April 18 - Maradona’s Almost A Goner

HIS is arguably football’s greatest ever rags to riches story. Growing up in the shanty town of Villa Fiorito, he shared one room with his seven siblings and almost drowned in the family cesspit as a toddler. He would go on to become the greatest player of his generation and have the world at his feet.

Yet Diego Armando Maradona’s rise to prominence was matched only by his fall from grace, which bottomed out when he suffered a massive heart attack today in 2004 following a cocaine overdose, leaving him at death’s door.

The seeds of Maradona’s destruction were sewn when he developed a cocaine addiction following his transfer to Barcelona in 1982. A spell on the sidelines with a broken ankle following a horror tackle from the “Butcher of Bilbao” Andoni Goicoechea didn’t help matters as young Diego found better things to do with his time.

His move to Napoli in 1984 was where things really got messy for the Argentinean as a mixture of glory days on the pitch and hanging with the wrong crowd off it saw him pick up yet more bad habits. The day he signed for Italian club around 80,000 fans turned up at the San Paolo stadium in Naples, each paying 1,000 lire to watching him play keepy-uppy in the centre circle.

Maradona brought the good times back to Napoli, as they embarked on the most successful era in their history thanks to their number 10. He was so loved by the public that 25% of children born were named Diego during his spell there.

Diego’s drug habit was an open secret, with the club hiring private detectives to follow his every move. They would see constantly attending parties and hanging out with the shady Giuliano family that controlled the local mafia.

For most of this time Maradona was able to hide his habit from the drug testers, as he would either manage to stay clean in the days before a game or have the club switch urine samples. This ploy only worked until March 1991, when he tested positive for cocaine and was handed a 15 month ban as his behaviour was becoming more erratic.
He managed one of several comebacks by skippering his national side in the ‘94 USA World Cup, but even this turned into farce with his crazy camera-hugging goal celebration.

Once he finally retired from the game in 1997 his descent into obesity and addiction took on a new momentum. Paternity suits, drugs and near bankruptcy meant that he decided to retreat to Cuba to kick his habit, but instead he sat around with Fidel Castro, eating huge steaks and smoking cigars.

On the night he collapsed doctors claimed that Maradona had enough cocaine in his body ‘to kill a man.’ His heart was only working at 50% of capacity and crowds of well-wishers gathered outside the hospital. He remained in intensive care for eleven days before recovering and heading back to Cuba.

He then embarked on yet another recovery, losing weight thanks to a stomach-stapling operation and managing to get on the football pitch to play in the odd charity or testimonial game. This proved to be another false dawn though, as he would be back on the sick bed in 2007 when he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic after being diagnosed as an alcoholic.

We’ll leave you with some footage of how good he used to be and Martin Amis’ musings on the man: ‘Inside every fat man, they say, there is a thin man trying to get out. In the case of Maradona, it seems, there is an even fatter man trying to get in.’

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