Weekend essay: What Maradona gave us, and what we took from him

“To hell with what might have been. No one can reach personal perfection in a complex world filled with distraction…what happened is all we have.”

– Stephen Jay Gould

In the days since Diego Maradona died last Wednesday it has sometimes been hard to reconcile the images of joy and transcendence with a media narrative running parallel.

This other insistent tale told us that we were mourning a great man unfulfilled, a great man destroyed by his “demons”, as people insist on calling them.

Diego Maradona, the man, might well have lived a different, longer and less disturbed life if circumstances had been different but then he wouldn’t have been Diego Maradona.

Diego Maradona, the footballer, perhaps could have achieved a lot more if it had not been for his addictions. But what more was left to achieve? What more is there when somebody dies than the knowledge that the world will lose itself in reverie at your accomplishments? 

If we can remember Diego Maradona at his best, especially in that summer of 1986 when he led Argentina to the World Cup, then this week we are mourning something lost in ourselves too which we are reminded of when he dies and which exists independently of Maradona’s life.

Would that life have been more fulfilled if Maradona had left football at 35 to embark on a sporting retirement which included well paid, safe and secure corporate endorsements? It would probably have been less painful for those who loved him but where was he supposed to go after football, where can anyone go after a life like his which has, by the age of 25, delivered achievements most can only imagine?

There is nothing but disappointment waiting in the real world for those who have achieved like Maradona. When Marilyn Monroe entertained 18,000 US servicemen in Korea, she returned and relayed her experiences to her then husband Joe DiMaggio. “It was wonderful, Joe, you never heard such cheering.”

 “Yes I have,” DiMaggio said.

In his essay on DiMaggio, Streak of Streaks, the evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould beautifully lays out how those moments a sports star achieve shape everything we feel about them:

“A man may labour for a professional lifetime, especially in sport or in battle, but posterity needs a single transcendent event to fix him in permanent memory. Every hero must be a Wellington on the right side of his personal Waterloo; generality of excellence is too diffuse. The unambiguous factuality of a single achievement is adamantine. Detractors can argue forever about the general tenor of your life and works, but they can never erase a great event.”

For Di Maggio, who clung to his achievements and where they placed him on the American cultural pantheon during his long life, that event was his 56-game hitting streak in 1941.

For Diego Maradona, the great event was the 1986 World Cup. That was the great event which links us all to him, which can never be unbroken and which can never be diminished by the talk of darkness or “demons”. 

We all have demons, but not many of us win a World Cup effectively on our own.

In that June month, Maradona achieved permanence. Those who scoffed last week that a footballer’s death was leading the news bulletins would never scoff if ‘a poet’ or ‘a politician’s’ death received the same coverage. In doing so, they reveal only their own ignorance, their own failures of imagination and their incapacity to understand that when Maradona played football – especially when he played football as he did in Mexico in 1986 – he was transforming our understanding of how things can be done or, at least, how they could be done by him. There was a profound truth in evidence at those moments just as there is when a writer or a musician creates something that speaks to us. 

Look at Maradona’s second goal against Belgium in the semi-final of the World Cup. This was a goal of typical brilliance which, after he scored it, he stumbled having skipped by the final defender. It seemed inevitable that he would fall – anybody else would surely have fallen – but instead he moved upwards, away from the ground. It would have been barely more surprising if he had started to fly.

This was the boy who said his dream was to win the World Cup and then discovered that his dreams were more like rites of passage.

“For so many years, we have told him repeatedly, ‘You’re a God’, ‘You’re a star’, ‘You’re our salvation’, that we forgot to tell him the most important thing: ‘You’re a man’.”

Jorge Valdano

Maradona’s life wasn’t predestined but sometimes it is hard not to think it was. If not quite from the moment of his birth – “You have a healthy son and he is pure ass” his mother was told when he arrived – but from an age when he began to demonstrate his preternatural control of a ball, it seemed ordered. 

In his magnificent biography of Maradona, Jimmy Burns recounts how Maradona’s talent quickly became apparent and, almost as quickly, it became apparent that this talent could take Maradona’s family and those who tried to attach themselves to him, into a different world.

“This kid is going to be the salvation of us all, Dona Tota,” Maradona’s first coach Francisco Cornejo tells Maradona’s mother. “May God make it so,” she replied.

To this end, Cornejo also took Maradona to a doctor he asked to make the boy “fatter and bigger”. 

“When I finished with him,” the doctor ‘Cacho’ Paladino told Burns, “the boy was like a racing colt”. 

Maradona was put on a course of vitamins and injections and they, too, became a lifetime companion. A solution for those who needed Maradona to be Maradona at all times and for Maradona who needed to be Maradona too.

Paladino also provided advice for Cornejo. “Listen carefully to what I tell you,’ Paladino said. ‘Don’t give him to anyone, keep him for yourself, and when he’s older, sell him and keep half the money. Best you do that, because you’re going to be left behind.’

Cornejo was left behind but everybody was, in one way or another, as Maradona conquered the world and then spent the rest of his life trying to come to an accommodation with a life of relative ordinariness.

The quirk of fate that saw him die on the same date as George Best fifteen years later, and at more or less the same age, has linked them yet again in many people’s eyes. There were similarities. Best’s balance was something that allowed him to thrive in an age when, like Maradona’s, he would be on the receiving end of a butchering from defenders. Alex Ferguson would later talk about the “double-joined ankles” that those at Old Trafford said allowed Best to become the player he was. 

Best had just turned 22 when Manchester United won the European Cup in 1968 and nothing would ever be as good again. 

If the same was true of Maradona after 1986, there were still accomplishments which could come close. There were league titles in Italy with Napoli, who had never won one before. There was another World Cup final in 1990, although this was a dark counterpoint to ’86 with Maradona, already broken and deluded by cocaine abuse, revealing more about what was to come, with only glimpses of all that he could do.

Still, the stories of Best and Maradona are very different. Perhaps this is merely a function of the respective drugs which became their primary addiction. Best, at all times, seemed to be trying to come to terms with what he had lost, with a career that was meandering from that highpoint at Wembley in 1968.

All addicts may be unhappy in their own way, but if Best’s life was full of regret, few would think of first asking Maradona where did it all go wrong.

To do so would also be a failure of imagination and even simply a failure to study what was right in front of you. Best once exited the home of a woman he had spent some time with and left only a note on the mantlepiece which read, “Nobody knows me.”

Maradona, too, became used to the performative element of his life and the distance it could take him from whatever other life he could have imagined having.

But what life could that be? EL Doctorow wrote of JP Morgan that he “knew as no one else the cold and barren reaches of unlimited success.”

Maradona’s success was different, compromised, and paid for in ways he couldn’t afford. The success he experienced was suffocating, not cold, because he experienced fame as few have.

In wondering if there could have been more, we are making one last demand of Maradona. We are asking him not only to overcome the addictions from which all of us can suffer and which are not demonic, but still cunning, baffling and powerful.

They can be overcome, but to do so while battling fame as well, perhaps the most suffocating of them all, makes everything more difficult. “One dreams of the goddess fame,” Peter De Vries wrote, “and winds up with the bitch publicity.”

In that accommodation there is no peace, but then if there had been peace, there might not have been all we witnessed. “Talent is one thing,” a great musician once reflected, “you need another gene too.”

Maradona’s ambition drove him along with his talent. It drove him towards success and it sent him towards madness. “Having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation,” Frank Sinatra said once. 

“I know what the cat who wrote the song is trying to say. I’ve been there—and back. I guess the audience feels it along with me. They can’t help it. Sentimentality, after all, is an emotion common to all humanity.”

Sinatra’s vulnerabilities were hidden by his swagger and he inspired devotion but was also despised, like Maradona, for the associates he had and the way those associations with mobsters benefited both parties. 

He also, despite having an art he could continue with, found peace elusive.

But maybe it was something else that eluded them. How could they be ordinary? 

“Poor old Diego,” Jorge Valdano, who played with Maradona in 1986, wrote once. Valdano would capture beautifully the sense of loss last week and a long time ago, he sensed what was coming. “For so many years, we have told him repeatedly, ‘You’re a God’, ‘You’re a star’, ‘You’re our salvation’, that we forgot to tell him the most important thing: ‘You’re a man’.”

Unfortunately for Maradona the man, he was all those things. He was salvation and a star and as close as it came to a God. 

Whether Maradona would have absorbed this most important but most ordinary of things if he had been told it by the public is impossible to know, but maybe we can take a guess, maybe that would have been a little too much shared humanity.

It is ordinariness that eluded figures like Maradona and Best and it was that they could never accommodate.

“This kid is going to be the salvation of us all, Dona Tota.”

Francisco Cornejo

On September, 28^th 1971, the first newspaper reference to Maradona appeared in the Argentinian newspaper, Clarín. A typo saw that he was referred to as ‘Caradona’, but the rest seemed apt about the ten-year-old boy who died a broken down man of 60 last week.

His shirt is too big for him, and his fringe hardly allows him to see properly. He looks as if he’s escaped from a piece of wasteland. He can kill the ball, and then just as easily lift it up with both his feet. He holds himself like a born football player. He doesn’t seem to belong to today, but he does; he has a very Argentine love for the ball, and thanks to him our football will continue to nourish itself with great players.

More than 49 years later, Clarín carried an obituary of Maradona this week. In it they published his words when asked in 2005, what he would like his epitaph to be. “Thank you for having played football, because it’s the sport that gives me greatest joy, the most freedom, and it is like touching the sky with your hands. Thanks to the ball, thank you to football.”

If you want a happy ending, Orson Welles said, it depends on where you stop the story. 

This is where the story stops. The happiness was everywhere else.