Magico Cavaliero tomorrow 600 in A “I still like life in the gym”

TRIESTE Six hundred times Knight: more than him, among the active players in the top league, none. Against Reggio Emilia, tomorrow evening in the recovery of the ninth day, the Trieste golden boy will enter the restricted club of the great Italian basketball players. Beginning of the year full of emotions for Daniele who on Sunday, on the Fortitudo Bologna parquet, will also celebrate his 37th birthday. Six hundred appearances in Serie A, 11113 minutes on the pitch with 3672 points scored: impressive numbers, records that testify to the all-encompassing love and passion that characterized the career of a player capable of living his relationship with basketball with extraordinary intensity.

What balance can you make of these extraordinary twenty years of basketball?

I think it is still too early to talk about the past and to stop and take stock. Today I prefer to think about the present, about what I still have pending with the Trieste Basketball jersey and what awaits me in the coming months. I try to enjoy gym work and life with my teammates. Then it is clear that the time will come to draw a line and make a cold-minded examination of what has been a long career full of memories.

He will close the regular season with 616 appearances in Serie A, the same as Alberto Tonut, another from Trieste who wrote the history of Italian basketball.

A reason for great pride given what he was able to do in Italy and with the national team. It would be a great satisfaction to be able to follow in the footsteps traced by a great champion like Alberto ».

What were the most beautiful and significant moments?

There are so many, sometimes linked more to small details and to the sensations of the moment than to a result achieved or to a particular season. I think back to the tears of Da Ros in the evening that in Casale gave us the promotion, to the joy of Coronica after the bomb that in Turin allowed him to score his first points in Serie A with the bench all up to celebrate, or all expression of Bussani’s face when Luca Banchi called me, then fifteen, to make his debut in Serie A. On a personal level, I believe that the Italian cup won in Avellino and the awareness of having done something important for a club and a passionate supporter like that irpina is one of the most beautiful passages of my career.

The most difficult moments?

In the second year in Bologna, 2008, I went through perhaps the most complicated period of my career. I had lost faith in myself and the desire to play and this scared me a lot. I worked on myself, to seek the joy of living everyday: in the second year in Montegranaro, thanks to people like Giustino Danesi and Fabrizio Frates, I found the beauty of working out in the gym. Twenty years of basketball, what perhaps was missing was the chance to win a championship or a cup: the EuroChallenge final lost with Varese, as captain, remains a bitter memory.

Let’s go back to the Trieste season. You have been through difficult moments but you are still in the running for the final eight at the end of the first leg.

We are focused on Reggio Emilia and the goal we have set ourselves is to think about one game at a time. Of course, being able to catch a prestigious result in extremis thanks to a ranking that remains extremely short would be magnificent. We will try, knowing that tomorrow we will face a tough opponent.

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