Prima Dona

Diego Armando Maradona, who is from the backside of Buenos Aires, is the best soccer player in the world, but he is also among the worst at dealing with the world. He goes from being an ugly, prickly caterpillar to being a graceful, fluttering butterfly each time he steps onto the 110-meter pitch. When he steps off it, he devolves again into a petty little slug of a man, described by various sportswriters around the world as "indiscreet," "flawed," "explosive," "vulgar," "spoiled," "surly," "mercurial," "petulant" and plain "rubbish."

The past year has caused a growing number of soccer analysts to say "Mr. Disagreeable" is no longer so wonderful on the field, the one place where Maradona has always been at ease. He was described last winter as being "a few pounds overweight and a yard too slow" by English soccer writer Steve Tongue of The Sunday Correspondent. Tongue added that in a friendly match between Argentina and Italy in Cagliari, Sardinia, on Dec. 21, "Maradona bore as little resemblance to the dominant footballer of the eighties as his country did to reigning world champions; and although writing off sporting genius has always been a hazardous pastime, there is considerably more evidence than Thursday's tiresome match...that the peak of his career should be located nearer to the middle of the past decade than to any date with nine as its third figure."

Maradona is 29, and he has been beaten up in a sport that has grown increasingly violent in recent years, not only in the stands but also onfield, as teams send out the equivalent of hockey goons to shadow, harass and, if need be, injure star scorers on the opposing sides. Maradona, who is an attacking midfielder for Napoli in the Italian League as well as for Argentina's national team, has been tripped, kicked and flat-out tackled so often that he is lucky to have two functioning legs these days. He has chronic back problems and two screws in his left ankle, the result of a vicious foul by a Spanish defender in 1983. He rarely trains the way he should, and on his 5'5" frame every extra ounce of fat shows. Still, part of the perceived demise of this athlete is the wishful thinking of those who are sick of his capricious personality and boorish off-field demeanor.

Typically, he scoffs at his critics. "Do you want to know the truth? I'm better than in 1986," he boasted recently, referring to the year he led Argentina to the World Cup championship, in Mexico City. "My weight's better, my health's better, not to mention my will to play. If I need to spell it out, I'm aiming to have another great World Cup." Yes, Maradona has lost 20 pounds on a recent crash diet. But his regimen, which involves taking cortisone treatments, is considered risky by many doctors, and when his physician found out about it, he quit Maradona's service.

For some veteran observers, Maradona is a symbol of all that has gone wrong with the sport of soccer. He is aloof and mercenary, whereas most great former players were supposedly kind, grateful and dedicated beyond the limits of monetary reward. Now in the fifth year of a nine-year, $23 million contract with Napoli, Maradona has enough off-field endorsements and business income to earn about $8 million a year, which makes him the highest-paid soccer player in the world. At times he appears to have no allegiance to anything except his paychecks. Instead of playing for Argentina in an important World Cup tune-up match against Scotland in Glasgow on March 28, Maradona flew to Japan to pick up a tidy $2 million for promoting a multinational company based there. Without him, Argentina had no offense and lost 1-0.

When Pelé "handed down his inheritance as the best player on earth," wrote Jeff Powell of the London Daily Mail in a 1989 year-end column, he could never have imagined "the ugly environment or aggravating manner in which Maradona would pick up the mantle." Maradona, some would have us believe, is not just a symptom of an ailment; he is the disease itself. And yet, in Naples, where he recently led his club team to its second Italian League title in four years, he is revered by thousands upon thousands of fans, and his likeness and number—10—are painted on countless walls. When he is at his best—dribbling impossibly between two, three, half a dozen opponents, starting and stopping like a jackrabbit, the ball magically attached to his foot, shin or knee—Maradona pleases all who see him. He has been described by the Italian journal La Gazzetta Sportiva as "bold and defiant as a Caravaggio Bacchus, vibrant as a cobra, tender of movement, elegant, a beautiful mortal."

Because he improves the performance of his teammates, Maradona gets a pass from most of them for his flighty behavior. "Maradona can do 100 good things, but as soon as he does one bad thing, everybody jumps on him," says José Luis Brown, the sweeper for Argentina who played on the 1986 World Cup team. "The truth is that Maradona is a great person. You will never find his teammates speaking bad of him, because we know him as a person as well as a player. We know what he is like inside."

If no one else knows, so be it. Folks who are right out on the edge aren't always easy for the rest of us to fathom. A great, troubled athlete can always claim that he is simply misunderstood by the public. Certainly it is hard to understand how a man who claims he is sick of publicity can appear in the Italian weekly magazine 7 wearing a wreath of fern leaves on his head and a bikini in one shot and relaxing under a beauty salon hair dryer in another, as Maradona recently did.

Maradona's Argentine teammate Jorge Valdano acknowledges that the star has made some p.r. mistakes. "But who hasn't?" he asks. "And just because he's Maradona, small things become gigantic things and are reported in the world's newspapers."

This undeniably is true. When Maradona said in December that the 1990 World Cup draw was rigged, the news traveled around the globe faster than a space shuttle. Likewise, when he chartered an Aerolineas Argentinas Boeing 747 and flew a few hundred friends from Rome to Buenos Aires for his million-dollar wedding last November in that inflation-wracked country, it made the gossip sheets everywhere. No one will deny that Maradona is whimsical, emotional and naive. Even he will admit as much. "If at times I get angry or I complain, it's because I don't know how to keep my feelings quiet," he says. "And I don't want to learn."