the times | Thursday November 26 2020 1GM 55
men, as a fitness coach, losing 24lb.
By now football was taking a back
seat to his more publicity-seeking, and
sometimes peculiar, pursuits. In 1995
he teamed up with the appreciably ill-
tempered Eric Cantona to form a foot-
ballers’ union “to safeguard the rights of
footballers all over the world”. The
same year he also spoke at the Oxford
Union, where he performed kick-ups
with a golf ball.
In 1996 he took part in a three-round
exhibition boxing match against the
former world flyweight champion San-
tos Laciar in Cordoba. He then went on
to launch in Argentina his own five-
nights-a-week chat show and got a tat-
too of Che Guevara on his right arm.
At 5ft 5in, he was not built like a con-
ventional footballer, though he made
up for his diminutive stature with his
chunky, muscular demeanour and, at
times, outright wizardry with the ball.
And despite his now tarnished reputa-
tion, in his home country Maradona
always remained a hero. They loved
him because he came from the lowest
sector of society, and not least because
of that goal against England. To Argen-
tinians, it was viewed as a display of viv-
eza, craftiness and willingness to bend
the rules when it so suited them, a qual-
ity much admired in that country. En-
gland fans could never bring them-
selves to forgive him for the Hand of
God, even when in 1998 he confessed: “I
realise that goal should not have stood
and I am sorry for what happened.”
During his five greatest years, those
spent at Napoli, he earned $30 million.
He was generous to his family, perhaps
over-generous with those long-lostMICHAEL KING/GETTY IMAGES; KERIM OKTEN/EPA; RINO PETROSINO/GETTY IMAGESMaradona’s career, although he did go on to coach his national team, left
relations who always rediscover
wealthy relatives. Much of his money
went also on his love of sports cars —
and cocaine. In 1996 he finally con-
fessed to an Argentine magazine: “I was,
I am and I always will be a drug addict.”
A report from a special clinic that year
confirmed that Maradona had suffered
brain damage from his cocaine habit.
His behaviour was increasingly in-
temperate and he could often not recog-
nise family or friends. In January 2000
he was admitted to an intensive care
hospital after suffering heart problems,
the result of his drug and drink habit.
His admirers included Fidel Castro
and, strange but true, the Pope. Mara-
dona, a Roman Catholic, married his
long-term girlfriend, Claudia Villafañe,
in 1989 after he had promised John Paul
II to do as much. One of their two
daughters, Dalma, became an actress
and singer; the other, Giannina, had a
child with the Manchester City footbal-
ler Sergio Aguero.
He and Claudia divorced in 2004.
Their two daughters survive him, as
does Diego Armando Jr, who in 1995 an
Italian court ruled was his by another
woman, Cristiana Sinagra, a model.
Aged 12, the boy was signed up by his
father’s old club, Napoli, but only went
on to play lower-league football, as well
as representing Italy in the Beach Soccer
World Cup.
Maradona’s final years were dogged
by ill health. He was admitted to hospi-
tal in April 2007 suffering from abdomi-
nal pains and had hepatitis diagnosed.
He received further treatment in a
psychiatric clinic that specialised in
alcohol-related problems. He recov-
ered enough to take over the steward-
ship of the Argentine national side,
overcoming an early 6-1 defeat to Boliv-
ia to scrape into the 2010 World Cup.
His private life, meanwhile, re-
mained complicated. In 2013 he had
another son called Diego Fernando,
with Veronica Ojeda. In 2017 he took
Claudia and Giannina to court, claim-
ing they had stolen money from him.
There were also reports that he had fa-
thered three children in Cuba.
A few weeks ago this flawed yet supre-
mely gifted footballer, who scored some
300 goals for club and country, was back
in the news when he was rushed to hos-
pital again with a blood clot on the brain.
By then the world seemed to have for-
given him his faults and come to see him
as he saw himself.
“My mother thinks I am the best,” he
once said. “And I was raised to always
believe what my mother tells me.”Diego Maradona, footballer, was born on
October 30, 1960. He died of a heart
attack on November 25, 2020, aged 60John Gilbert Getty
Grandson of the oil tycoon J Paul Getty who had
a passion for punk and the rock’n’roll lifestyle
Though profiles of the family almost
invariably reference the so-called Get-
ty curse, being a scion of the billionaire
tribe must often have seemed a blessing
to John Gilbert Getty.
The work of his forefathers gave him
the freedom to play, and he took full
advantage during a bohemian life split
between Britain and the United States.
A talented musician with a passion
for punk and a knack for roiling an elec-
tric guitar into a sonic tempest, rock did
not make him famous. Still, he looked
the part and enjoyed the lifestyle. For a
time he lived in a Los Angeles mansion
that boasted a cathedral-like tower,
a pentagram-shaped entrance and
more scenic balconies than a five-star
Venice hotel.
Dubbed “the Castle”, it hosted Bob
Dylan, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol and
Getty bought it from Flea, the bassist of
the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In 2014 he
sold it for $8.3 million (about £6 million)
and later moved into an ornate Spanish-
style home with sweeping views in the
Hollywood Hills that was previously
owned by Marlon Brando.
His father, the billionaire business-
man, philanthropist and composer
Gordon Getty, is the fourth child of
J Paul Getty, the British-American oil
tycoon once said to be the richest man
in the world. In 2015 the family’s wealth
was estimated at $5.4 billion.
Yet fortune has begat misfortune and
the clan’s history is a tangled tale of
legal battles, illegal substances, turbu-
lent private lives and premature deaths.
Control of the money inspired bitter
legal fights, while the family is no
stranger to scandal and tragedy. It
emerged in the Nineties that Gordon
Getty, a pillar of San Francisco’s social
elite, had secretly fathered three
daughters with his mistress, Cynthia
Beck. One of John Gilbert Getty’s
brothers, Andrew, whose poor health
was not aided by his drug use, died of
natural causes aged 47 in 2015 in his Los
Angeles villa, where a hallway was said
to be decorated with portraits of serial
killers and a 6ft model of a velociraptor
that stood near the front door.
That the young John Gilbert Getty
should need a bodyguard for such
mundane excursions as strolls through
Hyde Park was an unhappy reminder of
the case of his cousin John Paul GettyIII, who was kidnapped in Rome aged
16 and held for ransom for five months
in 1973 by a gang who cut off his right
ear, an ordeal that became the subject
of several books and films. Trauma-
tised, he was left paralysed in 1981 by a
stroke caused by a drug overdose and
died in 2011 aged 54.
John Gilbert Getty was born in San
Francisco in 1968 to Gordon Getty and
his wife, Ann, a publisher and
philanthropist (obituary, October 3,
2020). He had a daughter, Ivy, an artist
and model, with Alyssa Boothby, a jew-
ellery designer. They survive him, as do
his father and two brothers, Peter, an en-
vironmental philanthropist, and Willi-
am, a businessman.
His parents divided their time
between Britain and the US. Despite his
British connections, he struggled to
grasp the concept of driving on the leftside of the road, making for some hair-
raising journeys. Slender, tattooed and
with long hair worthy of a rock idol, he
was generous with his affections, some-
thing of a family tradition, and pos-
sessed an eccentric spirit and an indi-
vidual sense of style. He kept a war-
drobe of vintage women’s outfits by the
Italian designer, Emilio Pucci, simply to
admire them because they appealed to
his aesthetic sensibility.
“He once woke me up in the middle of
the night, sat on my bed edge, because
he wanted to discuss some Pugin archi-
tectural wood detail,” Matthew Bannis-
ter, a school friend, recalled. Aged
around 11, they formed a band named
the Swindlers, influenced by the Stran-
glers. About that time, Bannister said,
Getty terrified his classmates at the
Dragon School in Oxford by gathering
them on the banks of the River Cher-
well and recounting the plot of a film
only he had seen — The Exorcist — in
full, gory detail. As a teenager he re-
turned to the US to attend Phillips Ex-
eter Academy, an elite boarding school
in New Hampshire, then studied En-
glish at Brown University, an Ivy
League institution in Rhode Island.
He was unafraid to unleash his
mischievous side in adult company.
“One time there was a fancy event
at my grandparents and my
father and uncles thought it
was a brilliant idea to release
rodents and random insects
around the party,” his daugh-
ter wrote in a social media
post. “Evidently things got
hectic.”John Gilbert Getty, Getty
family heir and
musician, was
born on
September 7,- He was
found dead in
a hotel on
November
20, 2020,
aged 52
He kept a wardrobe of
vintage women’s outfits
simply to admire them
John Gilbert
Getty with his
daughter, Ivy,
an artistMaradona with his daughters, Dalma
and Giannina, in Italy in 1989