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“And these brigands are commanded by the …”

Silence. Flamini slowly gets up from his chair and practically whispers: “The brigand chief.”

“No, Mathieu, that’s not how we do it. You have to give it a little more oomph, you have to say it loud, like Maldini.”

We start over. “And these brigands are commanded by the …”

Flamini, a little louder: “The brigand chief!”

Maldini: “You really don’t get it, do you? You have to shout! It! Out!”

And, as always, the third try is the one that works. “And these brigands are commanded by the …”

Flamini, red-faced, shouts furiously: “THE BRIGAND CHIEF!”

There’s a brief pause. Then everyone stands up, from Beckham to Sheva. The roar is terrifying, the entire A. C. Milan team, in a single thunderclap of a voice: “… WHO GIVES EVERYONE BLOWJOBS AND WIPES HIS MOUTH ON A LEAF!” The silence is deafening. Gattuso practically faints. Mathieu Flamini (a wonderful person, a genuine team player) glares at me angrily. I can read his expression, I know what he’s thinking: “A pig can’t coach.”

CHAPTER 6

Faking a Fake

Nils Liedholm could have been a coach; he could also have been a stand-up comedian. He decided to split the difference: he did theater, but his venue was the locker room. He was my first mentor and teacher; he might also have been my first Brigand Chief. He was a genuine chief, of real brigands; that is, us. Roma, capoccia der monno infame, to put it in Roman dialect—Rome, the capital of the world of villains—with Il Barone, as he was jocularly known, as its emperor and guide. He never raised his voice, but he taught plenty of useful lessons, especially useful to the young man I was at the time. He wore me down with technique. “Dribble,” and I’d dribble. “Dribble with your right foot,” and I’d dribble with my right foot. “Dribble with your left foot,” and I’d dribble with my left foot. “Slalom dribble,” and I’d pretend to be Alberto Tomba with a soccer ball. “Do a leg fake,” and I’d start to stumble. “Fake a fake,” and I’d fake it, pretending I’d actually understood what he’d said. In reality, though, I was delving deeply in an attempt to resolve a question that was tormenting me: “What the fuck is he talking about?”

He was an extraordinary person. He could make you laugh; at the same time, his profound calm and inner tranquility would astonish you. We were haunted by the fear of losing him; the odds were always highest when we played away games in Milan. The train left Rome’s Termini station at midnight. That was far too late for him. He’d have someone drive him to the out-of-the-way station of Roma Tiburtina at ten o’clock, then he’d climb aboard a sleeper car sitting empty by the platform, get comfortable, and go to sleep. At eleven thirty, they’d hook the sleeper car to the rest of the train and then pull into the main station where we were all waiting, ready to set off on our journey of hope—a journey of hope, in the sense that we always hoped Liedholm was with us, that he hadn’t been hooked onto the wrong locomotive, one heading for, say, Amsterdam or Reggio Calabria. Every time it was a crap-shoot. The next morning, we’d tumble out of the train exhausted, stubble-faced, in Milan. The only one who looked rested was Liedholm, who could have slept through an atomic bomb. “Boys, how are we doing this morning?”

“Doing great, Coach.”

And off we’d go to our hotel, to play cards and maybe set fire to our hotel room.

At the Grand Hotel Brun, in Milan’s San Siro neighborhood, we once came mighty close to doing just that. It was the evening before the Inter–Roma match of 1981. After dinner, it was the usual group of us lying around in our room: me, Roberto Pruzzo, and Bruno Conti. Pruzzo was sprawled out comfortably on the bed, reading a copy of the Corriere dello Sport. A lightbulb clicked on in Conti’s massive brain: actually, it was a Bic lighter that clicked into flame. In any case, that genius Conti crept over and set fire to the corner of Pruzzo’s paper. Pruzzo saw the sudden