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I lived the first 6 years of my life in a world where Diego Maradona didn't really exist: Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas. I learned of him through moving to the Congo—the literal middle of nowhere to many Americans—and finding out that everyone but me knew who he was.
I lived on a medical school compound next to a small village in the Kasai and the village kids, whose access to TV was pretty much exclusively during World Cups, pretended to be him during the ubiquitous after-school pickup games.
He was always larger than life to me because of this: if you can inspire children who live a thousand miles into the interior of the Congo back before there was regular communication with the outside world (now there’s Facebook and streaming, of course), you had to be a God.
When I went to college, the Che-loving stoner from Vermont that lived down the hall had a Maradona poster and jersey. He also demanded fealty to D10S before you could smoke with him. Or at least that was his demand of me.
And then I read the books, watched the old footage, saw his modern-day antics (especially at World Cups) and I get the love to a degree. But as Shireen Ahmed points out, we cannot simply accept that he was some perfect embodiment of footballing genius. https://twitter.com/_shireenahmed_/status/1331640265459818497
He wasn’t the perfect embodiment of anything. He was problematic, genius, difficult, pibe de oro. He was sadness, too. Addiction, whether it is to drugs, fame, or both, is sadness many ways. He refused to recognize his son, Diego Sinagra, for 18 years.
I don't know what to make of him, really, except to double down on refusing to idolize anyone. Never meet your heroes because they will always disappoint you. But I will probably never forget those Congolese pickup games where I learned about Maradona. That's something, I guess.
