Today, when Your life among us has come to an end, I feel the need to write about my own life. How many people, I wonder, have that privilege? To have others speak about them and still have so much to say about themselves? However many there are, You are among them—and You live and will live forever, because You lived billions of times: as many times, that is, as someone else, among billions of people, felt something, lived something worth remembering, thanks to You. And if you think that this production of experiences ended today, you’re mistaken. Your image, and the chain explosions it triggers, has been recorded, archived in history, to create new experiences—for all those who still haven’t met You.
One word… Mundial, like a fairy tale
The first time I heard Your name was probably also the first time I heard the name of Your country. That expanse, defined by arbitrary, man-made borders, which gave You a shirt and two colours so You could paint people’s hopes. I don’t know when I learned that France exists, or Germany, or England, Belgium, Italy, or America—nor do I remember how I learned them. But I remember very well the first time I heard the word Argentina, and I still remember why I heard it.
It was late spring of 1994. I was seven years old, finishing first grade. In a few days the Mundial would begin—a word which, whatever language you translate it into, in none does it sound so wonderful. I heard some older kids talking about Argentina and Maradona, and I waited to see what would happen, in that first match in Boston, where you would play against a Greece already shattered before even stepping on the pitch. Being seven, of course, I had every reason to hope that predictions mean nothing—and my first contact with Your image was violent, almost traumatic. Aside from the fact that You were tearing down my dreams of seeing Greece at least stand with some dignity in the place where I was learning the countries of the world, You also spat an emblematic spit at the camera, which in my childish eyes looked like an attack from a wild beast. It would take years for me to understand.
I grew up, as a child, in the 1990s. Back then, learning football, one of the most common things one heard was people mocking Maradona. It was so fashionable that it had become almost a common truth: that You were a synonym for footballing ruin. Today, of course, I see all those who so easily uttered pompous words about morals and behaviour now glorifying You—now that You no longer beat them, puncturing their nets and the dreams that Your left foot tore to rags.
Four years had to pass—the same patience we endure from one Mundial to the next—for the moment to arrive when the planet would begin to treat You as a historical relic. It was surely easier to place You in a museum display case and approach You as scholars, rather than as fellow human beings and, inevitably, Your admirers. But in 1998 I too learned what had happened in history before 1994. I learned about the Final in Rome, about “the Hand of God” and that “but he scored another one too, which was…”, about Passarella who turned a national team into a catwalk because he thought that’s how he would erase the imprint You left on it—and which almost haunts it. I learned about 1978, when you didn’t play; about Barcelona, where they broke Your legs; about Napoli, which You lifted from the depths and turned into a club-legend of the sport.
Your Image
Suddenly history seemed very different from the days when You played. The short videos of what You did took on another meaning. You were no longer just a photograph and a spit at the camera; You were not the star everyone loves to hate, but one of us mortals—who became a little more immortal. You were already beloved, and I had to hear it whenever I defended You. Just as I heard it when I wrote a school essay about my idol and, obviously, I wrote about You—just as I heard it from those who said, “the great player isn’t seen only on the pitch, but also off it,” dropping hints so absurdly tragicomic, because what makes You so special to all our lives was, beyond what You did on the pitch, everything You did outside it as well.
Another four years were needed for me to reach what I truly wanted: to see those old images—which weren’t that old, but they were from a time before I was born, and that was enough to give them another dimension. Before the 2002 Mundial, having also shed the anxiety of supporting the national team of the country that gives me a passport—since I understood I wouldn’t be seeing it there very often—I knew perfectly well which colours I would support. I wanted to see You still playing; I felt bitterness that I had arrived so late, but it was enough that Caniggia and a few others were still there to remind us of Your presence.
The bitterness and a strange nostalgia
Argentina was a ruin from the economic crisis; people were walking into supermarkets and stealing food. But in those three matches in Japan—in Ibaraki, Sapporo, and Miyagi—the banners read: “Pelé was King, Maradona is God.” My dreams, of course, of seeing a copy of Your epic collapsed somewhere around the 68th minute of the match against Sweden. Greek television was showing England against Nigeria, but I already had a mobile phone and the companies were sending updates. I still remember that message: “SWEDEN–ARGENTINA 1–0 AT 58’ GOAL: SVENSSON.”
That Mundial was made for one to seek glory in the past. With all the teams extremely mediocre—except for the other country I first learned because of football, Brazil—and with refereeing ripped straight from the wettest dreams of some official from a dockside club in a suburb of a Balkan capital, the whole tournament existed only to make you want to forget where you are and look for the good old days.
The “good old days” are often nostalgically longed for by those who grow and age; but then the contrast was so immense that even those who couldn’t possibly feel nostalgia, like me—because they hadn’t lived it—still retreated to the past. On one side, the star of that Mundial was a guy with sleeve tattoos and a mohawk who posed in magazines as a model and built a villa in Los Angeles to live with his pop-star girlfriend who’d gone upscale; on the other side, You—with a Che Guevara tattoo and a shaggy mane that earned You the nickname Pelusa (hairy). On one side, the dance of billions in a sterile stadium in Yokohama; on the other, the image of the damned Azteca echoing screams—Yours, Víctor Hugo Morales’s, and those of the tens of thousands who danced and went into ecstasy sixteen years earlier in another, far more footballing corner of the world.
That year I was finally able to watch those videos, to record them on VHS tapes, to search for more from the years when You played. I saw You singing “Vamos Vamos Argentina” in the dressing room after the ’86 Final. I saw You put Your hand into England’s vault. I saw You dribble past every mortal—like some “cosmic kite”—to make the twentieth century a period of History that, among other signatures, carried Yours as well. I watched the penalties against Yugoslavia, the penalties against Italy, the boos in the Rome Final. I saw the nurse against Nigeria. I saw Maradona.
The televisions still showed only Your “missteps.” A few yellow tabloids and a few pink videos to fill airtime. That was all they could give You—and that’s what they gave You, while You were searching for Your own life: a life they took from You so that everyone else could live it.
Your life in my life
A year later Your Autobiography was published—or rather, what You told some journalists about Your life. There was nothing better for the summer of 2003—a summer without a Mundial—than to learn Your truth. By then I had learned to dress in the sky-blue and white: not of the flag of the country I lived in, but of the shirt You had worn. I went to school in the shirt You wore in 1982. I had become obsessed with a number—10—while I had also learned, in autograph books and anywhere else I could, to sign with Your signature. I know it isn’t forgery; no one has ever been prosecuted for signing with the signature of God.
I learned about the songs written for You: Rodrigo and “Mano De Dios,” which made You cry; Los Piojos, Ratones Paranoicos, Mano Negra, and anyone else who decided—when it mattered, not after the fact—to give You the pedestal You deserved, so that Your personality could illuminate our dreams.
I learned about Your life—but I also learned about football. Today, when I’ve grown up and I can’t run as much as I used to, I always fall back on Your admiration for those who can play until they’re a hundred—like what You wrote about Valderrama, saying that to play football you might not even need to run, if you can think. You did everything: You ran, you thought, you imagined, you created, you painted; you directed a super-spectacle on a green backdrop, always the permanent protagonist.
I learned about Pelusa, whose house let in more rain than the outdoors, where food was never enough—and today they demand explanations from You for why you didn’t, as a child, stand up to Videla. I learned about Your missteps, about Cielo in Barcelona and about the Camorra, exactly as You told them. And then I understood why I wanted to admire You even more: because as You were, from nothing and nowhere, You made an entire planet speak about You—and You wanted nothing else but a ball, drinks, and a few other “pleasures,” as any mortal from Your places and Your origins could want when they found them laid before them. You showed, with brutal force, the contradiction of a world built to destroy anyone who doesn’t belong to systems, to references, to environments. You would have been mortal if we had never known You; but because in this world we did know You, that is why Your image is an icon.
You were such a large part of my daily life that I felt You were my own person. I never met You, but I saw You many times in my dreams. After all, that’s where mortals meet divine figures: inside visions. I was in love with my classmate who was born on the same day as your eldest daughter, Dalma. I looked up the activities of the Iglesia Maradoniana, because having no other church, I had absolutely no problem coming to Yours—it was always a hospitable place for dreams.
I didn’t care to become a footballer, but I loved playing football and I wanted to play football like You. Not, obviously, as well as You—but with Your explosion, with Your gaze, with the fist You clenched, with the left foot You struck with, with the pass You threaded behind every defence—German or Brazilian—with that slightly hanging touch on first contact, with things no one else did and no one could do and no one will, because everyone else can become champions, but You made championship, in our eyes, want to become Maradona.
Sport
In 2004—the year we all went mad with the “miracle” of the most boring, conservative, predictable football, and with the “festival” of commerce called sport—I managed to steal the chance to go to Athens, for that Final of the youngsters. I wore my sky-blue and white shirt, loaded myself with my flag, and with my whole family we watched little Aimar, little Saviola, little scorer Tévez win, for the first time, a title in those colours after Your footballing farewell.
In that morning match at the OAKA, at halftime the Spanish-speaking CNN came to ask me where I’m from and why I support Argentina. The answer was so easy. Next to me were some other guys from my city, Thessaloniki, who had made the same trip with a banner in Your country’s colours and another in those of Your great love, Boca. I kept the sky-blue and white—the ones of Racing—which You later wore as a coach.
Dreams that grow up with us
After that I started to grow up enough that I no longer had childish dreams. But I learned from my childhood dreams how to fight for my own. The way I grew up in that Maradonian adolescence certainly marked me, and even today I see that I react to situations with a temperament that has done me nothing but good. You were now among the icons. The sky-blue and white shirts had filled my wardrobe: 1982, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008 and finally 2010, when You were coach (with two watches).
I don’t know if there is anyone else in the world who would play without a left-back and I would insist obsessively that this is what must be done, knowing it makes no footballing sense—except in an incredible metaphysical relationship that You have with the sport itself, as institution and as phenomenon.
On 22 June, twenty-four years after the “Hand of God” and the “Goal of the Century,” Your Argentina played Greece. Sixteen years after that first experience of 1994, I had no dilemma whom to support. I had seen Your second-to-last victory as a player, in sky-blue and white, against Greece, on 21 June 1994. I celebrated, more than anything, Your second-to-last victory as a coach, with the same team, once again against Greece, on 22 June 2010. Palermo’s goal made the match feel as though God himself designed it to give it to You as a gift—to say his own footballing farewell to You.
The swan song
My last intense image was from Leicester, in 2015. By then I had grown up quite a bit, and in a hotel room in Zurich I was watching the after-scenes of the astonishing victory of another Argentina—this one with the oval ball, rugby—one that the legend tattooed on your arm, Che, would have wanted to admire. After their sweetest match, against Tonga—an encounter anyone who wants to see rugby’s beauty should watch—the entire national team of Your country proved that You are more than a footballer.
In rugby culture the kicker’s game is considered inferior because it lacks bodily contact, struggle. Of course, all that is forgotten if one looks at Your muddy shirt in that first match for Boca against the hated River. But in Leicester the players who had just completed the painting of 4 October met You—and, ecstatic, danced with You to Rodrigo’s song. You were so great that at the same time You could make the world love two sports, just because You loved them.
I saw You collapse many times; the televisions always played whatever bad thing happened to You. I worried and agonised when You had been in hospital some years ago and we all knew that one day things wouldn’t be so fine. We didn’t know which day it would be—but we knew You wouldn’t do anything to delay it.
Those of us who learned to love You, even if we met You only in our dreams, were never selfish. This is the life You wanted to live on Earth, and we would never crucify You for it.
Goodbye, You will always be here
Today we say goodbye to You—written with Your name and the number on Your shirt, which fit together so harmoniously as to form a symbol whose coincidence of language goes beyond the acceptable limits of randomness in a pattern. We say goodbye to the life You left, but we know that the lives You will live will continue forever, because You taught us to dream, like children; because You were the boy made of gold—so much gold that it is enough to cover billions of dreams.
Goodbye, Great Diego. I hope to see You again, where we always talk: in my dreams. Give us a few more—we need them.
