Diego Maradona's life resists a simple summary, genius on the pitch, controversy everywhere else. He captured both sides of that in one sentence during his emotional farewell to football. "I made mistakes, and I paid for them," he told the crowd. "But the ball is still pure." He was not denying anything. He was drawing a line between the person and the game, insisting one could be flawed without dragging the other down with it. Few players in the sport's history carried both extremes as visibly as Maradona did, which is exactly why a line built around holding them apart has stayed with people for more than two decades since he first said it, long after the specific circumstances that prompted it have faded from memory.
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