ALL- TIME GREAT WON ’ 86 WORLD CUP
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Diego Maradona, the Argentine soccer great who led his country to the 1986 World Cup title, has died at 60.
Maradona’s spokesman, Sebastian Sanchi, said he died Wednesday of a heart attack, two weeks since being released from a hospital in Buenos Aires after brain surgery.
The office of Argentina’s president said it will decree three days of national mourning, and the Argentine soccer association expressed its sorrow on Twitter.
Maradona captivated fans around the world during a two- decade career with a bewitching style of play that was all his own.
Although his reputation was tarnished by drug addiction and an ill- fated spell in charge of the national team, he was still idolized in soccer- mad Argentina as the “Pibe de Oro” or “Golden Boy.”
“You took us to the top of the world,” Argentine President Alfredo Fernandez said on social media. “You made us incredibly happy. You were the greatest of all.”
The No. 10 Maradona wore on his jersey became synonymous with him, as it also had with Pele, the Brazilian great with whom Maradona was regularly paired as the best of all time.
In a statement, Pele said he had lost “a dear friend.”
“There is much more to say, but for now may God give his family strength,” Pele said. “One day, I hope we will play soccer together in the sky.”
In 2001, FIFA named Maradona one of the two greatest in the sport’s history, alongside Pele.
Bold, fast and utterly unpredictable, Maradona was a master of attack, juggling the ball easily from one foot to the other as he raced upfield. Dodging and weaving with his low center of gravity, he shrugged off countless rivals and often scored with a devastating left foot, his most powerful weapon.
“Everything he was thinking in his head, he made it happen with his feet,” said Salvatore Bagni, who played with Maradona at Italian club Napoli.
A ballooning waistline slowed Maradona’s explosive speed later in his career, and by 1991, he was snared in his first doping scandal when he admitted to a cocaine habit that haunted him until he retired in 1997 at 37.
Hospitalized near death in 2000 and again in ’ 04 for heart problems blamed on cocaine, he later said he overcame the drug problem. Cocaine, he once said famously, had proved to be his “toughest rival.”
But more health problems followed despite a 2005 gastric bypass that greatly trimmed his weight. Maradona was hospitalized in early 2007 for acute hepatitis that his doctor blamed on excessive drinking and eating.