Carlo Ancelotti_ The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius - Alessandro Alciato [19]
“No, I doubt that very much.”
“Please come take a look.”
“I’m on my way.”
He was checking me over, increasingly confident that it wasn’t my meniscus: “See, it can’t be your meniscus; this is the meniscus over here,” and as he spoke he lightly touched the spot with one finger. I leapt straight into the air, I hate to admit it. Still, even back then, I was already right one hundred percent of the time.
I underwent surgery, and recuperation was pure hell. Nowadays, just two months after surgery, Gattuso is already running; back then, two months after the operation, I swore like a sailor every time I tried to move. For forty-five days I was in a cast, in bed, with my leg at a forty-five-degree angle, in traction; then, for another month, I was in an air cast (a removable cast, which I took off every morning for physical therapy), followed by another thirty days during which I could only set my foot down lightly on the floor. Total time out of commission: one hundred and fifty days off my feet, no end of boredom and irritation, and an incredible array of pains. In the meantime, Rocca had stopped playing, but, since he was now an expert in the field of hobbling and limping, he stayed on with A. S. Roma, assigned to work on my recovery.
While bedridden, I actually put on some weight. I know—incredible … me, of all people! So Francesco decided to put me on a diet. During summer training camp, I worked separately with him while the team exercised and practiced. Every morning, he put me on the scale, and I never lost a pound. Nothing. It drove him crazy. He couldn’t figure it out.
“Why aren’t you losing weight? Carletto, what am I doing wrong?”
“Francesco, I don’t understand it either. But it’s got to be your fault.”
If he took the blame, credit went to the fans. In Brunico, not all the players slept in the main wing of the hotel. Many of us were housed in an annex where each room had a kitchen of its own. Fans would bring us wild mushrooms, we got hungry at a certain time of the evening, and at midnight we started cooking up fettuccine ai funghi. If those mushrooms had been poisonous, today Rome would have just one soccer team. We ate epic quantities of pasta. I finally recovered completely in October 1982, round as a soccer ball but happy, just in time to begin the preseason leading up to the Scudetto and skip the World Cup entirely. “Champions of the World. Champions of the World. Champions of the World.” They were. I would only become a champion later, with A. C. Milan.
And to think that Enzo Bearzot would have taken me to Spain. I had already debuted in the Italian national team in January 1981, in Montevideo, Uruguay, when Italy played the Netherlands. I played in the Mundialito; I scored a goal after six minutes of play, and I even won a gold watch that the organization put up as a prize. My teammates, the older ones especially, took that outcome with wisdom and philosophy: “Lucky jerk.”
After the match, I went out to celebrate with Marco Tardelli and Claudio Gentile, and then we went to dinner. Of course, we got back late. My first thought, as we returned to the hotel: “I’m with Tardelli and Gentile, so there’s no problem.” My second thought, as I saw Bearzot waiting for us at the lobby doors: “No problem, my ass.”
I was the ass, and my time was up. We went around to the back entrance, we took the elevator, we punched 3 for our floor. The elevator doors slid open; we were home free—or almost. We would have been, too, if it hadn’t been for that tiny detail: Bearzot, waiting to greet us. Il Vecchio—the Old Man—in person: “You