I'm going for eighty.
It comes to mind more and more often, by surprise, and it continues to seem far-fetched to me. But how? I arrived here in Cagliari yesterday, with my sister Fausta accompanying me, acting as my mother, as my tutor, for me who had never left the province of Varese, other than Lombardy.
«But you know, Gigi, I'll be back up in a bit because I have to get married. »And there the attempt, perhaps a little pathetic, to be tough: «Look, it's Paolo who should agree, not me».
Oh well, let's say it was the day before yesterday, but not almost sixty years ago, that's what's unlikely. Because I played the last game when I wasn't thirty-two, and it may also be true that the glory lasts a moment but then you have to be satisfied with the memories.
I continue to feel good in the world, through ups and downs, as I believe happens to everyone. I have my children, grandchildren, friends, a lot of people who have not forgotten me. Yet, during sleepless nights, I am reminded every now and then of what the great Brera once wrote, who had a veneration for me for which I will forever be grateful. He was the one who nicknamed me “Thunderclap”as almost everyone still calls me today, even those who did not live through those times and are now the absolute majority.
He told me one day, in a boarding lounge for an Italian away match, that the image had come to him of San Siro, Inter-Cagliari, us with the scudetto on our shirts, seeing me more and more unleashed in search of the goal. Like a progressive roll of thunderhe told me face to face between one puff of pipe and another, which cannot fail to be followed by the downpour, the storm, the outburst and, in short, the release of the ball which finally ends up in the net.
I scored two goals that day, good ones, and we won 1-3. On the pitch of the team that would later win the title, also because within six days I broke down, actually they broke my second leg, and my championship ended there. We are talking about an era in which with those defenses, and those rules which unlike today did not protect us attackers at all, goals were a truly rare commodity.
The 0-0 that today in our football occurs once every death of the Pope was routine in the 1960s and 1970s. Well, when I've been struggling lately because the two fractures had left their markand I felt within myself that the career would not last long, Brera wrote more or less that heroes deserve to die young, in the midst of their glory, and should be transported to Olympus on a chariot of fire.
Reading those lines, rereading them, and indulging in the spells was even banal, but I believe it was inevitable. And I certainly haven't forgotten the effect the news had on me, about twenty years later, that Gianni Brera himself had died in the lower Lodigiana area in a car that caught fire following an accident. But that image of the hero, who should die in his prime to leave an everlasting memory, has occasionally returned to me in difficult moments.
I think of Grande Torino. How he would be remembered today, with all the honors, if he had won a couple more championships and then ended his fantastic cycle in decline as it always has happened and always will happen. And like him, he will remain immortal, precisely because he is transported directly to Olympus by that fiery cockpit.
Then, fortunately, I also think that half a century or so after that Cagliari championship, and the 35 goals in the blue shirt, everyone, absolutely everyone, continues to call me Thunderclap, or more familiarly, Giggirriva, and to love me. Maybe, who knows, even wanting to read what, causing me a minimum of violence because my motto has always been privacy first and foremost, I finally felt like telling. Because it's a story from another century. So it is now history for real.
I have always said it and I repeat it here in my own hand: I landed in Cagliari with the fixed idea of apologizing to everyone and returning home as soon as possible. Even more so when, the day after the at least adventurous trip that I described, they took me to visit the camp. Where instead of grass there was this pale sand, and where I would discover over time that falling wasn't dramatic but wasn't even that nice: it being understood that, once the ball was nearby, I no longer had the time nor desire to distinguish between proper grass and clay.
But the ball was still far away, that was a visit, let's say, of courtesy. Which also included an offer of employment with a good monthly salary: but more generally an environmental welcome which on the one hand seemed flattering to me, because it was clear that they believed in me and in the investment they had made, and on the other it had an affectionate component. I was a kid, the classic clean-shaven guy since I hadn't shaved yet: perhaps also for this reason I perceived a sense of protection that began to change my mind. It was all new to me. Meanwhile I didn't have to go to the factory but only think about training and playing.
Then we lived together, all of us bachelors together in a guesthouse in Via Diaz where married people came often and willingly because we had more fun there. And I understood little by little, but all in all quite quickly, that qthat was the place to start living again. We ate together, we shared sensations and feelings, we compensated for the distance from the family by living in a sort of permanent changing room. I still have in mind the menu of a typical day: raw egg for breakfast, rice, steak and fruit for lunch, minestrone, chicken and fruit for dinner.
I would later discover how much I liked fish.
#Gigi #Riva #connection #Sardinia #man #island
