The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
I am tempted to agree with Bareng-Batho Kortjaas in his outlandish opinion that Diego Armando Maradona was no football icon but was football itself. That was exactly how spectacular and outlandish Maradona was as a football player, and a sporting hero. And that is the problem.
My philosophical sensibility ill-disposes me towards football itself and heroes themselves, any heroes, I must say. I think of understanding heroes as good pretenders and rather very phony personages. About soccer itself it bothers me that many football fans neither know nor care that the very first football match to be played in ancient England was not played with the leather ball but a human head.
Yes, football has a dark, bloody and very dirty history. Much like their cousins the historians, philosophers are bothered by the origins and genealogies of things, people, organisations and games included. I believe philosophically that football has not fully been liberated from its bloody and dirty origins and foundations in war. By the way, it is the head of a defeated and beheaded Danish prince that ancient Eastern Englanders used as a soccer ball in the foundational football match. So, in my sensitive heart anyone that distinguishes themselves as a soccer hero or worse, a legend of the so-called beautiful game, must be suspected of many things dark and dangerous. Soccer heroes and legends must be troubling objects and subjects to ponder philosophically.
The Shadowy Greatest Footballer of all Time
I am willing to join the very noisy debate on who the greatest footballer of all time might be. The names of Maradona himself and the automatic Lionel Messi are thrown around in this rather profitless quarrel of the whole world. About Messi I will say as little as possible out of my fear of the unknown.
I have watched the fellow play and score and I think I know witchcraft when I see it. Some of my friends that are historians of soccer and its heroes have told me haunting stories about how Messi as a kid was too short for the game and had to be surgically elongated in a laboratory somewhere.
For that reason and many others my words will be very few concerning the football legend who has never, with his national team, won a world cup. I suspect the man of being some Fourth Industrial Revolution gadget. But Maradona is not the greatest football player of all time either. No. His dismal record as a soccer coach says a lot and takes away whatever glory he built with his dribbles and many goals.
The matter can be easily settled in that he was a great player and a terrible coach, and therefore not really a master of the theory and practice of the game. Somehow the greatest footballer of all time is somebody that does not really exist, or exists as a character and performer of soccer. The name Pele is a Hebrew word that describes a “miracle child,” or child born out of magical acts. Perhaps to conceal his true mother and father given name from the dark forces in the world of football, Edson Arantes do Nascimento called himself or had his fans call him Pele. Pele, otherwise, was a stage or field name for Bra Eddy.
I can bet that even some everyday and everywhere soccer fans think that the Ghanaian soccer star Abedi Pele is the Pele of legend. Well, he was a great footballer in his own right but Abedi Ayew only adopted the name Pele as part of his fanaticism and imitation the Brazillian soccer wizard, Nascimento. Whenever journalists and other interested parties confront him with troubling questions concerning who might be the greatest footballer of all time: himself, Maradona or Messi Bra Eddy never answers the question directly. Infact he says he cannot be the judge. After which he asks the interlocutors to check the number of soccer world cups each candidate has won and the club goals they scored. On club goals and world cup victories both Maradona and Messi remain behind Bra Eddy by a significant margin, I am told.
Pele in football, like Ali in boxing is the unquestionable greatest icon of all time, so far, that is.
Not my Maradona
Let us agree that there can never be one Maradona for all of us. Like Mohammed Ali who was a living individual, and an institution, Maradona was multiple and a phenomenon. Heroes and villains alike, in sports and outside, have their shadows, myths and fictions that surround them and which they surround themselves with.
It is a piece of real homework for biographers, historians and philosophers to locate the true person out of the doubles and shadows that appear. We can go on and on trying to identify and pick up the many different Maradonas from the full basket of his dramatic and spectacular character and personage. There was one Maradona that was certainly not my Maradona.
I am not talking about the cocaine sniffing hooligan or the foul-mouthed hoodlum, no. Some issues are between a man and his gods. I am talking about the Maradona that I saw in flesh, even if it was from a generous distance, in Pretoria. The 2010 soccer world cup brought to South Africa all sorts of wizards and magicians of the soccer world and its undersides. When I saw him he did not perform any dark art or utter any profanities.
He only waved rather tiredly at screaming fans and some of us worried onlookers in the peripheries of the Union Buildings in Arcadia. I am not even bothered by the Maradona of the “hand of God” ball of 1986 where he literally punched a flying ball into the net, sentencing England to defeat and catapulting his own to victory. That was profitable Machiavellianism, every country and team needs that kind of Maradona.
I join Tony Leon in laughing at and about Maradona’s “famous demands” to South Africa before he landed with his team for the tournament.
I am not bothered by play stations, pool tables and quantities of ice-cream demanded. Not even the six-course meals, a legend and his team also have to eat and eat well I guess.
It is the bidet toilet that he asked for himself that worries me and that will continue to worry me for a very long time to come. He demanded a state-of-the-art thing that would provide for all sorts of unholy performances and all.
The history of Maradona and toilets is also a tall tale one of whose highlights is that as a kid he was rescued from sure death when he fell into an open lavatory in the poor parts of Argentina.
I do not have the full details but I think he fell into the dirty hole while chasing a plastic ball or something worse. Yes, football is one of those things where legends are frequently seen running and falling in many unceremonious and embarrassing ways.
Having grown up in a shack in the poor armpits of Argentina, using cesspits and the bush for toilets, the legend, perhaps, should not have demanded such an extravagant toilet from poor South Africans.
Our Maradona
There is a decolonial Maradona after all what has been said and done. Like Mohammed Ali who spectacularly refused to be recruited into the war of America on Vietnam, Maradona frequently dramatised his leftist political ideologies. Among his heroes and friends was the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro whom he called his “second father.” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Evo Morales and other powerful political figures and symbols were his idols and metaphors that he threw around as part of his performance of himself as an anti-American activist.
He now and again referred to Donald Trump as a “cartoon character” to be laughed about and not taken seriously. His leftism was close to political fundamentalism that he displayed especially in the most quoted terse utterance: “I hate everything from the US, I hate it with all my strength,” which he repeated like a verse and a religious incantation.
In 2005 he made headlines by publicly donning a T-Shirt with the words “Stop Bush,” as part of his negation of George Bush Junior’s representation of the imperially monstrous United States of America. He wore a big tattoo of Che Guevara on one of his arms. Maradona was politically and intellectually conscious of the problem of coloniality at a world scale which sentenced the black, the poor and marginalised people into epical misery.
He understood how the world works, how it has been structured and systematised into a dark and very dangerous place for those that found themselves in the receiving end of Empire. He did not, philosophically speaking, hate America as a place and a people. He was too worldly and too cosmopolitan for that.
He resented the system that America represents and presses upon all of us everyday. Rest in Power, Diego.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa: email to: [email protected].
