From Brazil to Italy, the death of Argentine football star Diego Maradona after cardiac arrest sparked a wave of pain. Maradona, who has struggled for decades with addiction and weight problems, is one of the most productive players of all time. Photograph: Fabio Prensa Sasso / Zuma
Diego Maradona of Napoli celebrates a purpose of an Italian Serie A match against AC Milan at San Paolo Stadium in 1988. Source: Supplied
One night in January 1991, Diego Maradona, the world’s most prominent football star, who then played for Napoli in Italian Serie A, quietly sought to order two sexual employees of a Neapolitan Mafia associate.
When Maradona made this call, he was a remote figure, exhausted by the constant attention of his fame, who could not pass anywhere in Naples, tracked through the media, betting on a club he sought to escape and desperately addicted to cocaine. .
But halfway through this discreet 3:40 order, at the other end of the line he insisted that Maradona greet his son, a beloved Naples fan.
“This moment is like a tragic comedy,” says Asif Kapadia, director of the 2019 documentary Diego Maradona, which chronicles the player’s seven tumultuous years in southern Italy from 1984 to 1991.
Argentine legend died at the age of 60 from a center attack on Wednesday after undergoing previous brain surgery this month
“Here’s a guy looking to escape fame and get lost in his addictions to sex, drugs, alcohol, but in between you have a kid who jumps on the call to ask him questions. About the last game. If you put that in an episode of The Sopranos, you’d think it was funny, but you think it would “never happen. “But he did. That’s life. By DiegoArray “
Unkistakable, the phone call went through the government and was then used as evidence to set rates opposite the midfielder’s dynamo for cocaine ownership and distribution (the latter because it bore dust to sex workers).
In April of that year, a drug control revealed lines of cocaine in his blood and was banned from playing football for 15 months.
He then fled Italy to his local Argentina and was temporarily arrested for possession of cocaine, while police drove Maradona distraught and crying.
Diego Maradona was evicted by police from an apartment in Buenos Aires on April 26, 1991 after being arrested for owning part of a kilo of cocaine. Source: AFP
“When he arrived in Naples, he had bright eyes and a big smile,” says Kapadia, who used many hours of personal and unpublished footage in this deep dive, as new interviews with Maradona himself.
“But when he left, he shattered the pain that had partially inflicted upon him. “
It is a shocking drop of the highest player endowed with his generation; on par with the biggest fashionable times like Cristiano Ronaldo or his Fellow Argentinian Lionel Messi.
But unlike them, Maradona was also a player who had a romantic story, from rags to rich, who as seductive as his talents on the field.
MARADONA’S POOR DIRT IMPROVEMENT
One of 8 children was born in 1960 into a deficient circle of relatives living in the slums of Buenos Aires.
Maradona’s skill with a football began to manifest from an early age and as rumors of his prodigious skill grew, a film crew captured images of the boy doing tricks, explaining his ambition to win the World Cup for Argentina.
At the age of 15, Maradona signed for the Argentina Juniors home team and has become financially guilty of his entire family.
He temporarily rose through the ranks before signing for rival Boca Juniors in 1981, before FC Barcelona raised him the following year.
But his arrival in Europe has been tarnished by injuries and controversies over his lifestyle and party temperament.
In his last attack on Barcelona – the last Copa del Rey of 1984 against Atletico Bilbao – Maradona worried in a large-scale bray that led him to kneel in the face of an opponent, knocking him unconscious without blood on the field.
To make matters worse, the case was positioned in front of the royal circle of Spanish relatives present, while the whole country watched live television.
After this embarrassing episode, only Napoli seemed willing to accept a threat by buying it. The transfer to a club that suffered a degradation for Maradona, but 80,000 rabid enthusiasts showed up at Napoli Stadium in July 1984 (before the start of the season). ) for official opening.
“Naples, one of the poorest and most violent places in Europe at the time,” Kapadia says, “they needed a hero. “
Diego Maradona for Naples Source: Supplied
Small, fast, strong, complicated to hit the ball and endowed with unmatched strategy and intelligence, no one can play as Maradona at its best. He temporarily loaded the stick (and the town so ridiculed) on his back as he passed from a losing cause to a serious contender in the first two seasons of Maradona.
It is a similar situation for the Argentina national team clearly average, which Maradona led at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.
At the age of 26, he has led from the middle, generating sensational solo performances, in the quarter-finals, in which they beat England 2–1.
Maradona scored goals; the first was the notorious “hand of God” incident, in which he deceived the ball into the net.
The second, a very good singles race, from his own field, haggling over five England players for one of the biggest goals in World Cup history.
Argentina continued to suffer defeat to the British in the 1982 Falklands War, and Maradona (and almost all of Argentina) considered it a “revenge. “
He also played a central role in the final, betting the killer pass in order to win in a 3–2 loss to West Germany. Already adored in Argentina, he was a national hero.
Success continued in Naples, where Maradona brought them to their first name in 1987, scoring 10 along the way, making it an instant Neapolitan deity.
“If you speak ill of Maradona, you speak ill of God,” says one fan of the film, with a mortal.
Maradona’s non-public trainer, Fernando Signorini, recalls that the player had had a blood test, only for a nurse to borrow a jar and place it in a local church.
“He likes a demigod, it bothers him psychologically, ” he said.
With his ability to move around the virtually non-existent village, the Camorra – an infamous mafia team – presented Maradona’s cover and indulged in the party, hard drugs and simple women.
Although he is married to Claudia Villafane, his long-time girlfriend, he also had an affair with Cristiana Sinagra, a friend of one of Maradona’s sisters.
Sinagra gave birth to Diego Jr. in early 1987, appearing on Italian television with the one-day-old boy to proclaim Maradona as his father. Maradona knew the truth, but she publicly denied the child.
“I didn’t care,” he admits in the movie.
“The factor of detecting your child comes at a turning point in your life,” Kapadia says.
“At the height of his feat, Maradona felt that he may never make a mistake or show weakness, so he lies. This is what leads him down the road when he gets lost. “
He did not recognize his son until 2016 and since then admitted to being the father of six children in the cases, in addition to the two daughters he had with his now ex-wife.
At that time, his good luck on the court continued: Napoli won the UEFA Cup in 1989 and the Name of Serie A in 1990. But mentally, Maradona had controlled it. He longed for a quieter position to play football, and his serious vices were his biggest escape.
“Even the Napoli enthusiasts I spoke to would have liked the club to let it go sooner, because then it wouldn’t have been so bad,” Kapadia said.
The 1990 World Cup in Italy was even more disturbing: in the semi-final (which was held, as fate intended, in Naples), Argentina beat Italy in a penalty shootout and Maradona scored a key shot.
Having been a hero in his country followed for so long, Maradona personality not pleasant in Italy almost overnight.
Drug charges and wiretaps occurred a few months later, and no one from the S. S. C. Napoli even provided in the sentence that decreed his 15-month football ban.
Diego Maradona greets Naples fans Source: Supplied
The war for redemption is underway for Maradona. He soon returned to the Argentine national team at the 1994 World Cup, but failed in another drug control, this time for performance-enhancing ephedrine.
After finishing his career in the 1990s, he fought cocaine use, obesity and alcoholism.
Last year, he appointed coach of the troubled La Plata Gymnastics team in Buenos Aires. Despite their misfortune, Argentines will never find the backs of Diego.
This article was originally published in the New York Post and reproduced with permission.