Hand of God: The Life of Diego Maradona - Hardcover

The playing fields of the '80s and '90s are sadly littered with the unfulfilled promises of athletic greatness deterred by self-destruction. Soccer star Diego Maradona rose from the slums of Buenos Aires to teenage fame and a career that blazed its way across Europe before reaching apotheosis in the 1986 World Cup. That World Cup performance, in which Maradona raised his already magnificent game an impossible notch or two, elevated him to a sporting pantheon reached only by a supernatural handful: think Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, and Pelé. But, as biographer Jimmy Burns painfully details, the charismatic and stormy Maradona quickly lost everything to drugs, scandal, and corruption. Maradona's is a cautionary tale, and Burns relates it with charisma.

Hand of God is the definitive biography of one of the greatest players in the history of world soccer, a man who at one time was arguably the most brilliant and most controversial figure in all of sport: Argentina's Diego Maradona.This extraordinary story moves from the slums of Buenos Aires, where Maradona was born in 1960, to the packed stadiums of the United States, where he was ignobly expelled in 1994 after failing a drug test. In his rise to fame - and notoriety - Maradona played for some of the world's greatest teams, leading Argentina to their second World Cup championship in 1986, and captaining Napoli to two Italian League titles. But the pressures of stardom led to a cocaine addiction that caused the charismatic and stormy footballer to womanize, associate with organized crime, and become a pawn in Argentinean political gamesmanship. This revealing examination of a complex sporting genius offers unique insight into a sordid world of exploitation, corruption, and intrigue. (6 x 9, 260 pages, b&w photos)