His body wracked by drugs, Diego Maradona would love to return home to a quiet life – but it will never happen
Simon Kuper ‘It was as if we had beaten a country, more than just a football team,” writes Diego Maradona in his new autobiography. “Although we had said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas war, we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was a revenge.” Like so much else in Yo soy el Diego (I am Diego), the account of Argentina’s victory over England at the 1986 World Cup is fresh. “Sometimes I think that everything in my life has been filmed,” writes Maradona, “that all my life is in the magazines. And yet it isn’t so.” Indeed not. This book reveals a different Maradona to the footballing Saddam Hussein of British perception.
On Friday Maradona turns 40. He is expected to die soon. In Cuba he has ample free time. Perhaps for these reasons, he has told two Argentinian journalists the story of his life. Last month Maradona flew to Buenos Aires to promote his book. Looking thinner than usual, he inveighed against hunger and poverty in Argentina, and after a few days received a phone call from Fidel Castro, who said, simply: “Come back.” Maradona went. But in Argentina he is still everywhere. “Maradn!” the crowd began chanting at the end of the depressing international against Uruguay this month. His face appears a dozen times on every newspaper kiosk, and the radios that play non-stop in Argentine houses assault you several times hourly with the singer Rodrigo’s ode, La mano de Dios (Hand of God): “In a shanty town he was born/It was God’s will.” The shanty town of Villa Fiorito, well-documented as it is, was never so clear as in this account. The eight Maradona siblings growing up in one room; when it rained, more water inside the house than outside; the turquoise corduroys that were his only pair of trousers; his father working from four in the morning until three in the afternoon. “It wasn’t easy, eh? Nothing was easy,” says Maradona. It helps you understand why Maradona was perennially transporting an army of friends, relatives and casual bystanders around the world. Snooty Catalonia was appalled when they all turned up in Barcelona in 1982, but Maradona delights in giving things to people. In the book he recounts the first time he took his family to the beach, the day he asked his father to stop working, and the Maradona family’s first visit to Disneyworld (or Disneyland; he isn’t quite sure). Yet it was tough. He made his professional debut at 15, his international debut at 16, and by 19 had scored 100 league goals. “I knew the jealousy of the others… I locked myself in my room and cried. I wanted to buy everything. Nobody can imagine what was happening to me then… Like everything in my life, things were going too fast.” Very early in his career he began dreaming of playing only with boys, against boys, in a stadium where all the fans, the stewards and policemen were boys. His first World Cup, in 1982, is a deception. Maradona is mediocre, is kicked to pieces, and is sent off against Brazil for kicking the bearded Batista in the balls. As the book reveals, he got the wrong man. “What few people know is that that kick was meant for Falcao.” All of Argentina is upset, but Maradona says: “In our country there are many more important things than Maradona.” The military regime, for instance, which in 1982 still ran the country. Even today it repels him. But as he reminds us, when the moment came he shook the hand of General Videla, the dictator.
He also cheerfully reveals himself as the Iago of international football. His spur, he tells us, is revenge. At 17, omitted from Argentina’s squad for the World Cup of 1978, he swears revenge; when an opposing goalkeeper calls him chunky and overrated, he puts four goals past him; after the World Cup of 1982, he swears revenge for the next World Cup; and there, confronting England, he avenges the Malvinas. He recounts that dribble through the England defence second by second. As he advances down the right of the field, beating three England players, he can see his team-mate Jorge Valdano in space to his left. Then, however, Terry Fenwick arrives. “He wouldn’t leave me!” Maradona recalls. “If Fenwick had left me, I could have given it to Valdano, who would have been alone in front of [Peter] Shilton. But Fenwick didn’t leave me! He kept me a terrible guard, Fenwick!” Finally Maradona shakes him off by feinting inside and going outside. Appearing in front of Shilton, he experiences a flashback. Six years before, at Wembley, he had likewise dribbled through the whole of the England defence, but faced with Ray Clemence, had shot wide. At the time, his seven-year-old brother “El Turco” (The Turk; most people in the book are known only by their nicknames; both God and Fidel Castro are The Beard) had phoned him to say: “Bollocks! If you had feinted, you’d have pulled the goalkeeper out of position.” This time, in the Azteca stadium, Maradona does exactly that. By the time Terry Butcher lumbers up to clog him, he has already scored. Later, in the changing room, Hector “El Negro” Enrique calls from the shower: “A lot of praise for him, but what about the guy who gave him the pass?” As Maradona comments in the book: “Son of a bitch, Negro. In our own penalty area he gave me that pass!” Maradona confesses that at times he prefers the first goal, the one he scored with his hand. “It was like stealing the wallet of the English.” No hard feelings, though. His visit to the Oxford Union in 1995 was “one of the greatest joys of my life”. The crowd gives him an ovation and chants “Diegouuu, Diegouuu!” . He also offers praise to several British players. Michael Owen is “for me, the only player who stood out at the World Cup in France. Speed, wickedness, balls. I hope that injuries don’t ruin him.” George Best was “a great player, but even crazier than me”. (For Maradona, “crazy” is generally a term of approbation.) Kevin Keegan “was my idol for a long time”.
Only Shilton is castigated for his rage over the handled goal. “And the other one, Shilton, did you see that? He didn’t invite me to his farewell match. How many people can go to the farewell of a goalkeeper? A goalkeeper!” David Beckham, finally, is “too beautiful to go on to the field”. But Maradona loves his passing. His favourite player, however, seems to be his fellow left-footer Rivelinho. Maradona tells a lovely anecdote about the Brazilian sitting around with Gerson and Tostao at the World Cup of 1970. “They were doing nothing, because those guys didn’t have to do anything to play. Then Pel turns up. And they think, ‘This shit black man, what can we say to him? The son of a bitch does everything well!’ But Rivelinho always said the right thing. So he looked straight at Pel, and said: ‘Tell me the truth. You would have liked to have been a left-footer, wouldn’t you?'” Soon Maradona may die. Argentine heroes tend to die young: Carlos Gardel, Eva Peron, Che Guevara, and this year, in a car accident at the age of 27, the singer Rodrigo. Maradona’s addiction to cocaine is regarded in Britain as further proof that he is “mad” (the habitual British tag for wayward foreign footballers) but Argentinians see it differently. They point out that Maradona has been under unusual pressure since his late teens. Significantly, it was when he moved abroad and joined Barcelona that he began taking drugs. Or in Rodrigo’s words: “Fame presented him with a white woman/Of mysterious taste and forbidden pleasure.” If Maradona ruined his body with cocaine, and took the banned substance ephedrine to lose weight for the 1994 World Cup, he did it to serve his country. He gave of his flesh. And Argentina, in endless decline since before he was born, demanded it of him. Yes, other great players bore their greatness better than he did, but Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer and Bobby Charlton were from rich countries where football didn’t have to compensate for everything else, while Pel had the support of a generation so gifted that they won the 1962 World Cup without him. Maradona, however, carried Argentina on his shoulders. Now he has had enough. In Cuba, he has retreated from the world. The island may not excel at drugs rehabilitation, but it is a small place with few journalists where the national sport is baseball and the political leader a Communist who makes reassuring noises about the poor instead of going on about inflation and the peso-dollar link. Maradona prefers this to a rehab clinic in Canada besieged by journalists with none of his friends around. His unfulfilled dream, he writes, is “to return to my country and be left in peace”. This will never happen. In Argentina he will only become more legendary until he dies and is given a funeral to dwarf Evita’s. In England, he deserves better than to remain a victim of the fantasy that but for bad luck and cheating foreigners, this country would win more World Cups. Maradona might be a paranoid drug addict (he explains that governments want people to be drug addicts) but most of the time he seems to be a nice man. Sitting next to him at dinner in Oxford in 1995, I was astonished by his kindness.