Maradona is dead. Maradona is alive. Diego – the digitally archived world star. All the passes, the dribbles, goals, kicks, tears: Youtube. The modern grief reflex, the continuous loop, promised as early as 1986 on the advertising board in the Estadio Azteca: JVC VH Video. Toni doesn’t hold the ball, no, but the future was next to the goal. She would never go again.
And so was Maradona: the last analog, global sports icon. When the news of his death moved the world within seconds on Wednesday, a photographer in Tehran, for example, reached into a drawer. Opens the superhero album from childhood days, with the newspaper articles, the photos: The rise and fall of Diego Armando Maradona, described in Farsi, in broad headings and narrow columns, images in black and white, cut out, pasted in and filed decades ago.
The magic of the great, fleeting moments, once archived the morning after, in childlike conscientiousness, supposedly lonely, actually in reassuring synchronicity: the children’s archives kept this world together from one end to the other, in Tehran, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Berlin , West and east. Football, the greatest common denominator. The space on the servers has long since cleared the drawers, not only the album from Tehran is now on Instagram. Digitized memory, everything can be called up, every second. But that’s technology, not magic.
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