I’ve seen Maradona. I’ve seen him play live a dozen times. I consider myself lucky because in the course of my life (which is passing from autumn to winter) I have admired the best. Only for Garrincha did I have to settle for television. I find the rankings tedious. Football has evolved season after season. Physics, tactics, technique. Then everything is relative: for me Omar Sivori was the best. Yet Giglio Panza, the unforgettable director of “Tuttosport” that I had the privilege of meeting, told me: “Because you didn’t see what Renato Cesarini was capable of”.
Maradona passed away at the age of 60, causing a planetary commotion that is struggling to fade. Diego showed magic on the green lawn. The details, as it can happen, can escape. To “understand” them, after you have memorized them, you have to rewind the “tape”. Of Maradona you were struck by the “final” part of an action or a goal. You were ecstatic. But if you could go back, then you “saw” the blinding stop, the deadly feint, the millimeter passage, the launch with the tachometer. Not just dribbling or the net to remember.
Maradona had the ability to shock: opponents and the public. Someone compared it to a painting by Caravaggio: I imagine the revolutionary idea of that great painter of depicting whores and cutthroats, in the role of madonnas and saints. In my opinion Maradona was a Pollock cast. It invested you with the materiality and the bright colors.
His is the most beautiful goal of the “century”. Although in my opinion the most difficult was the one stuck on a free kick against Stefano Tacconi in a Napoli – Juventus. Ballistic prowess that shattered the certainties of physics. Juventus, to honor him, put that goal on his profile.
He could have played with the black and white jersey, reported underage to Gianni Agnelli by Omar Sivori. Although he became in Naples the symbol of the rebel fighting against “power” (modern Masaniello, capable of redeeming a city and a people), Maradona confessed in 1992, during his season at Sevilla, that he had long dreamed of Juventus. Of having imagined being able to become the leader as had been “Bettega and Tardelli”.
At Juventus, however immense, Maradona would have been the “primus inter pares”: Platini permitting, obviously. He would certainly have won more than the two championships he won under Vesuvius. He would have been loved but not revered as in Naples. His Savoyard life would have been different. I don’t venture to say better: just different.
You couldn’t not admire Maradona: too good. Only once did I hate him. When in the mundial of “magical nights”, he incited the Neapolitans to cheer against Italy. The Neapolitans listened to him cheering Argentina. Ancient rusts with that Cavour.
By my choice you will not find here words on the dark side of Maradona: it is known. A great Italian “pessimist” explained that “men are perfidious with the living, as they are understanding with the dead”. I am of the opinion that each of us has something bad in our pannier. My grandfather knew Filippo Turati. He left me a book that collected the parliamentary speeches of the socialist leader. The one of February 1907, among other things, reads: “To judge a little less, to judge a little better“. I think of her as Turati.
Therefore, I am not stepping up to the guilty parties. But neither do I intrude with the damp eyelashes that in these hours are transforming Maradona into the stunt double of San Francesco.
Naples has decided to change its name to San Paolo: it will be called Diego Armando Maradona. Excellent initiative, in the sign of the city’s intact love for its unforgettable champion. Less well, in times of Covid, the thousands of people on pilgrimage in front of the murals. The fumegeni outside the stadium. Much worse in Argentina: where at the Casa Rosada, the pilgrimage to the coffin was suspended and the police had to intervene.
I am intrigued by one aspect of the Maradona story. That is to say (in the context of his footballing greatness and the equally exaggerated human dimension) the ability to become a symbol of the last. Maradona was born poor in an Argentine “villa miseria”. Like Pele: so poor that he couldn’t afford a pair of shoes to play football.
Diego approached a certain idea of politics. Pele was considered a “bourgeois”. How much Diego, despite living as a nabob, was considered “proletarian”. Pele has never spent any time against the “colonizing Yankees of South America”. After his stay in Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro, Maradona thought (as Che Guevara had thought) that Latin America should free itself from the American “gringos”. He had a crush on Chavez, Lula and more recently Maduro.
The “Wall Street Jurnal” wrote: “Maradona friend of the Communist dictators”.
Was he a communist, Diego? It was certainly, “against”. Transgression was his cipher.
So much so that in my opinion, the melancholy notes of Piazzolla’s tango or the poetic ones of Pino Daniele that have been punctuating hundreds of television reports on Maradona for hours, should be replaced with those of Manu Chao’s patchanka.
Diego Armando was a “rebelde”. Which, explained Jorge Valdano, “the world after having crowned him king, he left alone“. Like the protagonist of a Hopper canvas.
Bergoglio sent a letter and a rosary to the Maradona family. Since those who met him describe Diego as a good and generous man, who knows if (thanks to that letter) he was allowed to go up to the Last Floor.
I guess there is a national team there too. The problem for Diego will be to convince the one with the rolled-up socks to leave him the number 10. I see it as complicated.
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