Diego Maradona
Apr 22, 2004
The life and times of Maradona<br><br>IT is a crisp autumn evening in Buenos Aires, but heavy sweat runs down the face of the corpulent middle-aged man in sunglasses and a black T-shirt who is struggling through a clamour of well-wishers and autograph hunters on his way into the football stadium.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARADONA
He played professional football at 15, lifted the World Cup at 25 and was being called one of the greatest players ever by the time he was 30. And on Monday, after years of drug abuse, Diego Maradona was in hospital fighting for his life. Richard Williams writes about the twilight of a god
IT is a crisp autumn evening in Buenos Aires, but heavy sweat runs down the face of the corpulent middle-aged man in sunglasses and a black T-shirt who is struggling through a clamour of well-wishers and autograph hunters on his way into the football stadium.
Behind the shades, beneath his unruly black curls, a pale, fleshy face is contorted into the familiar rictus of time-expired celebrity, that meaningless smile from which a form of existential panic has driven the last vestige of genuine pleasure.
For more than 10 years, football fans have stared in horror at that face and then turned away in sadness as the apparently inexorable decline of the man sometimes called the greatest footballer of all time played itself out in the world’s media, one hideous chapter after another.
By comparison with Diego Armando Maradona, the descent of a George Best or a Paul Gascoigne seems almost decorous, just as his history of dalliances makes David Beckham’s alleged extracurricular activities look like the adventures of a boy scout.
You would need to turn to the darker side of show business - to the gruesome extended farewell of a Judy Garland, perhaps - to find a personal calamity made into such a public spectacle.
This time the pictures - taken on Sunday outside the Bombonera, or “chocolate boxâ€, the home of Boca Juniors, the club with which he made his name more than 20 years earlier - showed an almost unrecognisable figure.
From the bloating of his face, the thickness of his neck and the extent of the multiple bellies wobbling beneath the black shirt, he looked to be carrying close to 20 stone on his 5ft 7in frame. And this was once the 10-year-old boy who entertained crowds with his joyful ball-juggling tricks at half time during first division matches.
Within a couple of hours the 43-year-old Maradona would be attached to a hospital’s life-support system, his condition critical and his breathing sustained artificially as the news went around the world of the latest act in this long-running passion play.
Perhaps Maradona’s condition really turned critical on the day in 1994 when he was thrown out of the World Cup after testing positive for various forms of ephedrine, a banned substance, in a random urine test following Argentina’s 2-1 victory over Nigeria in Boston. He knew it, too.
“They’ve killed me,†he exclaimed, when told that he had been suspended from the remainder of the competition.
But “they†had not killed him, if by “they†he meant the officers of FIFA, football’s international governing body.
The long, slow process began the day such a phenomenal talent made its appearance in such a poverty-stricken environment, the day it became apparent that Maradona’s genius was a goldmine to be worked and worked and worked again until it had given up its last glittering nugget.
At the age of 10, for instance, he was being encouraged to use a false name to disguise his identity when he appeared in league matches between teams of a higher age group, for which he was not eligible under the rules of the Argentine Football Association.
The last piece of significant exploitation took place in the months before the fateful 1994 urine test, when he was persuaded to return from Spain to prepare for his country’s attempt to regain the trophy they had won, under his mesmerising leadership, eight years earlier.
On arrival in Argentina, he weighed a portly 92 kilograms. To play effectively, he needed to be down to 77kg. One way or another, in a single month he shed almost a quarter of his body weight.
Those who saw him at the time remarked that he looked like a jockey on a wasting regime.
For a 33-year-old, this was hardly the best preparation for a series of severe physical tests in the high temperatures of mid-summer USA.
The only man who knew how it had been achieved was Daniel Cerrini, a former champion bodybuilder and proprietor of a Buenos Aires gym. Cerrini took charge of the weight-loss regime, his methods including a crash diet, weight training and the extensive use of food supplements.
By the time the World Cup started, Maradona was again surrounded by controversy. Newell’s Old Boys, the Rosario club, which had signed him on his return to Argentina, dismissed him after he had missed the team’s training sessions once too often.
Journalists attempting to doorstep his house were met with gunfire.
Nevertheless, he reported fit for duty with Argentina. Masterminding their opening match, a 4-0 victory over Greece, he celebrated one of the goals by sprinting across to the nearest television camera and screaming into the lens.
Broadcast around the world, his contorted features made him look like a lunatic, flying on a cocktail of adrenaline and every recreational drug known to man.
Nevertheless, the result of the match was enough to persuade the Argentine people that a glorious finish to the story was not only possible but inevitable. Within a few days, however, he was weeping inconsolably after hearing the result of his test, and so were his fans.
His demoralised and leaderless teammates crashed out of that World Cup, but Maradona began a personal fall that nothing seemed capable of arresting.
Banned for 15 months and fined pounds Sterling 10,000, he returned to action as the manager of Deportivo Mandiyu, a minor Argentine club who were promptly relegated after a short reign during which Maradona called one referee a “thief and a liarâ€.
A similarly unsuccessful spell coaching Racing, one of Buenos Aires’ great old clubs, was interrupted when he went missing on a drink and drugs binge.
Having failed twice as a manager, he went back to the Bombonera, his spiritual home, and signed a new deal as a player with Boca Juniors, whom he had left 13 years earlier when he began his European adventure.
His return to Boca was going nowhere when he suddenly showed another side of his character.
Out of the blue he summoned the world’s media to a Paris hotel, where he announced his intention to form a trade union to represent the interests of leading footballers.
Drugs of a recreational kind had become a problem for Maradona when he moved from Barcelona to Naples in 1984, receiving a signing-on fee of $6m.
This was the start of the most successful period of his career, in which he led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup (after beating England with those two notorious goals, one scored with the “hand of Godâ€) and then took his club to its first ever league championship in 1987, followed by the UEFA Cup victory in 1989 and a second league title in 1990.
But Naples, lying under the heavy influence of the gangsters of the Camorra, was not a place that discouraged a thorough investigation of the pleasures of the flesh, and Maradona’s nocturnal adventures inevitably drew him into a demi-monde of intrigue and clan warfare.
There was no shortage of kiss-and-tell episodes, both before and after his 1990 wedding in Buenos Aires to Claudia Villafane, in a ceremony whose ornate design would make an African emperor - or the scriptwriters of Footballers’ Wives - blink in admiration.
He was already at the centre of a police investigation into drugs and prostitution. And in the spring of 1991 a rare club dope test yielded traces of cocaine, leading to the imposition of a first 15-month suspension by the Italian authorities.
If that ban broke the back of his career, the second one, three years later, administered the coup de grace. All attempts at a comeback were doomed to failure.
His second spell with Boca Juniors brought little return for the club, interrupted first by treatment for addiction in a Swiss clinic in 1996 and then by another positive test for cocaine after Boca’s opening match of the 1997 season. This time, 21 years after he had played his first professional match - 10 days before his 16th birthday - his career as a footballer really was over.
In 2000 he was admitted to hospital in Uruguay, suffering from a severe heart condition that the doctors blamed on his heavy use of cocaine.
Fidel Castro offered him the facilities of Cuba’s excellent medical service, and he landed in Havana for the first of several stays in an attempt to cure his addiction.
His past, however, continued to dog him, and two years ago he was ordered by a Naples court to cough up £18m in unpaid taxes and interest.
Guardian
He played professional football at 15, lifted the World Cup at 25 and was being called one of the greatest players ever by the time he was 30. And on Monday, after years of drug abuse, Diego Maradona was in hospital fighting for his life. Richard Williams writes about the twilight of a god
IT is a crisp autumn evening in Buenos Aires, but heavy sweat runs down the face of the corpulent middle-aged man in sunglasses and a black T-shirt who is struggling through a clamour of well-wishers and autograph hunters on his way into the football stadium.
Behind the shades, beneath his unruly black curls, a pale, fleshy face is contorted into the familiar rictus of time-expired celebrity, that meaningless smile from which a form of existential panic has driven the last vestige of genuine pleasure.
For more than 10 years, football fans have stared in horror at that face and then turned away in sadness as the apparently inexorable decline of the man sometimes called the greatest footballer of all time played itself out in the world’s media, one hideous chapter after another.
By comparison with Diego Armando Maradona, the descent of a George Best or a Paul Gascoigne seems almost decorous, just as his history of dalliances makes David Beckham’s alleged extracurricular activities look like the adventures of a boy scout.
You would need to turn to the darker side of show business - to the gruesome extended farewell of a Judy Garland, perhaps - to find a personal calamity made into such a public spectacle.
This time the pictures - taken on Sunday outside the Bombonera, or “chocolate boxâ€, the home of Boca Juniors, the club with which he made his name more than 20 years earlier - showed an almost unrecognisable figure.
From the bloating of his face, the thickness of his neck and the extent of the multiple bellies wobbling beneath the black shirt, he looked to be carrying close to 20 stone on his 5ft 7in frame. And this was once the 10-year-old boy who entertained crowds with his joyful ball-juggling tricks at half time during first division matches.
Within a couple of hours the 43-year-old Maradona would be attached to a hospital’s life-support system, his condition critical and his breathing sustained artificially as the news went around the world of the latest act in this long-running passion play.
Perhaps Maradona’s condition really turned critical on the day in 1994 when he was thrown out of the World Cup after testing positive for various forms of ephedrine, a banned substance, in a random urine test following Argentina’s 2-1 victory over Nigeria in Boston. He knew it, too.
“They’ve killed me,†he exclaimed, when told that he had been suspended from the remainder of the competition.
But “they†had not killed him, if by “they†he meant the officers of FIFA, football’s international governing body.
The long, slow process began the day such a phenomenal talent made its appearance in such a poverty-stricken environment, the day it became apparent that Maradona’s genius was a goldmine to be worked and worked and worked again until it had given up its last glittering nugget.
At the age of 10, for instance, he was being encouraged to use a false name to disguise his identity when he appeared in league matches between teams of a higher age group, for which he was not eligible under the rules of the Argentine Football Association.
The last piece of significant exploitation took place in the months before the fateful 1994 urine test, when he was persuaded to return from Spain to prepare for his country’s attempt to regain the trophy they had won, under his mesmerising leadership, eight years earlier.
On arrival in Argentina, he weighed a portly 92 kilograms. To play effectively, he needed to be down to 77kg. One way or another, in a single month he shed almost a quarter of his body weight.
Those who saw him at the time remarked that he looked like a jockey on a wasting regime.
For a 33-year-old, this was hardly the best preparation for a series of severe physical tests in the high temperatures of mid-summer USA.
The only man who knew how it had been achieved was Daniel Cerrini, a former champion bodybuilder and proprietor of a Buenos Aires gym. Cerrini took charge of the weight-loss regime, his methods including a crash diet, weight training and the extensive use of food supplements.
By the time the World Cup started, Maradona was again surrounded by controversy. Newell’s Old Boys, the Rosario club, which had signed him on his return to Argentina, dismissed him after he had missed the team’s training sessions once too often.
Journalists attempting to doorstep his house were met with gunfire.
Nevertheless, he reported fit for duty with Argentina. Masterminding their opening match, a 4-0 victory over Greece, he celebrated one of the goals by sprinting across to the nearest television camera and screaming into the lens.
Broadcast around the world, his contorted features made him look like a lunatic, flying on a cocktail of adrenaline and every recreational drug known to man.
Nevertheless, the result of the match was enough to persuade the Argentine people that a glorious finish to the story was not only possible but inevitable. Within a few days, however, he was weeping inconsolably after hearing the result of his test, and so were his fans.
His demoralised and leaderless teammates crashed out of that World Cup, but Maradona began a personal fall that nothing seemed capable of arresting.
Banned for 15 months and fined pounds Sterling 10,000, he returned to action as the manager of Deportivo Mandiyu, a minor Argentine club who were promptly relegated after a short reign during which Maradona called one referee a “thief and a liarâ€.
A similarly unsuccessful spell coaching Racing, one of Buenos Aires’ great old clubs, was interrupted when he went missing on a drink and drugs binge.
Having failed twice as a manager, he went back to the Bombonera, his spiritual home, and signed a new deal as a player with Boca Juniors, whom he had left 13 years earlier when he began his European adventure.
His return to Boca was going nowhere when he suddenly showed another side of his character.
Out of the blue he summoned the world’s media to a Paris hotel, where he announced his intention to form a trade union to represent the interests of leading footballers.
Drugs of a recreational kind had become a problem for Maradona when he moved from Barcelona to Naples in 1984, receiving a signing-on fee of $6m.
This was the start of the most successful period of his career, in which he led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup (after beating England with those two notorious goals, one scored with the “hand of Godâ€) and then took his club to its first ever league championship in 1987, followed by the UEFA Cup victory in 1989 and a second league title in 1990.
But Naples, lying under the heavy influence of the gangsters of the Camorra, was not a place that discouraged a thorough investigation of the pleasures of the flesh, and Maradona’s nocturnal adventures inevitably drew him into a demi-monde of intrigue and clan warfare.
There was no shortage of kiss-and-tell episodes, both before and after his 1990 wedding in Buenos Aires to Claudia Villafane, in a ceremony whose ornate design would make an African emperor - or the scriptwriters of Footballers’ Wives - blink in admiration.
He was already at the centre of a police investigation into drugs and prostitution. And in the spring of 1991 a rare club dope test yielded traces of cocaine, leading to the imposition of a first 15-month suspension by the Italian authorities.
If that ban broke the back of his career, the second one, three years later, administered the coup de grace. All attempts at a comeback were doomed to failure.
His second spell with Boca Juniors brought little return for the club, interrupted first by treatment for addiction in a Swiss clinic in 1996 and then by another positive test for cocaine after Boca’s opening match of the 1997 season. This time, 21 years after he had played his first professional match - 10 days before his 16th birthday - his career as a footballer really was over.
In 2000 he was admitted to hospital in Uruguay, suffering from a severe heart condition that the doctors blamed on his heavy use of cocaine.
Fidel Castro offered him the facilities of Cuba’s excellent medical service, and he landed in Havana for the first of several stays in an attempt to cure his addiction.
His past, however, continued to dog him, and two years ago he was ordered by a Naples court to cough up £18m in unpaid taxes and interest.
Guardian