The day Maradona played at the inauguration of the luminary of the first court that bore his name

Towards the end of 1991, Diego Maradona He was suspended from professional activity due to a positive doping control. He had left Italy, a country that also accused him of tax evasion. I was getting invoices for the removal of the Blues at the hands of Argentina in World Cup 1990. That was Maradona’s version at the beginning of the last decade of the last century, preparing for the first of the 10 resurrections.

At the same time, he had reached the Agricultural Athletics a letter from Liga de Fútbol de Tres Arroyos, indicating that they needed to expand the dressing rooms for the next competition. A significant effort had been made at the club to put lights on the pitch. In of the Garmaa Buenos Aires Party locality of Adolfo González Chavez which at the time had just over 1,500 inhabitants, there are two clubs: the Agrario, which is the humblest, and the Club Deportivo Garmense, with members who are mostly owners of the fields in the area.

What little money there was, slipped into the luminary: the footballers themselves were the ones who took care of the work. Not counting the required novelty, lighting the field required 10,000 pesos, the equivalent of 50 minimum wages at the time.

A group of five or six players, the most numerous of the squad and who were in charge of carrying out the works, thought of a company to raise funds, finish the lights and, now, redo the changing rooms. At the same time, Ricky Wonder It was a guarantee for summoning crowds and the idea of ​​putting it into practice dominated the meetings.

-Did you hear that Diego is coming? There was a long silence. If we invite him to play a game, will he come? They gave me a barbaric blanket. The goalkeeper who has always been tough said to me: hey, Joselo, see if Maradona is coming, stop blowing your balls. It’s true that today it was like saying: hey, what if we tell Messi if he wants to come and play with us? Things don’t happen if you don’t try. And inside, things never happen. There you go to the supermarket and meet Riquelme. Here you can’t buy a ticket to go see Boca, there’s never any.

A Jose Luis ZamoraJoselo, he had heard that Maradona would be there marisolspa just over 160 kilometers from of the Garma. She knew it was the closest she could get to one of those opportunities which, she supposes and perhaps she’s not mistaken, are more close at hand in Buenos Aires than anywhere else. The idea didn’t meet with immediate approval. But it floated. After the meeting, one of them came up and told him to count on him. It was easier to sign Ricky Maravilla, but the possibility of playing with Maradona was more attractive. Within a few days they had become four and a secret mission. There was no need to raise partridge. A few weeks later, the rumor was confirmed: “Maradona is in the East.”

The orange F100 model 80 left for Route 3 to go down to the Atlantic, with Hugo López, the goalkeeper, Carlitos Gil -ex player- and his son Facundo, who was in Third, and Joselo, of course. They had to find Maradona first and then ask him to come and play on their field. The detail was that the world champion had chosen that place to find tranquillity.

-No one goes on that date, there are no tourists. We bought meat to make a barbecue and, in the farm, the woman asked us what we were doing there. And we told him: we have come to look for Maradona. “Oh, she’s with Pablo Bahía,” she told us. We got to the house where he was staying and there was a skinny guy at the door. “Look, Diego is sleeping, but at 10 he goes for a run. When he gets up to run, he looks carefully,” he recommended. But we thought it best to go talk to Pablo and tell him what we wanted.

Paul Bahia He is a soccer legend in the area. The four went to his business and told him about the lights, the locker room and the idea that Maradona would play against Agrario to scrape together what was needed to carry out the work. The second part of the plan was completed with the coordinates of Bahia: every day at 13:00 Maradona’s contingent went to a beach near the mouth of the river with the sea. Those of Agrario, who already had everything for the barbecue, went to the agreed place and lit a small fire. The idea was to go unnoticed so that the encounter would seem casual. At the appointed hour they saw a caravan of cars passing them and stopping a few meters ahead. Was it them? From afar they recognized the only one who could not go unnoticed in any corner of the world. A few prudent minutes later, another caravan left, now on foot, to reach the place where the wanted man was.

-Let’s wait a bit and face it. We kind of got smaller because when we were around Diego and Coco (Villafañe, his father-in-law at the time) they would yell at each other while playing bocce. But there Pablo said: “Diego, come”. I think we felt our hearts beating, we felt it. “Look at the guys who want to meet you,” he told her. I don’t even know what we said to each other, what do you say to Diego? Also, we knew that others had offered him money to appear somewhere and he had taken the piss out of it. We told him what we wanted to do, that is to invite him to inaugurate the lights because we had to continue raising funds, because the issue of changing rooms had come up. And I always say that it was possible thanks to Pablo, because Diego stopped and started saying: “Look, when I’m on vacation…”, I think he was going to say no, but Pablo interrupted him and he he says: “that Diego, let’s play a game for these dirty faces” and there Diego said: “all right, come on”. We were silent for 30 or 40 seconds, not knowing what to say. There Hugo, the goalkeeper, said: “Diego, are you serious? If you don’t go, they’ll beat us. ” Diego stood halfway on his side and patted him on the shoulder: if Diego tells you he’s going, he’s going”.

The next thing Maradona asked was when would the match that had just ended by word of mouth be. “Whenever you want,” they told him. Immediately Maradona made the calculations in his head, he told them that he had to return to Buenos Aires because his mare raced at the Palermo racecourse – he called her Dalma Nerea, like his first daughter – and he made an appointment for them: ” On the 15th I’m here again in January and let’s fix a date for the match”. At the time, news from Italy indicated that the suspended footballer had to return to that country to testify in the tax evasion case, but that little detail didn’t seem like a hindrance. The group decided to take it one step at a time and wait for the next meeting to make the news public. They said goodbye and decided to retire to De la Garma.

-For a mortal, what happened to us was to die for. He’s crazy, 99.9% chance he’ll tell you no. Maybe not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. But we were coming back with a yes. But at seven or eight meters, Carlitos says: “we didn’t take a picture”. I said “let’s go back” and Hugo, as always, said: “stop messing with the picture” and suddenly we heard Diego’s voice: “Hey guys, come back I want to take a picture with you”. that everything we said was heard… We came with such joy that we shouted instead of speaking.

The return to De la Garma was pure adrenaline. Cell phones didn’t exist and they had news that burned them. With a UHF radio, when they got close enough, they contacted the president of the club, who, not knowing about this secret mission, did not expect results.

-We asked Carlitos to speed up, but the truck didn’t give more than 80, “go ahead, go ahead!”, we told him. When we were arriving, we made contact with the president: “I have opened my ear that we will tell you something. We went to meet Diego”, we told him. “What Diego?”, He asked us. “Diego Maradona” Look, he’s coming to play a game against us “, we told him. “But stop talking nonsense “, he yelled at us.

The day arrived for reuniting with Maradona and setting a date for the match. The same four who remained in the truck, repeated the remembered rituals, stopped by the same store and bought to make barbecue. The first indication that the agreement was still in effect was offered by Bahía’s wife: “How are you? Look, they’re training here,” he told them. They reached for their mouths at the same time. Cabal, they’re cabal.

-When Diego’s caravan passed and they saw us, they honked our horn. We felt like we were already friends. We set a date: February 25th would be the match. And there we pitched something that we planned later and told him that if he didn’t take it the wrong way, we’d like to name the camp after him. We surprised him. He was speechless, he didn’t expect it. “No, how do I take this the wrong way. That yes, make more room because my old ones will come ”, he told us.

The day of the match has arrived. The organization was working out the details from the beginning so that nothing failed that night, but there was nothing signed. It was all verbal. Diego’s word. Around noon, a person who spoke Italian arrived. In that country they had discovered the game and had sent a journalist to cover it. “Maradona returns to football” was the news born in De la Garma, a city that barely appeared on the maps and which had a special envoy from Europe. The match finished 1-0 due to the visit -“Amici di Marisol”- and the goal, a free kick, obviously by Maradona, who almost made another Chilean shot… from midfield.

-I played nine, six, five, eight… That day I played five for a while, imagine we made about 30 changes. We pooled the money, it went well. When Diego left, he said to us: “look, I’m going to see it all over again, eh”. I saw it again. I’ve been lucky. The following year he returned to the East. We spoke on the phone one more time and then I lost touch… We realized what had happened when he died many years later. You carry everything in your head, it’s inside you, you can only experience it when you remember it. I always think: why did Diego remain so inside us? Because even one comes from a humble family and he sees it the same way. He felt very moved … he changed on a stool, I think he returned with us that day, I don’t know if to his childhood, but he relived something of his humble times. We never took that bench off again. It’s in the same place. Now we have to renovate the dressing room again and we will leave it in the same place. There Diego Armando Maradona changed.