Diego

He was a craftsman, a bandit and a magnificent renegade. One that creates a new grammar of the game.

The Florida neighborhood where Diego Maradona grew up entered the textbooks of Argentine literature due to the famous, but almost staged, literary polemic between two avant-garde groups named after the streets of Buenos Aires - Florida and Boedo. And it was a game.

Florida was one of those districts about which, behind the reliable walls of his parents' home, the boy Jorge Luis fantasized, listening to stories about the bandit and poet Evaristo Carriego, a brawler with a hundred duels behind him.

If the character of a city bandit could bewitch a boy from a "good home", with governesses and private tuition, why be surprised at a poor boy who dreams of wealth in order to buy his parents a house one day. The figure of the city bandit, the one who fights, in a certain way fascinated the three most famous Argentines of the XNUMXth century: Borges, Che and Maradona.

Bandit, always. Remember the game in which he made one of the most famous unsportsmanlike gestures - a goal with his hand against the English. Fresh memories of the Falklands War could only be a dubious justification for such a gesture. His justification, the master's fate is different, lies in something else.

Master, first of all. In that same game, Diego scored one of the most spectacular goals in the history of the game. He took the ball from his own half, went past five players himself and scored a goal. And after that, even the intonation when you talk about a handball becomes somewhat different. Redemption through mastery is the only true redemption. When asked if he scored a goal with his hand, he answered with a mischievous smile - You know, every goal is scored by the hand of God. Mandate Krivokapić must also agree with this.

The fate of the master: in everything else he was nothing. The worst coach of Argentina in history. In order to not win anything with such a team, you had to have such a coach.

When his conflict with the football establishment began, he grew a beard like Che. At times he seemed to truly believe that his struggle was part of Che's struggle.

Imagine those days when Maradona, Castro and Marquez gather in Cuba... An ingenious episode, worthy of literature. Castro cooks seafood, Marquez talks, the two of them carefully treat Maradona, get him off drugs. I imagine Castro's intonations at times resembled Don Vito addressing a broken-down Johnny Fontane.

For my generation, he was important for another reason. He was the key trump card to oppose the world of the fathers. Namely, my generation was set on fire by fathers who had no dilemmas - for them it was a funny story about who was the greatest. Pele, of course. Then they would recount their black and white memories of this or that goal, of this or that victory with Pele's seal. That dogma called Pele really annoyed us. We started watching football just as Pele stopped playing. When Maradona appeared - it was finally the right answer to the world of our fathers - like Pele, Maradona is the greatest.

Of course, this kind of dilemma is artificially posed, it is always like that. Probably the wisest approach to this eternal dilemma is that of the late Doctor Socrates, the great football player, anarchist and alcoholic. He said - I find those stories funny, Pele or Maradona, The game is the greatest...

In the end, Pele managed to say goodbye to Maradona. Pele has always been a figure in the measure of global capitalism, correct, always where he should be, always saying exactly what he should (and this time too), a master who chews the "sweet hops of youth" (greetings for another master), Pele always did everything to everyone likes him, but how can you love someone like that? Maradona was "our Pele". For all times.

He was to football what the pre-Socratics are to philosophy. Heraclitean fire, Parmenidean feeling for the whole of the game, Zeno's passion for paradox... Supernatural elegance. And more than a game, forever.