From Mundo Deportivo, we reproduce the news of this Argentine newspaper:
'Maradona died: how the scoop that shook the world was created'
“Died. So, to dry. Not one more word, not one less. The message from the editor Mariano Verrina reaches the cell phone of the newspaper's head of Sports, Martín Voogd, at 1:06 p.m. Fifty-eight seconds later, the news is on the home plate of Clarion: Diego Maradona died. Next: World upheaval. A while later: It is already a legend.
From the egg that breaks the shell – the first piece of information that something was wrong with Maradona had reached the head of Sports 17 minutes before – to the bird that spreads its wings and flies into the world, a fleeting sigh passes.
The journey to the heart of a scoop sometimes has a component of chance and a lot of obsessive work, of foresight, of putting together just in case.
Journalists prepare their entire lives for a scoop that can never arrive, or arrive at four years, at two months, or at 17 minutes. The machine must be kept oiled because it is the only thing that can be foreseen.
The rest is of destiny.
First, two ambulances arrive at Maradona's house in the San Andrés de Tigre neighborhood. Then a nurse comes out onto the street, shakes her head from side to side and repeats, lost in thought: “No, it can't be … no … no …”.
Simultaneously one more ambulance arrives, but this time playing the siren.
Those facts are the first data. In Maradona's environment they say that the player was decompensated and they are trying to revive him. The situation is dramatic. Editor Julio Chiappetta gets another confirming source. The boss of Último Momento, Juan Pablo Elverdin, writes, the editor Pablo Blanco reviews and the cover artist Facundo Chaves looks for the photo and titles. Clarion publishes that Maradona is serious. It is 13.04.
But immediately the first source affirms that there is no case, that died. The second confirms that died. The editor writes that word like this, simply, the head of Sports validates the sources, Clarion publish and the news flies. Spain, Italy, United States, Brazil, England, Israel, Mexico.
All the vertigo stops short: Maradona is dead.
His name is a Borgean aleph from Argentina. The point where all the points are concentrated. The Maradona box contains and repels, shelters and expels, but it always reminds the Argentines who look out to see, who are they. Hate and love, in the fullest Argentina, are first cousins that sometimes wink at each other. Like politics and football.
It's funny, or not so much. When Perón died – the greatest icon of Argentine politics in the modern era – the newspaper Crónica made its cover with the only word that the editor of Clarion to tell his boss what happened with Maradona.
Died, and everything else is left over. Someone said it in Naples, in the middle of the thundering earthquake of simultaneous repercussions, already flocks of flying birds in every possible planetary sense: “Naples cries, period”.
A life of legend will always have scraps to continue cutting. Uncharted celluloid corners. Is this possible? How many times did we see the second goal against the English? And yet it appeared something different.
The magnificent English striker Gary Lineker, who was on the Azteca Stadium court that time, said it a few months ago: “The incredible thing is that Maradona scored that goal on that playing field. The ground was dry and hard from the heat. The ball was jumping and it was impossible to control it well ”.
Now let's look at the biggest goal in the world again. Indeed, the ball is jumping. Maradona's instep accommodates her with fleeting caresses. Tomorrow they will look like kisses. Kisses from the left-handed instep but on the run and dodging English as if they were wells from Fiorito.
It is so clumsy to say that that triumph of the captain with the loose curls and the inflated chest was the revenge of the Falklands as it is useless to deny that thousands of those who saw it while it was happening, in real time, contracted with Maradona a emotional debt that beat time.
His iconic face used in politics – including his persistent contradiction of supporting dictatorships as if they were progressive governments – thrust him into the crack with the force of a whirlpool and now he may be the one carrying his coffin to the burning chapel in the Casa Rosada.
His final homage in the temple of government rather than a temple of soccer will not be without political speculation, but it will not be eternal either.
Will last the beauty of his universal and true art heroic halo of the man who builds himself, like a David who gets up every morning to put the saving stone back into the giant's eye “