Alex English arrived in Naples in southern Italy in 1991 with one N.B.A. scoring title from a Hall of Fame run with the Denver Nuggets, eight All-Star selections on his résumé and a limited understanding of the Italian sporting landscape. He soon learned that his new surroundings were ruled by a 5-foot-5 soccer dynamo whose stature rivaled Michael Jordan’s.

Or maybe even eclipsed it in that part of the world.

Even to a newcomer from the United States, Diego Maradona was omnipresent throughout English’s one-season stint with the now-defunct Società Sportiva Basket Napoli franchise. It scarcely mattered that Maradona was unable to play for Napoli in 1991-92 because he was serving out the bulk of a 15-month suspension after testing positive for cocaine. English routinely flipped through Italian newspapers he couldn’t really read — and he couldn’t miss the unending stream of Maradona headlines.

The basketball and soccer clubs of Napoli were not at all well-connected like they are at, say, Real Madrid in Spain, where Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks regularly intersected with Real’s soccer stars before making the leap to the N.B.A. The suspension helped scuttle English’s chances of meeting Maradona during the season they could be both referred to as Napoli players.

“I think I got close to him once,” English said.

A lasting impression was made anyway. Maradona’s profile was so substantial that English, in a telephone interview, likened him to the larger-than-life Wilt Chamberlain as much as Jordan. It’s a shame they didn’t meet because Maradona, who died last week at the age of 60, was a huge N.B.A. fan. In a 2019 interview with TyC Sports, Maradona said that he began admiring the San Antonio Spurs from afar even before they employed Manu Ginobili, his fellow Argentine, and kept loving the league long enough to become a Stephen Curry fan.

Source: New York Times

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