The news flash from Buenos Aires, late on Sunday night, struck an all-too-familiar chord. Diego Armando Maradona was in trouble again. This time, however, he was facing an adversary even more intimidating than the massed ranks of cynical defenders, disciplinarian coaches, drug testers and FIFA officials with whom he oft-times crossed swords during his tempestuous football career.Worldscene
As we write, 43-year-old Maradona is in intensive care at the Clinica Suizo in Buenos Aires fighting for his life in the wake of an apparent heart attack. Initial news reports attempted to link his latest medical problems to his well-documented cocaine habit but the best medical assessments suggest that, rather, Maradona's heart problems are probably due to a combination of his overweight state and current unhealthy life-style.
It would be nice to claim that the news of Maradona's health problems came as a surprise. Nice but totally untrue. After all, he had already experienced a heart scare during a January 2000 holiday at the Uruguayan resort of Punta Del Este.
Sadly, not all footballers manage to get old gracefully. Not all footballers, especially those who have reached the giddy heights touched by such as Maradona, manage to find a post-football equilibrium. Put simply, not everyone has the mental and spiritual resources to deal with life after football.
In general, ex-footballers do everything they can to remain in the "football circuit", working as coaches, managers, scouts, journalists, TV pundits, agents or in football-related PR. Maradona, too, has tried some of the cliched post-playing career outlets, not always successfully.
For a short while, he once worked as coach to Racing Avellanda in his native Argentina.
As a player, he was anything but an assiduous trainer. Indeed, during his Napoli hey-day, his repeated failures to turn up for training became part of the Maradona metropolitan myth, Naples-style. Such a guy was never going to cut it as a coach.
More recently, we have seen him in Italy this season in the role of TV pundit in Il Processo di Biscardi, one of the country's best-known and most-followed football chat programmes. Here, too, he cut an almost pathetic figure - immensely overweight, oft-times inarticulate and rarely insightful in his "analysis".
The reality about Maradona is that, as a player, he flew too close to the sun. From the moment his playing career began to end, he has been in freefall, crashing from cocaine to drugs rehabilitation clinics to shooting matches (as in guns) with journalists to a desperate search for a hideaway in the unlikely terrain of Cuba, under the shelter of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
No one who was in Naples on the May Sunday 17 years ago when he led Napoli to a first Serie A title can be much surprised that he has failed to find a post-football serenity. To the Napoli fans, he was "Te Diegum", a footballing deity capable of delivering unheard-of manna, i.e. two league titles and a UEFA Cup.
Travelling into Naples on that May Sunday 17 years ago, one could have been excused for imagining that the city was celebrating a miraculous escape from a threatened eruption from nearby Mount Vesuvius. He was loved, adored and feted by the Napoli fans in a way that could only do his head in, once the adulation died down.
His fall into drug addiction bespeaks a shocking lack of care and nurture on the part of the Italian (and Argentinian) football community. Abandoned by those who should have looked after him, befriended by those who wanted to take him down the libertine paths of recklessness, Maradona fell into drugs not in order to reach a better playing level but through a profound ontological crisis. Who am I, when I can no longer be considered the world's best footballer? Who is he? Who was he indeed?
Current Valencia and Argentina midfielder Pablo Aimar gave a pretty good answer to that one, saying yesterday: "For us Argentines, Diego is just a little less than God."
