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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

to see how legendary this man was, you just have to watch Maradona, the HBO documentary. which is also arguably one of the best sports documentaries. He was a polarizing figure no doubt, but this man won Argentina the world cup single-handed. ahh see the pun. he also made napoli a backwater team into the powerhouse it is today. n remember most of the matches he won, he was high on coke i.e not playing at his full potential.

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I saw him live in Foxboro MA in the 1994 world cup match vs Greece (before he was disqualified for drug use). The crowd reaction to him was amazing. Every time he ran near the section I was in the crowd would go crazy just because he was close, even if the ball was far away. It was an amazing experience.

That documentary is awesome. Probably the best player ever and an unique character

There is also a recent netflix series about him as a coach in Mexico. I found it entertaining and learned a lot about Maradona.

> n remember most of the matches he won, he was high on coke i.e not playing at his full potential.

That's a big assumption. I bet without coke he wouldn't have dared to do his hand of god act.

You clearly lack the political context of England/UK and Argentina, and what that goal represented to Argentinians. With or without coke, that was a moment of liberation, and he alone carried the Argentinean team on his shoulders in 1986 when they won the World Cup.

One needs more than coke to do what he did in 1986. One needs to be extraordinarily gifted, only for the likes of Pele, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Garrincha, Messi, Zico, Cruyff, and Maradona could ever do.

It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1982 my family and the entire country was at war with an Argentinean dictator, when suddenly Margaret Tatcher, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the Argentine dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, Argentine people felt betrayed by England. Both countries were close friends for more than 100 years, since 1810 when Britain and Argentina signed a treaty of friendship proposed by Woodbine Parish. His cousin, John P. Robertson, was a good friend of General San Martin. Argentina and England had 2 enemies in common: Spain and France. Both countries were allies until the beginning of world war 2, when General Perón became a good friend of Mussolini. The dictators and facists Videla a Galtieri went to war with the UK, US and NATO. In 1982 there was no democracy in Argentina, and no diplomats to stop the war. There was no Congress and Senate at that time, making the war illegal. The fact that Maradona scored an "illegal" goal against England was seen as a revenge for loosing a war that no one wanted to fight. No one except Tatcher.

Sim hermano. When I mentioned “liberation” I meant the psychological catarse of the moment those 2 goals must have inflicted and meant to the Argentinean people. I totally understand how Tatcher used this war (as it is common to Great Britain) to pump popularity up when neo-liberalism was not really working. UK military killed some ~1500 Argentineans to achieve so. And while they thought they were the smartest, Maradona showed them otherwise.

He would have been even more outrageous without coke. He said as much on camera: on the pitch he was fine, “beyond the midfield line I was the commander in chief”; it was off the pitch that he struggled and needed coke. He started sniffing in Barcelona, where he didn’t gel with the team off the pitch and probably felt lonely and restless, but his football was already fantastic. Without the addiction he would have had a longer career, and likely would have carried Argentina in ‘94 too.

I hated his guts as a kid because of 1990 (another hand of god, and the feeling he took from Baggio and Schillaci’s Italy a final that was our god-given right), but I’ve come to realize later that he was one of the last great footballers to be (flawed) men first and athletes second. The way he spoke of guilt and regret, his embarrassingly public mistakes... they made him more real than a robotic superman like Cristiano Ronaldo will ever be. And some of his highlight reels are ridiculous.

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