The Raging Bull
THE little bull from Buenos Aires was ready for his bed. Speaking of himself in the third person, as he often does nowadays, he announced that Maradona was exhausted. He walked wearily through the scrum of newsmen and fans filling the hotel foyer and headed for the stairs. Up in their suite, his wife, Claudia, and their two daughters were already asleep. The family had travelled across three continents and a great ocean in under 18 hours. Enough was enough. The hooded brown eyes of Diego Armando Maradona had begun to droop and even legends have to rest.
He almost made it, until the twin temptations that have so often turned his gilded life into chaos presented themselves in the shape of a pretty girl and an invitation to go boozing with the boys.
First of all he spotted the attractive girl behind the reception desk. The shortest and the mightiest legs in world football took him through a 90-degree body swerve and he placed himself before her, grinning impishly and speaking rapidly in Spanish. At 1.62 metres he had to look up. And all the tall girl could see beneath her was a squat, powerfully built man with a 10-centimetre strip of his jet-black hair dyed vivid yellow. 'He seemed to be demanding the sweets,' said Ossie Ardiles, his friend of 15 years and former teammate, who now lives and works in England. 'He says you have hidden the sweets. He had some earlier and he liked them.' Maradona nodded eagerly. The girl, relieved that a pass was not being made by this strange little guest whose ludicrously striped head gave him the appearance of a human skunk, reached under the counter and took out a bowl of boiled sweets. He scooped up a handful and rattled out another stream of Spanish. He seemed to be settling in for a long, intimate and one-sided conversation, until Ardiles crooned something in his ear. Maradona sighed, consulted the diamond-studded Rolex on his left hand - the infamous Hand of God - then seemed to agree that the night was not yet over.
With his lawyer, his manager, a long-suffering personal photographer and Ardiles in tow, he suddenly burst out of the hotel and into the freezing night air of the old college city of Oxford. Still chewing on his boiled sweet, he waited for a taxi to be called. The Maradona roadshow sped down the M40 to London for a little early-morning champagne at Stringfellows.
Six hours later, as dawn was breaking over the dreaming spires, a star-struck London cabbie accepted two ?50 ($610) notes from the fat wallet of Maradona's manager and the little bull wandered wearily upstairs to make his excuses to Claudia and finally get some kip. He badly needed it. In less than 48 hours he was due on the pitch in Buenos Aires to play for his club, Boca Juniors, in a vital league game before 50,000 spectators. The faithful there are still prepared to pay top money to see an overweight man whose legs have long gone and who nowadays rarely plays more than 50 minutes of any match.
Watching him creep up the stairs of the old Oxford hotel, Bovio Nicolas, a photographer who has followed him across the world for 10 years, slumped exhausted onto a couch and muttered his thanks to God that another long night in the life of Maradona had passed without trouble. Football's most notorious drug-taker and fornicator had come back to his wife's bed sober and unsullied by scandal.
At the age of 35, said Bovio, the raging bull from Buenos Aires is now a pussycat. 'But he still doesn't like to go to bed,' he said wearily. 'Tonight he was quiet. A good boy. He just had a little champagne, not a lot. He doesn't drink so much now. And there were no girls. He just went to a few clubs, signed a few autographs and spoke to Ossie. He loves Ardiles like a big brother.