The most biographed and documented footballer in history is Diego Armando Maradona. Hundreds of books, dozens of documentaries, tons of retrospective articles, but the curiosity about the player does not end and is perpetuated as a bottomless pit. Coinciding with the inertia of the Llibreestiu, two editorial news about Maradona. The difference with the previous ones is that both include the episode, sub-juridical and universal, of death, which closes a biography voraciously squeezed, to the last drop.
First novelty: Maradona, the kid, the rebel, the god, by Guillem Balagué (Dome Books). Second novelty: My Diego, sentimental chronicle of a dribble that defied the world, by Alejandro Duchini (Ed. Lince). Balagué’s book follows the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Deliberately classic, it dazzles with the amount of accumulated documentation and, as in other books by its author (on Messi or Guardiola, for example), it always provides unusual details. The chronology does not allow itself great digressions and builds a compendium of everything filmed and published so far, separating the wheat from the chaff and incorporating testimonies that were already part of the corpus of testimonies about the life and work of one of the great players of the history, on and off the lawn.
A fan holds a T-shirt with the image of Maradona
The fascination for the player activates the same mechanisms as the stories that children claim before going to bed. We perfectly know the plot, the weaknesses and greats of the protagonist, we know when the important or sordid things will happen and, nevertheless, we want to read it again. It is a mechanism that feeds the memory and a perception of Maradona in which admiration and pity intersect. The player’s biography is so tempestuous and generous that it allows each biographer to express it in their own way. The fan could recite the index with his eyes closed. The humble origin. Precocity. Talent as a springboard out of misery. The gregariousness of the clan. The consolidation of the tribe. The Argentina of the eighties, the Barça de Núñez and the Barcelona of the Up & Down. The accomplice wisdom of Josep Maria Minguella and the proximity of the journalists –paper men: Quique Guash, Pepe Gutiérrez, Fabián Ortiz, Paco Aguilar– from then. Hepatitis understood as an urban legend, the treacherous and unpunished brutality of Goicoechea. The tumultuous transfer to Naples. The hand of God and the goal narrated with machine gun cadence by Víctor Hugo Morales. The decadence and alternation of addictions and vulnerable detox cures. The legitimate daughters. Seville. Illegitimate children.
Duchini’s book has a more literary ambition. As the title suggests, personalize the memory around the myth. Reflections are allowed in which documentary rigor, despite being relevant, is secondary and has an almost therapeutic dimension, an attempt to overcome grief through nostalgia. And with a rhythm in which the prose looks like a percussion instrument, Duchini recapitulates: “It was always contradictory. A millionaire, he ended his days in a rented house. Popular, he died alone. He left an inheritance and if anything, if he was always unpredictable, his heirs were not, who with their bodies still warm came out to publicly claim the assets. His farewell was a trip to the past. Those who were gone appeared, those that he, publicly, did not want to see. Peace was lacking, as always when talking about Maradona ”.
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