Maradona Good, Pelé Better, George Best

"They were never rivals on the pitch: Maradona, 20 years the younger, was in his rookie season at Argentinos Juniors in 1976-77, when Pelé jogged his last lap with the New York Cosmos. But off the field, their adverse temperaments and gigantic stature have made them ideal foils. Pelé is the company man, the executives' protégé, who smiles and smiles and tilts his lapel toward the bluest ribbon at the fair. Maradona is the unstable outsider, his life a carousel of mobsters, doctors, dictators, and cops. When Pelé publishes a book, it appears in an $11,000 limited edition and prompts the New York Times to opine that 'his admirers likened him to Saturn.' When Maradona publishes a book, it provokes a meditation on sodomy from Martin Amis. Soccer is barely big enough for both of them."

Brian Phillips in Slate investigates the question of who was soccer's greatest player.

Cool Hand Lalo

"'Dizzy Gillespie came to Buenos Aires, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. He played for a week to packed houses with an all-star orchestra, including Quincy Jones. It was a big jazz orchestra and I happened to have the same setup in my group. So Osvaldo Fresedo [the famous Argentine tango conductor] owned a ritzy nightclub and wanted to organize a dinner to celebrate Dizzy and his group. He asked me if I wanted to play two or three numbers after dinner. I asked my musicians and they said yes, so we went and played. At the time, I conducted from the piano. When we finished, Dizzy came right away and asked me, "Did you write these charts?" and I said, "Yeah," and he said, "Would you like to come to the United States?" I thought it was a joke. But it wasn't.'
"Schifrin arrived in the U.S. in 1958, and two years later, his breakthrough came when he composed and arranged a million-selling suite, called Gillespiana, for the bebop legend. 'It came out on Verve,' Schifrin remembers, 'which was ancillary to MGM Records, and the head of MGM Records sat on the board of MGM Inc., the biggest studio in Hollywood. He got me the first commissions for MGM films. It was all like a chain.'"

In LA Weekly, Gustavo Turner visits Lalo Schifrin.

Empty Cup

"'We won! We won!' the lockup's notorious chief of intelligence, Jorge 'El Tigre' (The Tiger) Acosta, shouted over and over, recalled Graciela Daleo, a survivor. 'When he said, "We won," I was certain that we had lost,' Daleo said in a seminal documentary film made here examining the 'parallel history' of the 1978 championship. 'And we did lose.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Patrick J. McDonnell looks back to Argentina and the 1978 World Cup.