Remembering Diego Maradona, a footballer as spectacular and as flawed as the country that mourns him
National Post, 27 November 2020
His performance in the World Cup in 1986 brought tears and joy. It wouldn't be the last time.
Diego Maradona died at 60, both more and less than expected.
It was not a sure thing that he would live this long, having serially cheated death due to drink, drugs and dissoluteness; his body was punished more off the pitch than on it. Still, it is not even 40 years since he soared and slithered, scintillating and sinister simultaneously, at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. Even if he had survived deep into his senectitude, June 22, 1986 would remain the supreme moment. For him and for soccer.
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Every sport has them. The greatest moment. The 1972 Canada-Soviet hockey series. Jack Nicklaus at the 1986 Masters, when the greatest golfer of all time won his greatest victory on golf’s greatest course. The 1995 rugby world cup final in South Africa, when Nelson Mandela was the MVP — most valuable president. The 2004 American League Championship Series, when the Boston Red Sox vanquished 86 years of cursed futility by winning four games after losing the first three against the Yankees, something never done before or since in baseball.
Those moments happen when sport breaks through the boundaries of strength and speed and strategy to touch something of the human spirit. It happens in the life of a nation — Sidney Crosby in Vancouver 2010 — or the at the crossroads of history — Jesse Owens in Berlin 1936 — or in a far away place that in a potent mix of politics and culture fascinates the whole world — Muhammad Ali rumbling in the jungle in 1975.
But there is only one truly global sport, and Maradona provided its greatest moment in 1986. Not even a whole game actually, but just few minutes in the quarter-final game against England at the World Cup.
All that is sports, all that was Maradona, came together in those moments. First the mendacity, then the magnificence.
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