“My only pleasure this afternoon was in discovering the Italians in Milan have stopped being racists: today, for the first time, they supported the Africans.” This was a statement Diego Maradona gave to the press in 1990, following a match at the San Siro stadium in Milan in which he played for Argentina against Cameroon. The latter won the game with a single point to Argentina’s zero. The tempestuous reception to Maradona in this instance stemmed not from a feeling that he had betrayed Italy by playing for Argentina in the games leading to the World Cup, but simply because they despised him. For, in their view, he embodied the worst kind of Italian Southerner: Neapolitan.
In something of the final installment to Asif Kapadia’s trilogy of documentaries about fame, his latest, Diego Maradona, explores Diego’s meteoric rise through every soccer rank (heretofore to be referred to as it should be: football), as well as his rebellious, freedom fighting spirit. The one that led him, in kismet fashion, to play for Napoli Football Club. While many found the move “random,” Maradona felt he lacked respect or appreciation while playing for Barcelona, culminating in a very public brawl after losing a game to Bilbao wherein players of that team taunted him with racial slurs pertaining to his father’s Native American ancestry. Indeed, the racial tensions that football caused to flare up during this epoch were markedly pronounced. And Maradona, a forever advocate of the poor and the marginalized, was, as such, an ideal fit for being transferred to Napoli. Italy’s most glaring underdog. Fighting for the city to not be written off as “unclean” (with allusions to the then recent cholera outbreak of 1973 also made during a match with Juventus) and uncivilized, there was a reason Maradona’s intensity was at its utmost during the years he played for Napoli. As he told one sports journalist, “It was north against south, the racists against the poor.” Never was that more apparent in such gestures as the likes of Florence and Milan writing giant, dripping with venomous sarcasm signs that would read “Welcome to Italy” whenever Napoli showed up in the north.
In the robust amounts of footage provided to Kapadia (as awe-inspiring as what he was given to create a narrative about Amy Winehouse for Amy), the director builds toward an ultimate high in Maradona’s career as he is elevated to the level of savior in Naples–a high that we can sense (regardless of already knowing how the story ended) is about to take a cataclysmic dive. It began slowly enough, with Maradona ingratiating himself into the fold of mafia family members. Not realizing that their “generosity” was not without the expectation of repayment, Maradona, by now used to the cars and the cocaine (as well as protection from the media reporting on his various flagrant affairs with ladies both normal and of the evening), the Giuliano clan helped shield him from some of the fallout when the press caught wind that he was the father of an illegitimate child born to Cristiana Sinagra, who had been sharing an apartment with Maradona’s sister, allowing the two to get very close indeed. Alas, Maradona was about to have his first child with his long-time girlfriend and then wife, Claudia. He could not publicly admit to such shame. Enter some of that mafia protection to help quell the wagging tongues.
These “kindnesses” would be repaid one way or another, however. The Giuliano clan, particularly Carmine, was aware of Maradona’s profound addiction to cocaine, and that he could be manipulated and controlled through it. So much so that he could be swayed to not win the 1988 Scudetto in order to cushion the mafia from losing billions of lire in betting losses (gambling being, as everyone knows, a primary source of income for the Camorra). Would Maradona do such a thing? Some wondered when this rumor swirled. The answer lies in a scene of the documentary in which the Napoli F.C. president acts appalled when Maradona is asked by a reporter whether or not he is aware of how much influence the Camorra has over Italian football, particularly in Napoli. Corrado Ferlaino’s “outrage” smacked of another Shakespearean theme: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Yes, it was mock outrage, of course, for there is no question the mafia had a hand in puppeteering events of every kind and level. Hence, the strong belief that a tongue-in-cheek exchange between Ferlaino and Maradona in the documentary points to awareness that they were pandering to what the camorristi wanted when the president tells Maradona that even though he’s happy they won the ’89 championship, he still wished they had for the previous one as well. Maradona, in his sardonic manner, retorted, “But president, we have to let someone else win, otherwise it gets boring.”
So yes, there is a strong chance he went to bat (a mixed metaphor here) for the Camorra in the name of keeping his cocaine flow steady–not to mention his overall livelihood. Like every fatally flawed character, Maradona has a war going on inside of him–one against his purer alter ego, Diego (thus the stylized title of the documentary). It is the addiction and the showmanship of Maradona that so often wins out. As Kapadia put it, “That’s why that whole idea of ‘Diego’ versus ‘Maradona’ is him, it always was. Why? It goes back to where he’s from and that when he was living in that shanty town, no one gave a shit. The minute he becomes famous, everyone cares what he’s doing.” That fame which extended to Napoli and suddenly started making people in other cities in Italy and beyond take notice left a similar imprint of rage and resentment on the town Maradona represented.
A rage and resentment parroted right back from the north, which viewed Maradona as its arch enemy for bringing Napoli’s team to ascendance. In 1990, after the loss to Cameroon, Argentina made certain to assure their place in the semifinals by defeating the Soviet Union. A defeat that would lead Maradona back to the very stadium that re-baptized him as Neapolitan: San Paolo. It was there that he would be faced with a moral quandary that few if any other football players have ever experienced. For how could it be easy to know that he would be responsible for preventing the very team that had lifted him to the status of God from achieving its entry into the World Cup finals? What’s worse, that he would be the one to kick the winning goal for Argentina. It was after this moment that Maradona lost any of the former Camorra-provided padding, and it seemed rather too much of a coincidence that he was drug-tested right after, resulting in his fifteen-month ban from the league. Things were never quite the same between Maradona and Italy again. Most especially with Naples, even though its spectators were the only ones in Italy that did not jeer the Argentine national anthem out of respect for Maradona. They were pressured to do so by other “real” Italians of course, with Maradona noting, “I don’t like the fact that now everybody is asking Neapolitans to be Italian and to support their national team. Naples has always been marginalised by the rest of Italy. It is a city that suffers the most unfair racism.”
Consistently the voice of the underrated and forgotten (solely for being poor), Maradona’s affections for Napoli could never be in question even during this most Shakespearean moment of betrayal formed by a plot point straight out of Macbeth. Or, as some Neapolitans would liken Maradona to, Masaniello, the fisherman who would lead the Neapolitan rebellion against Spanish rule before, in an unexplained frenzy, denouncing his fellow Neapolitans after negotiations with the nobility. It was another case of a Neapolitan cult figure being too deified for him to handle without going a little bit insane. For, as is the case with every celebrity that gets “saint-ified” too quickly, the people then take just as much pleasure in knocking that saint off his pedestal.
In spite of the tragic end between Maradona and Napoli, his spiritual essence remains pervasive throughout the city (most notably through the graffiti)–and the protective stance Maradona would take over the people he had adopted as his own remains: “I only want respect for the Neapolitans… the rest of Italy should know the people of Naples are just as Italian as they are.” Possibly more so, when taking into account that everything people associate with Italy is something culturally related to Napoli.
