Halfway through the match between Argentina and Nigeria it looked as if something had begun to take hold as the image of Diego Maradona seemingly asleep in his VIP box appeared on TV screens all over the world. In reality his appearance had raised questions from the moment he entered the stadium. Memes of his demoniac look, arms crossed across his chest, had gone viral, as did the gif of him dancing with a woman in the crowd.
It looked like a man under the influence. Maradona’s well-documented history of substance abuse, both legal and illegal – an issue he has been openly discussing for decades – gave us a clue as to what was going on but he says he has been clean for years and told reporters afterwards he had “only” been drinking white wine.
The man who has been described by many as the best footballer to have lived has been present at all three Argentina matches, held firmly in the grasp of some sort of security personnel as he teeters on the edge of the balcony much as he has done on the very edge of life throughout a turbulent existence.
He walks in and commands the chants of thousands, the focus of the world’s cameras and the response of online communities who faithfully ensure his every move goes viral as he prays, celebrates, applauds, insults, swears and expresses time and again what every man, woman and child feels at some point.
It is a laugh a minute with Maradona, always has been. I first met him when he was planning to launch a union to represent players’ rights against Fifa. Inside a five-star Paris hotel he said, “Let’s go and get some pizza,” and as we were stepping on to the pavement he warned us, “There’s going to be a lot of people here; watch out.” No sooner had he spoken than he disappeared into the heart of a demented mob chanting his name, hands stretched out, clamouring for a chance to glimpse and touch him.
On that occasion he was accompanied by his then best friend, manager and sidekick Guillermo Coppola. “Guille,” Diego called out as he dived into the crowd and dribbled himself out of it on to the road where Coppola had stopped a pink convertible Rolls-Royce that happened to be passing and brokered a ride for them both. Maradona jumped in and off they went; the entire swift move had taken a few seconds.
As a footballer he was out of this world. A “cosmic kite from another planet” the Uruguayan commentator Víctor Hugo Morales described him on air, narrating the second goal against England in 1986. The goal, the narration and the commentator have become legend.
What Maradona could do with a ball was proof if any were needed that football at its best is an art form. His entire being, body and mind, could do with a ball what the greatest composers in history have done with musical notes, the most notable artists with a brush and some paint, the best writers with words, pen and paper.
Diego “rewrote the 10 commandments of football” and performed miracles. His ability to rotate his ankle 360 degrees was matched by his peripheral vision, able to make out detail and movement all around him. When he became a celebrity in reality TV dance shows, fat and unfit, he showed once more his hips can also turn right round, and although we have never literally seen his head spinning, metaphorically it clearly does.
He lived and played with a blatant disregard for the rules and laws of man. The cocaine abuse was but one manifestation, a handball-goal and shooting at journalists door-stepping his home when his daughters were little a couple of other examples. His final bow on the World Cup stage was when he walked off the pitch led by a nurse in 1994, for a dope test which came back positive. He re-emerged from the ashes of that disgrace, and became Argentina’s 2010 World Cup manager, seducing the world yet again on football’s biggest stage.
People often say he “was clever with his feet” but not with his head, or “great as a player but not as a person”, as if one could be separated from the other. Maradona’s popularity worldwide would probably be best explained if we could accept contradiction as truth; Maradona’s extremes are not so much a case of someone swaying between good and bad but more the embodiment of both simultaneously.
Excess is his preferred modus operandi – a life as close to the edge as his has landed him in hospitals and emergency rooms more than once. Those who have had a chance to deal with him, whether doctors, judges or psychiatrists, often like to tell the tale, so we get to hear details such as the fact that admission to a private clinic in Uruguay after a particularly intense New Year’s Eve celebration was more a matter of consumption of pizza and champagne in wholesale quantities than recreational use of illegal pharmacology.
Amid the madness, he has always been coherent. His “performance” during the Nigeria-Argentina game in St Petersburg naturally ended with medical professionals to hand. One of the most controversial and charismatic celebrities alive, whose private life has been public for as long as any of us can remember, infamously fell out with Coppola over financial dealings gone wrong 15 years ago.
They had not met again until St Petersburg, a selfie of them reunited in a hug that went viral. Maradona is estranged from his first wife and two daughters, for decades the women of steel who held him together and kept him alive, and a poignant tweet from his eldest daughter, Dalma, perhaps best summarises how we all might feel if he were to, unspeakably, one day not walk among us. “I don’t know if I miss you more on or off the pitch. I think both.”
