Carlo Ancelotti_ The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius - Alessandro Alciato [12]
“I’m sorry, Carletto, you’ll have to wait. Signore Tanzi is in a meeting. He’ll be another hour or so.”
“No problem, I’m going home; I only live ten minutes away. When he’s free, give me a call and I’ll come right over.”
I was in the car when my cell phone rang, I thought it was Tanzi, but I was wrong: “Hello, this is Galliani. Ancelotti, where are you? Have you already signed the contract with Parma?”
“Not yet, but we’re about to sign.”
“Stop what you’re doing, go home, lock the door and pull down the blinds. Wait for me. I’m on my way to your house, with Ariedo Braida. You have to come coach Milan, you’re replacing Fatih Terim.”
Oh, right. Here we go again. The first thing I did when I got home was unplug all the phones. They pulled up with the contract, and they talked me into it in thirty seconds flat. I signed on the kitchen table. I was there from 6 November 2001 to 30 June 2004. It was the beginning of a love affair, as well as a story of victories and successes. The second chapter in a crazy passage of history, after my time at Milanello as a player. And the cause of a tremendous temper tantrum, absolutely justified, on Tanzi’s part.
Then there is the story of Real Madrid: me and Florentino Pérez, tortellini y merengues, but I’ll tell that one later. I won’t run away, I promise.
CHAPTER 5
The Pig Is Sacred. And the Pig Can Coach.
I scarf food down like a horse, and no one is happier than me. The champion of Italy, Europe, and the world; just take me to a trattoria, stand back, and watch. No one else can come close. I don’t care about the side dishes, the secret lies in the filling: inside of what I eat is what I really am. I’m a philosopher of ragù, with an idea befitting a Nobel laureate: it’s not the salami that hurts you, it’s the knife.
One evening at the San Siro, I was continuing to field Clarence Seedorf, and some of the fans in the stands were voicing their disagreement, one gentleman louder than the others: “Go back to Parma and pig out on tortellini.”
“And you go fuck yourself.”
He was screaming in Italian, and I replied in proper French. I wasn’t defending Seedorf, it’s just that I can’t stand by and watch someone insult a perfectly good plate of tortellini.
It takes me back to my childhood. I was born into a family of farmers, and it’s my memory of Sunday supper. A classic. Tortellini was the specialty of that day, only and exclusively that day, a sacred moment dedicated to my family, the air of home. Clean air. We were poor but polite, I don’t know if we were much to look at. Me, my sister Angela, papa Giuseppe and mamma Cecilia, grandpa Erminio (whom we called Carlino), and grandma Maria: the family grouped around the tureen full of steaming tortellini. Home and church, first Holy Communion and then Sunday supper, guests at one house or the other. Tortellini, wine, and pork, a blue-plate special that was free of charge. Pork, and lots of it, because that was what farm families ate where I come from. We raised pigs, took care of them for a year, slaughtered them in the heart of winter, and then stuffed ourselves on pork. It was good meat, we ate it 365 days a year, and no one ever had problems with cholesterol. In fact, if you ask me, they invented cholesterol later. What I’m trying to say is that if I think of a pig, I feel like I’m thinking of something nice, almost a sacred animal, like a cow in India, say, or else Zlatan Ibrahimović for an Inter fan.
That’s not what the Juventus fans thought, though. I have a memory that comes back to me in a flash every so often. It was my very first week on the job in Turin, I was driving to the office, and in the middle of Piazza Crimea I saw an obelisk. Nice, very striking, but what I really noticed was the graffiti someone had spray-painted onto it: “A pig can’t coach.” Cuminciom ben, as they say in Turinese