Diego Maradona loved basketball; its stars loved him, too

Alex English arrived in Naples in southern Italy in 1991 with one NBA scoring title from a Hall of Fame run with the Denver Nuggets, eight All-Star selections on his resume and a limited understanding of the Italian sporting landscape. He soon learned that his new surroundings were ruled by a 5-foot-5 soccer dynamo whose stature rivaled Michael Jordan’s.

Or maybe even eclipsed it in that part of the world.

Even to a newcomer from the United States, Diego Maradona was omnipresent throughout English’s one-season stint with the now-defunct Societa Sportivà Basket Napoli franchise. It scarcely mattered that Maradona was unable play for Napoli in 1991-92 because he was serving out the bulk of a 15-month suspension after testing positive for cocaine. English routinely flipped through Italian newspapers he couldn’t really read — and he couldn’t miss the unending stream of Maradona headlines.

The basketball and soccer clubs of Napoli were not at all well-connected like they are at, say, Real Madrid in Spain, where Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks regularly intersected with Real’s soccer stars before making the leap to the NBA. The suspension helped scuttle English’s chances of meeting Maradona during the season they could be both referred to as Napoli players.

“I think I got close to him once,” English said.

A lasting impression was made anyway. Maradona’s profile was so substantial that English, in a telephone interview, likened him to the larger-than-life Wilt Chamberlain as much as Jordan. It’s a shame they didn’t meet because Maradona, who died last week at the age of 60, was a huge NBA fan. In a 2019 interview with TyC Sports, Maradona said that he began admiring the San Antonio Spurs from afar even before they employed Manu Ginobili, his fellow Argentine, and kept loving the league long enough to become a Stephen Curry fan.

After Maradona’s death, Magic Johnson shared two photos of himself with Maradona on social media and described meeting him as “one of the thrills of my life.” Such was Maradona’s appreciation for basketball that, on multiple occasions, he described Ginobili as the most accomplished athlete in their country’s history. Such modesty was hardly common from Maradona, but clearly even he was moved by Ginobili’s run in a sport without the same level of reverence soccer holds in Argentina.

The late Kobe Bryant spent much of his youth in Italy while his father, Joe Bryant, who was known as Jellybean, played there professionally. Kobe Bryant crossed paths with Maradona at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and later referred him to his as “my idol.” Maradona described Jordan as his idol, which helped explain the grainy photos of Maradona wearing an oversize version of Jordan’s famed No. 9 Dream Team jersey while he was training for the 1994 World Cup.

That would be the last glimpse of Maradona on his sport’s biggest stage as a player. It predictably featured a dose of his incomparable left-footed magic, as conveyed by a scorching goal against Greece and an unforgettable celebratory scream into the nearest television camera, but was followed swiftly by another inglorious chapter for his lifetime of off-field troubles. After testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, Maradona was kicked out of the tournament.

In any Maradona discussion, there is no escaping the dark side. Drug addiction and health troubles kept him in the headlines worldwide long after he stopped playing. He seemed to be perpetually engulfed by family tumult and, after becoming estranged from his ex-wife Claudia Villafañe, was accused of abusing one former girlfriend.

In a 2014 television interview in Argentina, Maradona acknowledged that his drug use kept him from reaching even greater heights. “Do you know the player I could have been if I hadn’t taken drugs?” Maradona said.

The player Maradona was nonetheless always inspired passionate support in a crowded greatest-of-all-time debate that should be quite relatable to an NBA audience.

Maradona? Or Pelé? The Argentine who, even in an 11-on-11 sport, routinely carried underdogs to glory for both club and country? Or the Brazilian who became one of the world’s most famous faces, and an American pioneer with the New York Cosmos, on top of repeated World Cup success?

Taking it further: Can we conclusively say that Maradona tops Lionel Messi as Argentina’s finest soccer export? And further still: Can we even conclusively say that Messi is the modern era’s most worthy GOAT contender ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo?

As soccer’s pundits wrestle anew with such questions, it is reassuring to see that another global game isn’t any closer to sorting out its hierarchy than us hoop dreamers. Maybe it’s OK that no one in basketball has quite hatched a consensus formula to rank the likes of Jordan, LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Johnson and Chamberlain — if we can even agree on those six as the finalists.

Maybe New York Yankees legend Reggie Jackson had the right read when he spoke to us as James closed in on his fourth championship. Jackson said that just being in the ultimate paragraph of contenders is the ultimate compliment.

Rest assured that Maradona will have permanent residence in that stratosphere.

“I wish I had gotten the chance to know him,” English said. “He had that one-name thing. When you’re that big, like Maradona and Pelé, you don’t need a second name.”