What is your idol’s autograph worth? For Italian tennis player Potito Starace, it’s enough to smooth over a rough patch he hit with his idol, Diego Maradona. It all started when the Argentine decided to give Starace a bit of advice from the stands during a match against David Nalbandian in Buenos Aires, and ended with Starace wanting to do to Maradona what every English fan has wanted to since the “hand of God.”

Starace threatened to “bash a racket” in Maradona’s teeth after the former Napoli forward insulted him from the crowd during a quarterfinal loss to Argentina’s David Nalbandian at the Buenos Aires Open.

Starace, a Napoli fan who used to idolize Maradona, has now received an autographed Argentina No. 10 shirt from the 1986 World Cup winner.

“Certainly what he did was wrong and even more so because he is Maradona,” Starace told Tuesday’s Gazzetta dello Sport, which carried a photo of him holding up the shirt. But this ugly story finishes here.”

For you, but somehow we don’t think the embarrassing Maradona stories will end here, though.

Starace gets signed shirt from Maradona as apology for heckling [ESPN]
Image [gazzetta.it]