by devils to whom he must have pledged his soul in exchange for World Cup triumph.’ White was a skilled reporter with an experienced eye for all kinds of footballers. The last time had looked at Maradona for any length of time on a TV screen, he seemed ‘plagued by drink, drugs and fast food’, as if he was attempting ‘some mad David Blayne-style stunt, seeing how long he could live while attached to a mechanical tyre: the former genius of the game had been transformed into an almost spherical blimp.’ But White was pleasantly surprised by Maradona’s seemingly healthy appearance. And what in other times might have been a cruel exercise of public humiliation turned into a riveting piece of TV sports journalism, with a polite Spanish-speaking Lineker engaging with a seemingly relaxed, gracious, and good-humored Maradona, supported by his family despite his divorce, and reserving the full gambit of his emotions for the Boca goals and, irony of ironies, the moment when a referee failed to spot an opposition hand ball.
For British viewers, there were other treats in store-not least an entertaining if provocative account by the man himself of his two legendary goals in the Aztec stadium in 1986. ‘The other guys seemed reluctant to join in the celebrations, ‘ Maradona commented over the archive footage of him running alone into the corner of the Aztec stadium after the hand of God, ‘I was saying, “Come on guys, let’s do it properly, let’s go the whole hog”.’
Months later, hopes of Argentina repeating their World Cup success in 1976 and 1986 were dashed when they were beaten 2-4 by Germany in a tense quarter-final shoot-out in Berlin. The match brought back memories of the 1990 final in Rome when Argentina lost the defence of their championship crown to Germany 0-1 after a controversial penalty award, and players and officials from both sides traded punches on the pitch. Argentina’s national honor was restored when its football team clinched the Olympic men’s ‘gold’ title at the Beijing Olympics. The campaign to victory was notable on two fronts: confirmation of the extraordinary talent of the FC Barcelona youngster Lionel Messi and the looming presence of Maradona.
When the first football was kicked in these Olympics, a large majority of the fans watching the event locally supported China. But as one commentator put it, “things settled down when pictures of a relaxed looking Diego Maradona filled the big screens.’ The sight of Maradona, up in the commentary box or in the stands, hinted at celebrity, and the chants of China soon morphed into support for Argentina. It was hard to gauge the precise reason. Was it the memory of Maradona as a star player or his support for Castro and other revolutions? But the popularity of the Argentine team personified in Maradona in the most populated and fastest growing economy in the world was not lost on sponsors, PR firms, and TV rights people for whom the beautiful game was synonymous with big money.
It was during the Olympics that Maradona took a further step towards realizing his dream of managing the national squad, his personal life seemingly stabilized and his public profile demonstrating a marketing pull that could not easily by ignored by those who stood to profit by his renewed celebrity status, not least Maradona himself and the close coterie of family and trusted friends that surrounded him. When Argentina won its Gold medal, Maradona rushed down into the changing rooms and joined in a high profile celebration with the players as if he was already their coach even though the hero of the hour, according to the mass circulation Clarin newspaper, was Sergio Batista, the manager of the Olympic squad.
And yet in Batista, a veteran of the 1986 World Cup, Maradona had not so much a potential rival, as a useful ally and scout as a result of him taking over responsibility for the youth divisions of the Argentine Football Association. In the aftermath of the Olympics, while Batista faded into the background, Maradona who kept in touch with several of players that secured the gold , thanks to his friendship with Gabriel Heinze and his personal ties with Sergio ‘Kun’ Aguero, his youngest daughter Giannina’s partner and father to her child. The opportunity to make a fresh move came later that summer as Argentina’s struggling attempt to qualify for the World Cup put increasing pressure on the manager Alfio Basile, less than a year after his appointment as national coach. Basile was forced out in October 2008 after securing only four wins in nine matches. The crunch point came when Argentina was defeated 1-0 by Chile, the first time it had lost to its Andean neighbor in thirty-five years.
After the match, a complex network of vested interests contributed to intense lobbying in support of Maradona’s appointment as national coach despite fears that his personality was ill suited to the demands of the job. The exercise is thought to have included personal phone calls to the President of the Argentine Football Association Julio Grondona from three Latin American President, Chaves of Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia, and Argentina’s own head of state Nestor Kirschner, all of whom had been seen to politically ally themselves with Maradona during his latest anti-US phase. Grondona and other AFA officials were also made aware of the extent to which the commercial value of the Argentina national squad would be boosted with Maradona at the helm. For example The Renova Group, owned by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg which had brought the rights to 24 Argentine team exhibition matches for $18m in 2006 forecast a doubling of profits as interest soared round Maradona’s latest redemption. Within the football world, Heinze and Aguero had already led the equivalent of a dressing-room revolt against Basile, persuading other players of the Argentine squad to vote with their feet, in favor of Maradona, in what one AFA insider described as the equivalent of a ‘palace coup.’
While much of the maneuverings took place behind the scenes, it was only too evident to Riquelme, a key player in Basile’s squad who was the only member of the team to take a public stand against Maradona. In truth ego was mixed with principle. This was in part because Riquelme, a proud individual feared losing his influence in the team under Maradona’s tutelage. However Riquelme is also genuinely objected to the underhand way Basile’s removal had been orchestrated and which he believed was unjustified in football terms. Riquelme quit from the national squad saying of Maradona: “We don’t think the same way. We don’t share the same codes of ethics. While he is the coach of the national team, we can’t work together.”
Riquelme’s was admired for his elegant, unhurried style, his ability to prise open defences with slide-rule passes and well placed free-kicks. Since returning from a long stint in Europe to play for Boca, he had become something of a local hero. But critics, some of whom were close to Maradona, argued that Riquelme’s strong personality on the pitch was too often a curse rather than a blessing, dragging a whole team down when he underperformed and making it difficult to change systems. The Boca Juniors playmaker, who has made more than 50 appearances for Argentina scoring 17 goals, missed Maradona’s first two games in charge officially because of club commitments. However his decision to quit followed Maradona’s publicly veiled suggestion that the national squad could work better without him. Maradona said in an interview, that he got up at four o’clock every morning to think about team selection and much of his deliberating had been how to introduce Riquelme without disrupting the team.
Without Riquelme, and with Maradona as coach, the previously lackluster Argentina began playing well beating Scotland and France, and Venezuela in a World Cup qualifying match. But the controversy which had never been far from Maradona’s life resurfaced as Argentina stumbled in subsequent games, beginning with a humiliating 1-6 defeat away to Bolivia in what Bolivian fans would celebrate on Youtube as just revenge for the racial discrimination shown to their families and friends living in Argentina as immigrants. A succession of four defeats in five games left Argentina relying in the play-off position in the South American qualifying zone. Argentina and Maradona’s reputation were thrown a lifeline when a dramatic 93rd minute goal from the Boca Juniors veteran Martin Palermo secured a 2-1 victory over Peru. Celebration, the midst of a biblical thunderstorm, came in the form of Maradona, in raptures, aquaplaning across the rain drenched turf. Divine intervention or at least a saintly one was later invoked. The winning goal was, Maradona insisted, another miracle from San Palermo.
Days later, Argentina faced Uruguay in a match they needed to win to be guaranteed of a place in the World Cup. Argentina’s roller-coaster progress through the qualifying round until then had been widely seen as a product of Maradona’s eccentricity as a manager. Maradona’s campaign to control and direct the national squad involved him in a much publicized rolling brawl with manager Carlos Bilardo and a dispute with the Argentine Football Association over the appointment of other assistants. In his first year at the helm ,Maradona capped over 70 players and experimented with back fours, midfield sixes and four pronged attacks, preceded by as a training regime which accommodated Maradona’s enduring habit of waking late. The regime-if one could call it that- confused stars like Messi, Higuain and Tevez who had been molded by the discipline of the European teams they played for. Only weeks before Maradona had taken over as national coach, Messi- his proclaimed successor- had been warned by the FC Barcelona incoming manager Pep Guardiola that he faced being sacked if he continued to arrive tired for training after being discovered on too many nights out with Ronaldinho. At the time Messi’s form had dipped at the Catalan club. I wa told by a senior club insider that the ensuing conversation went something along these lines.
“What is you dream?” Guardiola asked of Messi in a crisis meeting.
“Well,’ answered the young player, ‘I would like to be to the greatest in the world one day, like Diego.’
‘Well then- you have two options: you go on partying, and you will be out of here within days. Or you start eating properly , cut out alcohol, go go to bed early, and get up on time for training and then you might become one of the best in the world.’
Days later Ronaldinho was on his way out of Barcelona, and Messi had buckled down to Guardiola’s regime which in many ways was planet’s apart from Maradona’s. In the following months Messi, like Teves, would suffer sustained criticism from Argentine fans who accused him of not playing his best. But the players struggled to come to terms with Maradona’s style of management, forever switching teams and strategies..Maradona called up mire 78 players, leaving even the most experienced football commentators struggling to see a method in the madness. Martin Samuel of the Mail on Sunday noted
that Maradona had approached the job of coaching Argentina like a little boy given the new FIFA 2010 game on Playstation and a bucket of smarties.
Argentina beat Uruguay 1-0. The victory was overshadowed by Maradona’s sexually explicit, foul-mouthed rant at his growing army of media critics. ‘There were those who did not believe in this team and who treated me as less than nothing, ‘a wild eyed Maradona declared, clutching his crotch “Today we are in the World Cup finals with help from nobody but honor. To all of you who did not believe in us, and I apologize to all the women here, you can suck my dick and keep sucking it. I am black or white, I’ll never be grey in my life. You can take it up your ass.”
Victim, knight, defiant rebel, foul-mouthed sexist thug-only Diego Maradona could claim to be all four in one statement, and get away with it. Two months later, Maradona emerged from a Fifa ban and flew to Pretoria to check out Argentina squad’s facilities, having lined up a series of lucrative appearances in the run-up to the World Cup. The tournament, that promised success as much as threatened disaster, was just over 100 days away.Argentina prepared for it with a squad that included some of the world’s most gifted players- Higuain, Mascherano, Diego Milito- and yes, Messi, still younger than when Maradona reached his prime, and yet carrying a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders.
