The game is lost among the torrent of Maradona data. There was a friendly in the mud in which Diego Maradona raised perhaps the most important cup, that of altruism. He risked his skin and saved a life.
It happened in Naples, in 1985. “We played in a potato field,” writes former defender Ciro Ferrara, author of the book, shaken by the memory. I saw Maradona.
Corrado Ferlaino, the then President of the club (he was for three decades) refused to allow this benefit meeting to happen. The cost of an injury to his King Midas could be high.
Pelusa agreed to play to help a child from the Neapolitan town of Acerra who suffered from a rare disease and needed surgery abroad. In rebellion, El Diez paid 12 million lire out of pocket to the insurance company.
Hours after facing Torino, he arrived at the precarious Acerra communal stadium, warmed up in the parking lot, among demolished buildings, and gathered ten thousand people who were left speechless. “Diego began to create wonders in the clay“says the Italian Ferrara in the text published by Granica publishing house.
As expected in the face of so much epic, It ended up raining and Diego’s body looked like it was splashed with chocolate.. On the muddy field and blurred demarcation lines, his team won 4 to 0. He scored two goals and managed to raise a large part of the 20 million lire needed. The rest came out of your bank account…
The photos from the end of the game show him sitting in a small swamp, like a dirty face, almost a “scugnizzo” – as Ferrara calls it in a Neapolitan way in relation to that mischief of a street boy –. That day Diego returned, without traveling, to Fiorito.
“It is something absolutely inconceivable for a player today. That was actually Diego. His gestures were sincere, instinctive, not advertising. There was no construction of a calculated image”details Ferrara at the age of 57 in that work whose prologue is by Maradona. It is a “letter” before dying in which Maradona confesses that with him he always felt “protected.”
In that chiaroscuro that was Maradona, Ferrara chooses to rest fundamentally on light. He does not deny the shadows, nor does he judge them. He speaks from the emotion of the bond, from that bond that changed his life. “Ciro is the best friend that Italy left me,” Diego used to confess.
The Neapolitan brother
The book took shape with Diego still alive. It was not intended as a post-mortem tribute or a mourning marketing strategy. The former Napoli and Juventus takes poetic license to talk about “that kind of dance in which you couldn’t perceive the difference between him and the ball, one body.”
Seven years younger than El Diez, the one who coached Juventus, Sampdoria and Wuhan in China, reviews those first rumors of Maradona’s arrival in Italy until his sad escape.
The love story of almost 200 pages begins on those vacations in Gaeta in which as a youth player he is forced to interrupt his rest. They call him to return urgently and join the concentration in Castel dal Piano.
The end is a farewell letter that years before he had gone viral as a monologue on social networks, a ghostly call with his friend from beyond: “What the hell did you do, what did you do on this Earth? “I know that smile well, son of a bitch.”
“The disproportionate emotions” of that revolution of a Latino in Europe, the way Diego called him “Ciruzzo”, how he bit the pillow because of the pain when the joint and muscle problems began to appear, the way he surrendered to the infiltration syringes that pricked his ankles and back… Ferrara revels in the detail like someone mourning a lost paradise.
The addiction and torment of that idol who was surrounded by the European press is also part of Ciro’s story: “We learned to decipher small signs,” he confesses. about that “wave that was destined to destroy everything.” And he makes a mea culpa: “The greatest regret I carry in my heart is not having been able to help him in a concrete way.”
The unconditional Ciro delves into that July 3, 1990 when Argentina faced Italy in the Magic Nights World Cup and thousands of Neapolitans ended up “de-Italianizing”fanning for Diego’s Homeland: “It seems in bad taste to ask Neapolitans to be Italian for one night after 364 days a year the Italians treat them as terroni (disparagingly from the south),” Maradona harangued.
“Naples was suspended between two fires“, he considers, about that semi-final night in which the teams tied, Carlos Bilardo’s team won on penalties and eliminated Italy to become a finalist.
The man who retired in 2005 with a farewell match at the San Paolo for which Diego returned to step on that grass 15 years later, feels that his life is a miracle, long before Maradona. In his early years he normalized the pain in his knees due to a growth problem and He was even hospitalized and moved around in a wheelchair.. Football seemed impossible.
Stark at times, Ciro makes it clear that “Diego He made many mistakes but he always paid for them with his own skin, hurting himself directly. self destructive“.
He also emphasizes that “His Majesty 10” arrived in Naples surrounded by “a blind and He left completely alone, in the dark, like a fugitive, marginalized, feeling at the center of a conspiracy. He disappeared as if dematerialized. “Immense melancholy spread over the blue sea of Naples like a veil of soot.”