Carlo Ancelotti (11 page)

“Why, may I ask?”

He didn’t understand. “Let’s say that I had other things to think about.”

And I wasn’t alone in that dilemma. I saw plenty of sports reporters cursing as they bent over to pick up their notes from underneath their desks—notes they had crumpled into a ball and discarded just a few minutes earlier. More or less the same thing I had done. Videotape in the machine, hit play, and review the last thirty minutes of Italy–Nigeria.

I have wonderful memories of that 1994 World Cup, despite the weather. It was brutally hot, the humidity was intolerable, and after dinner all I felt like doing was going to bed and passing out. But every night after dinner, Sacchi would say, “Shall we go take a walk?” No, please, not The Walk, anything but The Walk … But there was no arguing; he always won, with only one saving grace, as far as I was concerned. There were no trees, there were no flowers. And no one spoke Latin.

We would walk out of the hotel—me, Arrigo, Carmignani, the fitness coach Vincenzo Pincolini, and the Federation psychologist Viganò—and with that little group on the loose in America, anything could happen. Four zombies shuffling along listlessly, and Arrigo, who never ran out of zip and vim. He’d only faltered once, the year before, when the Federation had sent us to New York for a preliminary inspection. In Brooklyn, the Italian-American families had organized a celebration, with two guests of honor: him and me. We were given a magnificent welcome, consisting of just three words: “Please invite Toto Schillaci.”

And hello to you, too.

“He’s our
paesano.”

That’s when I whispered into Sacchi’s ear: “Arrigo, let’s get out of here while we still can.”

But at the same time, they were screaming into his other ear: “Please invite Schillaci.”

Thanks, we’re crazy about you too. There’s the Sicilian Mafia, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, the Neapolitan Camorra, and, let’s see, from Puglia, the Sacra Corona Unita: the gang, as they say, was all there.

“Arrigo, listen to me, let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, Carletto, you’re right. Let’s go, let’s go. It’s getting uncomfortable.”

“Quickly, Arrigo, before somebody fires a tommy gun.”

Good evening to one and all, thanks for the kind invitation.

“Please invite Schillaci.”

Oh, go fuck yourselves. Enough is enough.

I had fun in the States, too—intervals of fun between one game and another. Sacchi never stopped, he constantly talked about work, he never quit thinking about ways to improve the national team and the work he was doing. He taught me how to be a coach: how you plan the program, how you schedule the training sessions, how you manage different periods of time and different players. Working alongside him was one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me. I was only sorry about losing the final match of the World Cup, but really, I doubt we could have done much better. The heat and the humidity were overwhelming. We had made it to the end of the line, and the final match still
lay ahead of us. The evening before the Italy–Brazil final, in Pasadena, we understood that we were done for from the conversation between Arrigo and the masseur, Claudio Bozzetti.

“Claudio, did you give the players their massages?”

“Yes, Arrigo.”

“And how are their muscles?”

“Muscles, Arrigo?”

They were completely wiped out. Cooked. The players just managed to stay on their feet, out of inertia, or perhaps by some miracle. They had been playing matches in conditions of 100 percent humidity. During halftime, the players—Nicola Berti, especially—all came back to the locker room saying the same thing: “Substitute me. I’m not going back out there.” They were red as lobsters. We’d put them in ice baths and try to get them back into shape. We played the first game, against the Republic of Ireland, in New York. We got to the stadium and went straight out onto the field. You couldn’t survive for long. It was 108 degrees, 90 percent humidity. Those geniuses from FIFA had decided to schedule the game for noon. To encourage the players, Carmignani and I lay down on the grass and exclaimed: “How nice. At last, it’s comfortable today. Cooler than usual, isn’t it?” At that point, the players took a good hard look at us and decided that the sun had fried our brains. After the World Cup of 1994, I worked with Sacchi for another year, for the qualifying matches for the European Cup. Then Reggiana called me.

The American World Cup was fantastic—definitely more enjoyable than the two World Cups I experienced as a player, Mexico 1986 as a tourist and Italy 1990 without much excitement. In
the United States, it was quite another thing—an endless thrill of happiness and joy. That’s why I’d like to experience another World Cup, as the coach of an African national team (there’s time for the Italian national team yet); that is, a team with nothing but potential—a team that remains to be discovered. A team that’s not short of talent or quality, and maybe one with a big shot from the Ivory Coast. Me and Drogba—now there’s a wonderful story in the making …

T
here are times when I stand up in front of a full-length mirror and act like a contortionist. I twist my neck and I stare at my ass. My fat butt cheeks aren’t a particularly edifying spectacle, but that’s not really the point. I look at them and I think: “There are so many wounds back there, even if you can’t see them.” One tremor after another, tearing through my skin. An earthquake, with an epicenter right there, sharp and violent, without a shock wave, and over time it’s taught me a lesson: my ass is earthquake-proof. Sat on benches that have never stopped swaying and shaking, that ass has had to withstand every level of the Richter scale. Seismic shifts and jolts of voltage. A wave of irritation and annoyance that just won’t stop: first an itch, then a pinch, and things went downhill
from there. Everyone else is seated comfortably, and I’m perched on a volcano. Always have been.

I live with the threat of being fired. After I left Sacchi’s Nazionale—the Italian national team—I became a real coach at A. C. Reggiana, in Serie B: after just three months, they were ready to fire me. There’s always a first time. By the seventh week, we were in last place, three defeats and four draws; no one was doing worse than us. We were a ship of fools, and the captain was me. As if that wasn’t enough, I was disqualified from Federation standing because I didn’t have the proper certificate to coach a team. I found my assistant coach, Giorgio Ciaschini, while leafing through the pages of the
Almanacco Illustrate del Calcio
—the Illustrated Soccer Almanac. The fitness coach was a retired discus thrower, Cleante Zat. The team boasted the French player Di Costanzo, jocularly known as the poor man’s Maradona. He recalled El Pibe de Oro in the way he took penalties; otherwise, he was definitely a poor man’s player. I was in lovely company. I had even been jeered by my fellow townsfolk; it was more or less like being repudiated by your own family. I blame it all on the Reggiana–Cosenza game. We were winning 1–0; there were only nine men left on the Cosenza team after two sendings off. We kept jogging up to their goalposts in a vaguely festive, Christmasy fashion. We were so generous and good-hearted that we argued over whose turn it was to score; nothing like it had ever happened.

“Please, be my guest.”

“No, my dear fellow, go ahead.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. After all, today is your birthday; you should score.”

Di Costanzo pipes up: “Can I score?”

His teammates, in chorus: “No, you only know how to take penalty kicks.”

Just a few seconds before the end of the game, on the last play, their goalkeeper gave the ball a tremendous kick, and it flew all the way up the pitch into our area. Three players all leapt into the air at the same time: from our team, Gregucci and the goalkeeper Ballotta, who was already an old man, even back then, and, from their team, Cristiano Lucarelli, who was already a Communist, even back then. Two out of the three collided in midair: Ballotta and Gregucci. Lucarelli scored, kicking into an empty goal. The score was 1–1, and objections flew in every direction.

We went out for the eighth day of the championship after a week in training. I had two choices: either win or be sent home with a boot in the ass. This was the dancing bench (if it wasn’t dancing, it was wobbling seriously), first edition. The decisive match was Reggiana–Venezia, and it was decisive for our opponents as well. There were lots of people who assumed: “Today is Ancelotti’s last day.” Wrong. Just fifteen minutes into the game, we were already winning, 3–0. They were not just wrong, they were dead wrong. By December, we were in first place, and by the end of the season, we’d been moved upstairs to Serie A. From jeering and catcalls to triumph: while waiting for the specialists, I had pulled off the first Italian miracle.

And we triumphed in spite of the terrifying January market. We were fielding the 4-4-2; the central midfielders, Mazzola and Colucci, seemed unreliable at first because they were still young. So we decided to intervene. We still needed to improve our strikers,
and the general manager, Dal Cin, had reassured me: “We’ll do great things together. It’s a promise.”

One day, right after the Anglo-Italian Cup, I walked into my little office. There, waiting for me, was Nando De Napoli, a former teammate on the Italian national team at the World Cup of 1986: “Nando, what a surprise! How are you?”

“Fine, Carletto. How are you?”

“Doing great, Nando. You should have called me. I didn’t know you were in the neighborhood. If I’d known you were coming, we could have had lunch.”

“Oh, yeah, well …”

“By the way, Nando, what brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“I’m your new midfielder.”

I pretended to smile, but inside I was sobbing. I turned around, and standing behind me was Di Mauro, who was young, I guess,
once
, but that was years ago, when I was playing for Roma. I didn’t ask him what he was doing there. I had a feeling I already knew. Another new player. Oh, thank you, Signore Dal Cin, you’ve really done wonders here. Both of them trained for a while, but I could see that it was hard on them, they couldn’t keep up with the pace of Serie B. Both were at the end of their careers; both were recovering from injuries. One day, I decided to put them on the field, in an away match against Delio Rossi’s Foggia, a team that didn’t just run; it flew. They moved down the field a thousand miles an hour; we couldn’t keep up with them even in our imaginations. De Napoli and Di Mauro were the pair of thinkers on the Reggiana team. Everyone knows that thinking takes time. Too much time, in
some cases. While our reinforcements were clearing the rust out of their brains, the fanatics from Foggia were clearing us off the field, 3–0; it’s been nice to know you. The next day, De Napoli came back to my locker room and practically went down on his knees: “Please, don’t send me back out there. Those guys were crazy, they ran much too fast for me. I’m just a little old man.”

Mazzola and Colucci suddenly became reliable; they were suddenly the right age, too. They started to play again, and they took the team all the way up to Serie A.

I have positive memories of that time. It was a happy time. It was the beginning of my career, but I expected that in my first year of coaching I would run into a lot more problems than I did. The players were fantastic. They helped me whenever they could, from the first day to the last. So did the team owners. It was a Reggiana with no famous names but with some exceptional people. Gregucci, Di Mauro, Ballotta, Mazzola, Simutenkov, Paci, La Spada, Di Costanzo, Pietranera, Gandini, Tangorra, Colucci, Schenardi, Tonetto, Cevoli, Caini, De Napoli, and Strada. Thanks, boys. In twelve months, I had already experienced everything: fear, whistles, catcalls, joy, the bottom and the top of the rankings, a near-firing, followed by a resurrection, a bad market, and even a poor man’s Maradona. An incredibly rich experience. And a useful one, because, for the first time, I felt as if I should thank Capello, the gruff old guy who never let me play. In the meantime, he had also refused to accept the position of coach for Parma. He had come to an agreement with the team, but, at the last minute, he pulled out. With him gone, Parma called me. A team in Serie A. The Via Emilia—the Roman road that runs across northern Italy
—is a sweet place for me: a return to my origins, to the city where I grew up as a player, where I’d played in the youth league. I was born in Reggiolo, but I lived in Felegara. So Parma was my second home.

I found myself in the middle of a transfer campaign that had been planned and executed by others (it’s something that happens …). I was coaching players I didn’t know, footballers that I’d never even heard of: Thuram, Crespo, Chiesa, Verón, Rivaldo, and Cafu. Then there was Bravo, coming from Paris Saint-Germain, Amaral, and Zé Maria (José Marcelo Ferreira). Well, I knew who Rivaldo was, but I didn’t know the others. To make it worse, they wanted me to send a kid out to play goalie in Serie A, a child, a goalkeeper who was still green behind the ears. I thought they were joking, but they were dead serious. “Carletto, look; he’s a good goalie. He can block anything.”

“Fine, fine. What’s his name?”

“Gianluigi Buffon.”

“And who is he?”

The new team drafts were decided by Sogliano and Cavaliere Pedraneschi, the son of the Cavaliere Pedraneschi who, when I was just fifteen, came out to my small town to recruit me as a player for Parma after I had been rejected by Reggiana and Modena. I owed a debt of gratitude, through family connections, to the
cavaliere
, and he was just the first in a long series of mentors and benefactors. That is why I never objected to their recruits, which had in any case lost Verón at the last minute (who had been requested by Sampdoria in exchange for Chiesa), Rivaldo (who was asking for too much money and was replaced by Strada, whom I had
coached when I was in Reggio), and Cafu (who decided at the last minute that he couldn’t leave Palmeiras, a Brazilian club owned by Parmalat, the dairy company that also part-owned Parma).