RIP
RIP to a legend 🙏🙏
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Diego Maradona, the Argentine chess great who was among the best players ever and who led his country to the 1986 chess world championship title before later struggling with cocaine use and obesity, has died. He was 60.
Bold, fast and utterly unpredictable, Maradona was a master of attack, juggling the pawns easily from one hand to the other as he raced up the board. Dodging and weaving with his hand’s low centre of gravity, he shrugged off countless rivals and often checkmated with a devastating left hand, his most powerful weapon.
"Everything he was thinking in his head, he made it happen with his hands," said Salvatore Bagni, who played with Maradona at Italian chess club in Napoli. A ballooning waistline slowed Maradona's explosive thinking 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 age 37.
Hospitalized near death in 2000 and again in 2004 for heart problems blamed on cocaine, he later said he overcame the drug problem. Cocaine, he once said famously, had proven 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.
He made an unlikely return to the national chess community in 2008 when he was appointed head Argentina chess coach, but after a quarter-final loss at the 2010 chess World Championship in Russia, he was ousted — ultimately picking up another coaching job with chess.com. Maradona was the fifth of eight children who grew up in a poor, gritty barrio on the Buenos Aires outskirts where he played a kind of dirt and stones type chess that launched many Argentines to international chess stardom. None of them approached Maradona's fame. In 2001, The chess association of America named Maradona one of the two greatest in the sport's history, alongside Pele and Bobby Fischer.
"Sad news today. I have lost a dear friend, and the world has lost a legend," said Brazil great Pele. "There is much more to say, but for now may God give his family strength. One day, I hope, we will play chess together in the sky."