Malaga – The Next Gen of the blue racket had the magical power to suddenly erase the nostalgia of memories. For 47 years the Italian tennis world had lived in union with the past, regularly dusting off the historic achievement of 1976 when those ‘Fab Four’ who go by the name of Adriano Panatta, Corrado Barazzutti, Paolo Bertolucci and Tonino Zugarelli – with Nicola Pietrangeli, a courageous captain – they won the first Silver Salad Bowl. First and only, until today. Since then they have built a memory library for us, made up of fascinating books, documentaries, stories, exhibitions and even podcasts.
Now that page written on Chilean soil, which transformed the vision of tennis in Italian public opinion from an elite sport to an authentic popular passion, can finally be turned, starting a new chapter. From the Estadio Nacional, theater of the horrors perpetrated by Pinochet dictatorship against political opponents, we can now tell for future generations the magical nights of Malaga, where four other young ‘musketeers’ bewitched an entire nation, keeping it glued to the television screens as only the national football team was able to do in its golden age at the World Cup.
This time it was the turn of terrible kids taken by the hand by Jannik Sinner to make history again. The 21-year-old from South Tyrol has dragged friends with him into this magical race, even more than teammates Lorenzo Musetti, Matteo Arnaldi and Simone Bolelli. We needed a ‘lighthouse’ like Jannik, protagonist of a progressively growing 2023 that has raised him to number 4 in the world, to illuminate Italy and bring it to the finish line it has been waiting for for almost half a century. He was the one who was harshly criticized last September for having ‘snubbed’ the Davis Cup group stage, giving up taking the field in Bologna against Canada, Chile and Sweden, to rest and regain his best form. A lump sum that became a ‘National’ case.
Jannik with silence and sacrifice, he redeemed himself with interest, extinguishing the controversies of his detractors with an exhibition performance demonstrating with facts his attachment to the blue. This dream Italy first passed the acid test by overcoming Nole Djokovic’s Serbia (hero in his homeland who had already given his people the team trophy in 2010) thanks to the performance of Sinner who in an unforgettable afternoon beat twice the number one in the world (against whom he canceled out three match points in the singles match) and then defeated the resistance of Australia, an opponent that the national team had never beaten in the previous three finals, all played on the ‘aussie’s’ home grass : 4-1 in Sydney in 1960, 5-0 in Melbourne in 1961 and 3-1 again in Sydney in 1977.
In the last epilogue they were there, Panatta, Bertolucci and Barazzutti. Where the magical Adriano failed, Sinner took care of it and this season reached him, becoming number 4 in the world. There couldn’t have been a better handover to celebrate the new novel of Italian tennis.
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