Enzo D’Orsi, the journalist who invented the Italian Super Cup – Football, has died

TORINO – Enzo D’Orsi he died yesterday at the age of 71, in the green hills of Saluzzo where he lived together with his wife Maria Paola, a doctor in the city hospital for 37 years. He was, Enzo, one of the best Italian journalists of the last decades of the second millennium, linking his career in particular to Corriere dello Sport-Stadio, for which he was a correspondent for a long time and, until 2000, responsible for the Turin editorial office in the Piazza Solferino office and therefore in close contact with Juventus affairs. Perugian by birth and then Piedmontese first for work and then because Piedmont had stolen his heart (but he lived in Turin for little, he soon preferred the quiet of the province an hour from the city, and then Saluzzo is beautiful), D’Orsi is he was one of those journalists in danger of extinction, with the rare ability to embody the qualities of a reporter and an opinion writer together: in times when a trip on the internet was not enough to find out, he had a monstrous competence also (or above all ) on international football, the nose of the refined news hunter (how many times did he make Boniperti angry with his scoops), a refined tactical and technical knowledge that allowed him to discuss as equals with players and coaches (with Platini and Trapattoni he had a close relationship, with Maifredi there were sparks) and the ability to translate all this into the story – clear, clear, pressing – for the reader. He was the first to write about the Moggi system, anticipating the biggest scandal in the history of Italian football: his pieces were the first crack in the system and naturally infuriated Lucianone. He has also published three books for Edizioni InContropiede: The eleven days of Trapwhich retraces, using the device of Trapattoni as the narrator, the phase leading up to the unfortunate European Cup final lost against Hamburg (Enzo was there); It wasn’t champagneon Maifredi’s year in Juventus, e Michel and Zibi, on two of the players he was closest to, Platini and Boniek. Among his closest friends was Eraldo Pecci.

He had some quirks and some quirks. He said he supported Bobby Charlton’s Manchester United and he was certainly not enthusiastic, especially in recent years, about the habits and customs of Italian football, which never captured his support except for an ancestral liking for Perugia. At home he had a collection of 350 original shirts, collected in huge piles on top of which were those, in wool and with the sponsor Ariston, of Platini and Scirea. Wikipedia attributes to him the “invention” of the Italian Super Cup, but he never boasted of it: in fact, during a dinner he limited himself to suggesting to Paolo Mantovani, president of Sampdoria who had just won the 1988 Italian Cup, to organize a challenge with the Italian champions, on the model of the English Charity Shield. The idea was liked, it came to fruition shortly thereafter and has never gone out of fashion again.

D’Orsi was part of the so-called “Blue Circle”, a small group of journalists gathered by Mantovani in the golden years of Sampdoria. They wore a small round badge, edged in blue, on the lapel of their jacket and the president spoke with them in periodic meetings, because at the time the journalist’s point of view was considered valuable. They were proud of it, even if none of them (or perhaps precisely for that reason) were Doria fans. D’Orsi had his charms. Decades anticipating the outfit of the literary and television vice-inspector Rocco Schiavone, in winter he invariably wore clarks and loden, which from spring he replaced with a beige raincoat. Jacket and tie, always: he maintained that the newspaper should also be represented through the dignity of clothing. Grumpy, tremendously gruff, with whom he deserved to be gruff, rigorous and yet in certain sudden moments imaginatively creative, he became someone else when he dedicated himself to what was evidently a kind of mission: raising young people. Many have passed under his clutches (he knew how to be feather, he knew how to be iron, but first of all he had an immeasurable practical and emotional generosity) and almost all of them have made their way, starting with Massimo Gramellini, now deputy director of the Corriere della Seraand Guido Boffo, deputy director of Messenger. He taught them his own rigor, love for precision and detail, meticulousness, the first and foremost moral duty to always check and recheck everything, from the data to the drafts, and especially the clarity of exposition, which was often sent to I am tormented by the vanity of young reporters who considered themselves writers. When the boy Gramellini brought him the first pieces, he said this: “Either he is a genius or he is a madman. But I would lean towards the first hypothesis.”

Enzo D’Orsi leaves behind his wife Maria Paola, three children – Jacopo, signature of The printLudovico and Niccolò – five grandchildren and a great void.