Italy mourns a World Cup legend
Paddy Agnew pays tribute to Paolo Rossi
As football icons go, Paolo Rossi always came across as an approachable guy. Rossi, who died in early December at the age of 64 after a losing battle with lung cancer, was a living legend, a national hero, one of the most celebrated of Italians, but he dealt with all that very lightly.
I moved to Italy in the winter of 1985, three years after his moment of crowning glory in the summer of 1982, when his six goals power-blasted Italy to an unexpected World Cup win in Spain. Even at the distance of three years, the echoes of that triumph were palpable, be it through TV ads featuring the heroes of 1982 or through well founded sports media concern that there would be no repeat show at the following year’s 1986 World Cup in Mexico.
A four-year-old child could have worked out that many Italians still felt excited by and proud of that victory, Italy’s first World Cup triumph since the far-off days of the Mussolini-Pozzo team in 1934 and 1938. By the time I arrived in Italy, however, Rossi’s career was clearly on a downward spiral during his difficult (and only) season with Milan. He had missed the first ten games of the season through injury and he ended up scoring just two Serie A goals, admittedly both in a 2-2 derby draw with Internazionale.
Looking at his goals now, people might be inclined to dismiss him as a “poacher”. Yet, he was much more than that. He was a player whose speed of mind and foot, whose footballing intelligence more than compensated for his lack of weight and muscle.
He was no big central target man, no Gigi Riva. A more apt comparison would be Muhammad Ali: he would float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. One of the adjectives most often used about Rossi during the many tributes paid to him by colleagues was that he was “light”. He had a “light touch” on and off the field. Milan great, Paolo Maldini, whose career was just beginning as Rossi’s ended in 1987, put it this way: “For me, Paolo was so many things. He was the hero of 1982, a World Cup in which my father was part of the Italian coaching staff. For all Italians, he was a legend... I will always recall him for his light touch. He was a superstar but at the same time an absolutely normal person.”
When I met up with Rossi in the summer of 1997, ten years after he had retired from football, I experienced that “absolutely normal person” for myself. I had been fortunate enough to be hired as an interpreter for a sixpart BBC documentary, Golden Boots, presented by Gary Lineker. This was a history of the World Cup that focused on the leading goalscorers at various tournaments.
Interviews had been set up with a cast of living legends, including the 1982 coach Enzo Bearzot, ex-Inter and Italy midfielder Sandro Mazzola
and, of course, Paolo Rossi. Without exception, they were all delighted to meet Lineker and exchange stories with him.
Rossi spoke no English and Lineker no Italian, but they struck up an almost immediate empathy and understanding. Two leading goalscorers in consecutive World Cups – Rossi in ’82 and Lineker in ’86 – they needed no introduction to one another. Half the time, in my role as official interpreter, I was rendered redundant because they immediately got the other’s drift.
That interview took place in Vicenza where Rossi’s career had really kicked off in the 1977-78 season when, as a young player on loan from Juventus, he scored 24 goals for the newlypromoted side, in the process attracting the attention of Italy coach, Bearzot. Hence, when he retired from football, he settled in Vicenza where he became successfully involved in the real estate business.
That day, he admitted that he was earning more money as a real estate dealer than he had earned as a footballer. He might have been exaggerating a little, but this was a different time – before the Internet, mobile phones, satellite TV, VAR, the Champions League or the Premier League. This was a time when, even after winning the World Cup, Rossi and his wife could walk around Turin, exchanging banter with fans. Today, he would probably be accompanied by a bodyguard, and travel around in a limousine with dark tinted windows.
Not knowing Vicenza, I rang Rossi as we drove up to the city, both to confirm that we were on the way and to ask where we should meet. By that stage of his life, Rossi had done a lot of interviews, so he immediately suggested we meet up at the Santuario della Madonna di Monte Berico, a splendid baroque Basilica which sits high on a hill overlooking the city. He knew only too well that it would make for good TV images.
When the news of Rossi’s death was announced, Lineker said on social media: “How terribly sad. A wonderful striker and a lovely man. Scored a World Cup hat-trick in one of the greatest games of all time against Brazil. A true finisher’s life has finished way too soon.”
Just like his life, Rossi’s career was also curtailed prematurely by injury. I recall talking to the late Ray Wilkins, then a Milan player, back in the autumn of 1986. He had just played alongside
Rossi for a season. When I asked him about the legend of Italian football, he shook his head ruefully, saying that Paolo was “a fantastic guy” but “he has got serious injury problems”.
Indeed he had, retiring from football less than a year later in 1987 at the age of just 31. Of average height and slender build, Rossi was arguably not built for the intense wear and tear of football. He had joined Juventus as a 16-year-old, having been spotted in the Florence youth club, Cattolica Virtus.
Ironically, the man who spotted him was Luciano Moggi, then working in the Juventus youth-team set-up but later to become the villain of the piece in the infamous “Calciopoli” match-fixing scandal of 2006. Like many great champions, Rossi’s early career was not easy. By the age of 19, he had already had three cartilages removed from his knees. In the end, as Ray Wilkins pointed out, that physical frailty curtailed his career.
Indeed, Rossi himself often pointed out that his professional career really only lasted seven seasons. Not only was it curtailed by injury but, of course, he also lost two years, between the ages of 24 and 26, to that infamous ban for alleged involvement in the 1980
“Totonero” match-fixing scandal that led to the arrest of 13 players and the relegation to Serie B of both Milan and Lazio.
At the time, Rossi was a Perugia player, on loan from Vicenza having left Juventus in a then world-record deal which valued him at around €2.5 million. His alleged crime related to a 2-2 Serie A away draw with Avellino, in which he had scored both goals. To his dying day, Rossi claimed his total innocence, saying that his only crime had been to chat for 50 seconds with “some guy” presented to him by a team-mate the day before the game.
“Some guy” had suggested that Avellino were open to the idea of a draw. Next day, Rossi told his Perugia team-mates about the incident and they all dismissed it, vowing to play to win, he always claimed. On the basis of the “50 second chat”, the football federation judges gave him a three-year ban, subsequently reduced to two years. Years later, he still insisted: “I lost two years of my career, from 24-26, for something I didn’t do. For a 50 second conversation.”
As in many epic dramas, however, the nightmare had a happy ending.
National coach Bearzot had already taken a big gamble on Rossi by taking him to the World Cup in 1978. Despite the fact that he had only two previous caps, Rossi was a key man in Italy’s attack, and rewarded the faith shown in him with three goals in Argentina, earning the Silver Ball in the process, and helping to make Italy a seriously good side in their fourth-placed finish. The myth of Pablito was born.
If Bearzot’s first gamble was big, the second one was monumental. Four years later, he insisted on making Rossi an automatic first choice in attack in Spain, despite the fact that he had only played three games in two years because of his suspension. The rest, of course, is much loved history.
Rossi’s death, coming just days after that of Diego Maradona, clearly marks the passing of an era. Even though he won league titles, the Coppa Italia, a Cup Winners’ Cup and a European Cup with Juventus, his name will forever be associated with La Nazionale and Spain ’82. He was the handsome lad who, for a few months one summer, took an entire country by the hand and led it out to dance in the streets.
Rest in peace, Paolo Rossi, one of nature’s gentlemen.
As in many epic dramas, however, the nightmare had a happy ending