Everyone loved him. Accustomed for centuries to being Guelphs or Ghibellines, from years of football to being Mazzola or Rivera, Bianconeri or Granata, Rome or Lazio, the diabolical voice of Callas or the angelic one of Tebaldi, Loren or Lollo, the eagle Coppi or the Bartali’s nose, not him: Luigi Riva known as Gigi, from Leggiuno, province of Varese, deep Lombardy, you wouldn’t believe he wasn’t Sardinian, Giggiriva, passed away at the age of 79, shot in the heart in his native Cagliari. He, Giggiriva, went to that island which, they say, he had seen from above for the first time while going to play in Seville with a youth national team and had asked what it was and had said “I wouldn’t live there”, instead he wanted to live right there (and die yesterday) and that blue shirt as a teenager would have been his real skin that every fan loved.
Consistency and loyalty, everyone loved him
Yes, the Cagliari of that scudetto that smacked of a miracle as certain feats belonging to men appear was the consecration of “Rombo di Thunder” as Gianni Brera had renamed it, not quite as spot on as Abatino Rivera of those years. It was a championship that everyone liked, because the enemy next door hadn’t won it. But it is the blue shirt, the 35 goals in 42 times that are his record, those goals in which he unleashed his power and anger, his miserable childhood and his new glory, the boy he had been to whom some champions denied his autograph , and he never denied one and then never a selfie when tastes and gadgets changed. And when he changed football. Riva was not one of those champions who chased the dollar in his time and of those who in our times are attracted to black gold like magpies are attracted to real gold.
Not him. He didn’t even do, in the cinema, that Francis of Assisi that Franco Zeffirelli proposed to him, not like now when you find them in a sitcom, in a series, in a commercial, in a clip. He, “Rombo di Tuono”, at most was the protagonist of a documentary by Riccardo Milani, which has the sky in the title and still makes the heart beat, like Gigi did when he had the ball within range, and what a shot! He even broke his legs more than once: some opponents broke them, some others just saw him collapse on the grass, and we all heard his scream. Just as we all felt that “no” that he said to Juve, the Lawyer’s Juve, Boniperti’s Juve, the “master race” of those times. Yet a boy who had left Leggiuno lanky and sad, knew how to resist and let his love for his football win, for that land of Sardinia which had not belonged to him at birth but in which he found himself, shy, silent, much loved and yet left to his life, that land and those people in which he felt protected and defended, and he, who was used to undermining defenses, instead took refuge there. Happy.
Then, when his flesh and muscles were perhaps desperately damaged, he remained at Cagliari and Cagliari until relegation (long gone were the times with Manlio Scopigno), he never remained a stranger to the blue team that had made him the champion of all, because this was, Pallonara Italy, that is, all of Italy, united more than even another man from the island, Giuseppe Garibaldi, had managed.
He became manager of Italy, Riva, and they were continuously world champions, sometimes lost who knows why (the magical nights that were bewitched), but sometimes, instead, unforgettable, one for all “the sky above Berlin”. Riva always spoke little, even though who knows how much he had to say: he opened the opponent’s door wide open and that was enough, then the rest was his own world. He said that he had spent an evening in Genoa with Fabrizio De André, another Sardinian in spirit and choice, and that they were both silent for a good while, perhaps they smoked, then they talked who knows how much without ever stopping. De André gave him a guitar, Gigi a shirt. They gave us both emotions. The rest are numbers, appearances, goals, trophies. But emotions don’t take this into account. He was left-handed: the good foot on the side of the heart.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Read the full article at
The messenger
2024-01-23 00:20:56
#Gigi #Riva #died #Italian #football #legend #years #hospitalized #illness
