Maradona, The Best In His Time

Author: Fran Attié

Last year, around this same time, I watched an HBO documentary that had just come out about the man who has just passed away. I went out with a friend afterwards who had lived in Argentina, I told her about the doc, about this man’s life, and as a good Brazilian, I threw in some digs at the Argentine. Eventually, the conversation ended up where so many had before, with her defending Messi while I fervently criticized. A year later, as I look back after this 25th of November, letting the conversation so easily drift elsewhere, was a mistake. Though we couldn’t have known it then, we still reduced one of the great soccer myths into categorical, subtractive parameters; we dealt with men in absolutes, and Maradona was never absolutely anything.

He was, first and foremost, exceptional, one of a kind, the best in his time; he was a leader, a captain of Argentina and Napoli, the heartbeat of a nation; he was vocal, political, a friend of Fidel Castro and a “chavista;” he had a hot temper, a brilliant mind and a was a terrible manager; he partied hard and was addicted to drugs; he was the first Barcelona player ever applauded by Real Madrid fans, and probably the first to ever head-butt, elbow and knee three different players in the head in the same match; he was a world cup champion, who abused his body and his brain off the pitch, and still showed political guile in a time soccer players were mostly expected to look and do good on the pitch; he was an inspiring talent and a bad role model, transcendent and mercurial, a genius, an artist, everything and nothing and all; Maradona was, through and through, a man.

Now, I never saw him play. Mine is a different generation. I grew up on the goals of Ronaldo “Fenômeno,” on Kaká’s cross field dashes, Pirlo’s switches of play, Beckham’s underwear and Zlatan’s taekwondo kicks; Cristiano and Messi. What I experienced growing up of Maradona was a legend, one that lingered more ghostly than stately. It certainly features there my nationality: Brazil and Argentina flaunt one of the great rivalries of modernity—our success on the back of their defeat was always that much sweeter; the opposite, the same—and in midst of taunting and debating, sometimes we forget to appreciate the past. I did, at least. When I looked back into soccer’s history, the landmark was ever (and solely) Pelé, and it couldn’t be, for me, that another player had achieved to such great extents as his, otherwise his legacy might have been threatened. That is the mind of a child. It speaks in absolutes, and nuance comes with age.

Older, I took a bend more tolerant, I studied the game with less bias, and I came to accept sporting legends as statements of their time. Pelé and Maradona are comparable in the extremes, but their genius was expressed in the nuances. Really what we can say, is that the Brazilian’s game, was not the Argentine’s, and much to the same effect, today’s soccer is fundamentally different from the past’s.

As ever, there is beauty today, there is wonder, and the ethereal nature of soccer lives on. But this is also a time when artistry has begun to give way to efficiency, where human error is replaced by the mechanical, and the milimetric faults are scrutinized most intensely. Though the game has turned much more industrious, athletically exceptional, it has also gotten faster, more physical, and has made it harder for controversy to reign magical. And don’t be fooled, there has always been magic in the controversial, Maradona’s in particular, thrived in that field.

On June 22nd, 1986, Argentina played England in the quarter finals of the World Cup. Besides the usual hype and pressure of that sort of match, on the political front, the game was a replay of the Falklands/Malvinas’ war of 1982. It was a battle for superiority and revanche, contentious by default, a match that, in its nuances, probably couldn’t happen today.

Argentina came out victorious then, as Maradona scored the winning goals, two of the most famous of all time: “la mano de Dios,” and “the goal of the century.” They represent the unconventional nature of the Argentine, his genius and his polemic; they are affirmations of a romantic game, and of a resolutely original man.

The first, “the hand of God,” might be the most talked about sporting moment in history. When Maradona scored with his hand, he went beyond the game, literally and metaphorically. Much has been written about that goal, and in retrospect, it became too a signal of political revolt, the coup de grâce in an armed conflict fought four years earlier. That an athlete’s legacy could hold such an exorbitant honor, further goes to show how expansive Maradona really was.

The second goal on the other hand, was the ultimate statement of the Argentine’s talent. It was a 10 second play that so perfectly exemplifies the magic of soccer, the kind of moment every kid will dream of creating, it was poetry in motion:

Maradona picks up the ball behind the midfield line on the right side of the pitch; he spins in place, his back to goal, switches the dominant foot—right to left—he turns, escapes the press, pushes forward, two Brits ciao, ciao; he prances, he glides, still on the right hand side, left foot leads, cuts inside, defender’s left behind, he toggles ahead, outside again as he enters the box, bristling, domineering, a defender tails, goalkeeper charges, pounces, off-tempo, defender slides, blights, left foot to ball… coaxed into goal.

Last year, speaking with my friend, my biggest criticism of the documentary was its rendition of this goal. The action was rushed, poorly edited, filled with spliced-in alternate angles; it took the protagonist as a hero, sole and independent, and projected the moment solely on him, when soccer happens most beautifully on the wider lens. In trying to build up tension, the filmmakers took a narrow approach to the goal, and more severely, to Maradona’s craft as a whole.

The critique I am leveling here, takes the documentary simply as a symbolic starting point, of course. The point really, is to remember that, at the end of the day, we are most kind, most fair when we read people as manifold characters, and not as absolutes. Marcelo Bielsa said this week that “Maradona was an artist. The dimension of the repercussion of his art has infinite forms of recognition.” So, as we celebrate his greatness, let us not forget the nuances, as we are, after all, dealing with art.

SPORTS ARE OUR UNIVERSE