11/25/2020 4:50 PM
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 11/25/2020 4:55 PM
I interviewed Diego Maradona on June 21, 1986 on the pitch of the Azteca Stadium, in Mexico City, next to the goal where 24 hours he would score the two most famous goals of all time.
That day he became an immortal and, for many, God.
God lied to me.
It was a quarterfinal match of the World Cup, the rival was England, four years and a week had passed since the Falklands War.
Revenge?
Asked.
"Noooooo!"
Really?
“And, noooo.
It is an important game, there is no more ”.
Really?
I insisted, incredulous.
"Uuuuh, what are you journalists like!"
"Another game. Hard, yes, but that's it." All the effort that Maradona must have made to suppress the hatred he really felt towards "the English pirates" ─Maradona at that time the Argentine national sentiment made flesh─ exploded the day next on the court.
First, the goal with the hand, the
Hand of God
that all the 120,000 spectators in Azteca saw, all except, by a miracle, the referee.
Then
the epic, extra-planetary victory goal, the
one that Maradona started in midfield and, after dribbling across England, culminated at the net.
But he was already aware, long before.
of his immortality.
Or, what is the same, he believed it.
Another former captain of the Argentine team explained it to me, the also late Roberto Perfumo.
“César,” Perfumo said, “he always had a slave by his side who said, '
Remember that you are human, remember that you are human
.'
With Maradona it is the other way around.
Since he was 12 years old, everyone says to him,
'Remember that you are God, remember that you are God.' "
And he continued to believe it after he quit football, drugs, of all the drugs he used, which caused him the most addiction.
The indomitable energy that he had exhibited with the ball at his feet was transferred to Maradona the public figure, the one who expressed his opinion with an iron and absolute conviction on politics, religion, war and peace;
on communism, capitalism, Peronism, Catholicism.
For many he was the clown;
for his faithful, not only in Argentina but in half the planet, everything he said went to mass.
Literally.
The Maradoniana Church was created in Rosario, the birthplace of the other Argentine deity Lionel Messi.
The liturgy, celebrated weekly, read: "
Diego our / who are in the fields, / hallowed be your left-handed, / let your magic come to our eyes, / let your goals be remembered, / on earth as it is in heaven ...
".
One night in Buenos Aires I saw him on television singing a song before a wild audience.
The lyrics read: "I
sowed joy in this town, / I watered this soil with glory, / if Jesus stumbled, / why shouldn't he ...
".
No. Nobody laughed.
Maradona either.
The absence of irony,
the belief in himself, was total.
A faith that neither cocaine, obesity, nor disease, nor his previous brush with death
, nor his failures in the field (which were) or outside of it at any time could break.
There was his madness and his greatness.
But Maradona was bigger than ridiculous.
Much more.
Because of what he did in soccer, the religion that has the most devotees, and because of his immense strength of personality.
It was not a cold chest.
For better or for worse, it always aroused emotions.
Nobody was neutral before his figure.
It was, as they say in the land of "pirates", "
larger than life
", larger than life itself.
If it had been without having scored those two goals against perfidious England, who knows?
But those goals, and the World Cup that he immediately won in the final against Germany, gave him an aura that he never let go of and that never ceased to fascinate as much in Argentina, the country with the most hunger for idols that I know, as in the rest of the world. , totally shaken by the news of his death.