Flaws made him more human

Opinion

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This article was published 26/11/2020 (1246 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If memory serves, the Pope’s collection of football memorabilia is stored in a modest cabinet at the end of a hallway in the Vatican Museums, near a door to the Papal gardens where a cappuccino sets you back more than the weekly tithe.

Among the items — many of which signal Francis’s affection for San Lorenzo — is a souvenir most fans would pay dearly for: an Argentina jersey, No. 10, signed by Maradona with a personal inscription: “For Francis with all my love and much peace for all the world.”

It’s here that my thoughts took me late Wednesday, in the hours after the former Boca Juniors, Napoli and Argentine national team footballer was confirmed deceased at the age of 60, following some hours of my own initial shock, quiet contemplation and complicated remembrance.

It somehow struck me that the Vatican News website would post a story to its homepage, and not only a death notice but a full, 1,300-word obituary memorializing, in its own words, “a football poet;” that Pope Francis, himself, would say he was looking back “with affection” on his encounters with Maradona; that he would pray for him, for the both the “extraordinary footballer” and “fragile man.”

It was surely Maradona’s fragility that endeared him to so many.

Here was a figure, among the most famous people in the world, possessor of riches in ability and material, yet brought low by the most common of vagaries, weakened by the choices and substances of the very poorest, the most broken, the most human.

One of the greatest athletes in history, he could at once single-handedly win a World Cup and disgracefully get kicked out of one. Michel Platini, another man of contradictions, once said he “could do with an orange” what Zidane could do with a football, and still he could so often struggle to look after himself.

It was surely Maradona’s struggles that endeared him to so many.

His was a body built for communion with a football. It understood him — his stature, his contours, his desire. He could make it do as he pleased. He could use it to pleasure, to torture, to avenge the Malvinas, to reach out to him like the hand of God in Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam,” to even do one better and complete the touch, his own hand the Hand of God, punching the ball over Shilton, that momentary relation with the divine, no longer a man but something more, something not even Messi can pray to be.

And yet — always an “and yet” — he once referred to himself as “Lucifer,” as the very personification of evil. He knew the weakness of the flesh, how to give in to it, how it would often nearly kill him.

“I fight for my life, every day,” he wrote in his autobiography. Not-so-cheekily worshipped by the members of Iglesia Maradoniana, perhaps their prayers restored him to life a time or two.

“The Beard saved me many times,” he said. He admitted that addiction, that brokenness, was his “cross to bear.”

It was surely Maradona’s brokenness that endeared him to so many.

“There are things which are only in my heart,” he wrote, “that no one knows.” And we knew almost everything. He said it seemed as though his whole life was on film, in print, and no doubt much of it was, is.

We likely saw and read more about him than he intended, which is rare with celebrity, but what he emphasized time and again, his theme, was that he had never stopped being the Maradona of the barrio, of Villa Fiorito, for better and worse. He was, he would say, “the voice of the voiceless,” “the representative of the people.”

It’s what drew him back to the Church, and to Pope Francis, he revealed in 2014.

“The Holy Father treats me like a brother, and treats everyone the same way,” he told Vatican Radio.

“He kisses everyone, hugs everyone. He has little time available; he works a lot but finds time for everyone.”

The affection was mutual. Perhaps the Pontiff, a fellow son of Buenos Aires, perceived those hidden things in Maradona’s heart: the joys, the regrets, the hopes, the fears, the longing for recovery, the yearning for salvation.

At the family wake, held in private before the body was laid in state at the presidential palace, a papal rosary was hand-delivered to his daughter.

It was surely Maradona’s pursuit of redemption that endeared him to so many.

 

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