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For: The Opinion
Monday, November 18
Moving: this was the last call between Diego Maradona and Hugo Maradona
“ Hi Hugo, are you sleeping? “. “ And what do you think Diego? Am I dancing at this time? ”.
They were three in the morning on 22 November 2020 and thus began the last telephone conversation between Diego Armando Maradona – who would die three days later, on 25 November- and his younger brother Hugo, who lived in Naples, where died this morning of cardiac arrest at 52 years .
So he remembered Hugo Maradona in an interview with Corriere della Sera in December last year, in which he said that They spoke at least once a week with Diego, many times at night given the time difference between Argentina and Italy. And that in recent tormented times for his older brother, convalescing after an operation, every time his number appeared on the cell phone, he was startled. Hugo was worried because he knew Diego was not well.
In that last call, in which there were also jokes, as always, Hugo said that the Ten kept him awake for half an hour so that tell him about the football games he hadn’t been able to watch. In this context, Diego confessed: “I miss football.” “In a few days I’ll get well and come back to my life,” he assured his younger brother, who when he asked when he would travel to Italy, he replied: “we’ll see, maybe for Christmas.”
In that last call, Hugo did not perceive suffering in the star. “ I was serene. And if Diego that night had been wrong, he would have done everything so that I wouldn’t realize it . He was like that, he didn’t want to bother. We are seven brothers and sisters, he called us all, but he did not talk about his problems. He never did. That is why I say, with great pain, that the truth about his last weeks is known only to him “, he assured.
In that interview, conducted by the journalist Monica Scozzafava, Hugo recalled that the last time she had seen Diego had been two years before, in Argentina, for Christmas, with Dalma, Giannina and Diego jr. “It was beautiful to be all together again. We wanted to return this year, but the pandemic did not even allow me to say goodbye to my brother for the last time, “he lamented.
Hugo did not hide his bitterness for the war for the inheritance that had been unleashed at that moment that, as he emphasized, did not interest him at all. And he said that the best gift Diego had given him was having taken him to Naples. “I will always be grateful to him for that,” he said. In addition, he remembered an alarm clock in the shape of Mickey Mouse that he had given him: “Diego reproached me for sleeping too much and I told him that I did not have an alarm clock and he then sent me one, large and with a loud alarm. Now I passed it on to my son Tiago who is 23 years old and what is Diego’s godson. ”
Hugo finally described his famous brother as“ generous ”and“ good ”:“ a brother, in the most deep”. “ He was the greatest player of all time, an alien. Everyone must remember him on the court, that it was his world, his life. For the rest, let’s leave him alone, he’s been tried enough, I think. For many it was a living business, but with us he was a normal person. We are children of the same parents, he went to a thousand at one time, but when we got together we were the same, boys from Lanús ”.
By Elisabetta Piqué