Maradona and Other Heroes

A neat post by Soumya Bhattacharya in Cricinfo on Heroes and Hero Worship. I love the part which reads

"The late Alan Ross, poet, editor and writer, has the last word on this: ‘I believe that heroes are necessary to children and that as we grow up it becomes more difficult to establish them in the increasingly unresponsive soil of our individual mythology. Occasionally, the adult imagination is caught and sometimes it is held: but the image rarely takes root.’ "

Diego Maradona was the resident deity of the temple in my soccer mad soul. In those elder days archive footage of matches past was a rarity akin finding health food in rural Punjab. In the build up to Italia 1990 there was a show on DD featuring great WC goals and as a stripling lad with a bit of talent in Soccer I watched Maradona score THE GOAL in the 1986 WC quarterfinal. My inner self underwent a catharsis. Such outrageous talent I had never seen. In those days I would often cite my middle name as Armando. I would dream of playing like Maradona. For what it was worth I too possessed a mean left foot and probably still do. Perhaps that was my cosmic link with the great man. And how I cried when a lacklustre Maradona and Argentina lost a shoddy final in Italy. But the legend of the man had left its imprint on me. It has still not faded.

These past few years, watching Tendulkar, another resident deity, has been a sad making experience. And the immense Bullshit perpetrated by that T-Rex formerly known as the Indian media does not help either. The cynic in my adult brain wants to hate Tendulkar for all those moments of immense heartburn. And just as I get into that frame of mind the Child projectionist in the brain wakes up and puts on reel one. The image of Tendulkar opening for the first time against NZ in Auckland and scoring 82 in 49. I realize that with the exception of PG Wodehouse, SRT has given me more hours of unalloyed bliss than anyone else. And for that I shall remain a fanboy till the end of days.