Since it’s that time of the decade when people around the world hold their breath, nurse their feet, worry about other people’s broken metatarsals and down vast quantities of the local alcoholic brew, I thought it might be fun to bring you news about an ex-soccer player called Diego Maradona.
Maradona is from Argentina and represented his country on numerous occasions. I have nothing against the man personally, apart from the fact that he scored a goal against England by jumping in the air and instead of using his head punched the ball past the advancing goalkeeper. Some people consider this as cheating, but Mr Maradona, in his infinite wisdom, decided that he didn’t do it himself, he claimed it was the ‘Hand of God’ - actually Maradona called it the ‘Mano de Dios’ since his English wasn’t too good. Also, he could have been referring to himself as a God.
Of course, as a football fan, I don’t let things like that worry me. The fact that he scored the goal against England in the quarter-final match of the 1986 World Cup between England and Argentina, which was played on 22 June 1986 in Mexico City's Estadio Azteca, and the goalkeeper was Peter Shilton is of no importance. As you can see, it was so unimportant that I don’t really remember the details … oh yes, the Tunisian referee’s name was Ali Bin Nasser … nevertheless, Maradona has been one of my pet hates ever since. When he didn’t use his hands he was a good footballer and played for Naples, the Italian team, from 1984 to 1900.
What he earned during that period can only be guessed at, but since his tax bill for those years was US$ 38.5 million, we can assume that he wasn’t too badly off. The fact that he didn’t pay his taxes is another story, suffice it to say that any ordinary citizen owing that sort of money would have had his football and any other balls confiscated, then been hung, drawn and quartered by the local tax authorities.
But this is Maradona we’re talking about, and being both short in stature and in pennies for his taxes, he was allowed to leave the country without paying so that he could return to South America where it would be easier for him to feed his notorious cocaine addiction. He became fat, perhaps bloated would be a better description, and the habit had him at death’s door more than once. But Cuba’s Fidel Castro came to the rescue and invited him to attend a drug rehabilitation centre that some say he had created for ageing revolutionaries with beards, Havana cigar smokers and the wayward rich communists.
Be that as it may, after a few years Maradona lost some of his fat, not to mention most of his fortune, and was invited to host a show on Italian television and do miraculous things with the ‘Hand of God’. Because of all the pre-show bla bla, millions of Italians tuned in to watch, which, unfortunately for him, included the Italian tax authorities, resulting in the confiscation of his earnings as a tiny down payment towards the $38.5 million debt.
But the story doesn’t finish there. Maradona, bold, benign and non compos mentis, recently returned to Italy for a charity event knowing that any ‘visible assets’ would be confiscated. The police saw him wearing a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, diamond ear studs and not one, but two watches. He was immediately whisked off by the carabinieri, appearing a little later without the watches and without the ear studs. The watches were sequestered as a further down payment on his tax bill, but somehow during the car ride to the police station Maradona managed to conceal his diamond ear studs somewhere or other.





As luck would have it both the watches were Rolex Submariners – one was for the local time and the other was to counterbalance the imbalance the first one caused. The watches, as most of you know, are not outrageously expensive, but if they’re auctioned as timepieces that come from the ‘Wrist of God’, the Italian taxman may well get a few additional euros if they sell them on e-bay. Unless, of course, they’re a couple of those fabulous fakes I wrote about a few months back!
And so ends the tragic tale of Diego Maradona, a man loved by some and hated by others. But to quote the up-tempo song from the musical ‘Chicago’, … ‘He had it coming’.


Source: Europa Star August-September 2006 Magazine Issue