Carlo Ancelotti (20 page)

That day, I started talking first, beating Galliani to the punch: “Listen, I asked for this meeting because I have a major opportunity. I’ve had an offer, apparently, from Real Madrid.” I qualified it in an attempt at diplomacy. “It’s an opportunity that I’d really like to take advantage of, because we’re talking about one of the most important soccer clubs on earth. Here, I’ve won and won and won again. I’ve been here as a player and as a coach, I know everything and everyone; maybe it’s a good time to seek greener pastures. I see it as a challenge, it could really teach me a lot, it would be exciting. If you could just see your way to …”

I was starting to blabber on, and I also had a vaguely doleful expression on my face, as if to say: make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver but the other is gold. Oh, of course I’d get used to the new situation; finding my footing between one championship and the next was becoming my specialty. I’d made my decision. But so had Galliani. And his decision wasn’t the same as mine: “That’s entirely out of the question.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s entirely out of the question, Carletto. You stay here, we’ll extend your contract. We don’t want to give you up. We need the work you do here. We must go forward together.”

I’ll confess that at times like that I felt like a genuine musketeer. One for all and all for one—which can be rendered in its Milan-fan slang version: Berlusconi for all, and all for Berlusconi.

Galliani went on: “You’ve done great work here with us, so I can’t let you leave. At this point in time, there is no such thing as A. C. Milan without you. Our story hasn’t come to an end yet.”

“But …”

“No buts. You are, and you will remain, the coach of A. C. Milan.”

It was as if he were symbolically handing me all the nuts and bolts he had removed from my bench over the years. Only symbolically, of course; otherwise, it would have taken a three-quarter-ton truck to haul off all that scrap metal. And I didn’t happen to have one with me.

I have to say I took it well. Very well. “If that’s how things stand, Signore Galliani, then I’ll be delighted to stay on.”

“I repeat, we’ll extend your contract and adjust it to your satisfaction.”

That wasn’t really what mattered. The important thing was the faith he had expressed in me. No price can be set on feeling loved and valued. These are emotions, and therefore priceless. When Real Madrid told me, “You’re the best,” they had certainly hit the right note—the same note that the Triad had sounded a few years before them. Cuddle me and feed me, and I’m happy.

So I called up Real Madrid and told them about my conversation with Galliani: “He told me that I can’t accept your offer. But I thank you; it’s been an honor to negotiate with you.” At home, I still have that pre-contract in a box with all my most important things. It’s a souvenir of a nice, adrenaline-charged period. Ramón Martínez was very nice to me: “I expected it to turn out this way, but it was a good experience for us too. We’ll see you again; let’s stay in touch.”

At that point, they focused their attention on Fabio Capello, who had already worked for them once. The Spanish press began pairing his name with mine in articles. The way they told it, it had turned into a battle between him and me, an all-Italian derby; in reality, I had already signed a pre-contract, but I had also already rejected their offer. At a certain point, Capello got angry and issued a statement that made me smile with fond indulgence: “You think Real Madrid wants Ancelotti? Excuse me, but whom did they call first?”

He thought he was the only candidate; actually—that time, at least—they had called me first, and I had even answered. Often my friends make jokes about that famous phrase. Whenever I invite one of them for dinner: “Sure, Carletto, we’ll be there. But whom did you invite first?” It’s become a catchphrase, an all-purpose joke.

People have called me from Real Madrid. There have been numerous contacts between Florentino Pérez and me; we’ve chatted and traded opinions. He is a person I respect; he knows what he’s doing and what he wants. He loves Real Madrid first and foremost; he’s a softhearted romantic, just like me. We like soccer, we love life, we enjoy entertaining people. We see eye-to-eye on many points. The last time we talked, he told me one thing in particular: “Carlo, someday you will be my coach.”

I
never engaged in doping when I played soccer. I took adrenal-cortex injections, like everyone did, but it was legal and legitimate. You were allowed. Some doctors even prescribed it. “It helps to recover from fatigue,” they told us, and, in fact, you felt less tired. Today, I am slightly dopey, but that state of mental confusion is a result of age—of my endless nomadic roaming, in my thoughts, from A. C. Milan to Real Madrid, from A. S. Roma to Chelsea and the national team of the Ivory Coast. That is why, whenever a soccer player suffering from ALS comes forward, I am so enormously irritated to hear people say that it’s all because of the substances that were circulating in the locker rooms. What do they know about it? Why don’t they find out the facts before they open their mouths? A bunch of self-appointed doctors without
licenses. I get mad, just as Stefano Borgonovo gets mad. Stefano is the person who helped me decide to write this book. He is suffering from ALS, but “not caused by doping,” as he often says. He fights against his personal enemy and the ignorance of the general public. There is a foundation that bears his name.

The reason I wrote this autobiography was to help Stefano. Anything I earn from its publication will be donated to research, because while fans may want to know everything about me, I want to know everything about this disease, and especially one thing in particular: the best way to beat the bastard, as Stefano calls his illness. He has lived in the shadows for two years, ashamed to show his face in public. Then he understood: life is beautiful, and we need to do our best to defend it. We need to fight for life, at Stefano’s side.

In soccer circles, rumors had been circulating for years that something was wrong with Borgonovo. It was an insistent rumor, but no one knew anything for certain. He only emerged once he felt ready: “Friends, I’m not well, that’s for sure. But there is one thing I want to say: the Bastard has already done me enough harm—no more.” He contacted Galliani to organize an exhibition game in Florence between A. C. Milan and Fiorentina (the two teams he played for), he gave an interview to Sky TV, he put his name and reputation into it. He took an enormous risk. It wasn’t easy for someone in his condition. He was clear-minded, but he exhibited the symptoms of his disease: “Here I am, ladies and gentlemen. I am Stefano Borgonovo. And I want to win.”

That was the beginning of the Great Challenge on the soccer field, with Ruud Gullit’s tears and my own sense of helplessness. I
saw Stefano in a wheelchair and didn’t know how to react; I didn’t know what to say, how to treat him. I hadn’t seen him for many years, and I never thought he’d look like this when I saw him again. We were all weeping, while he was laughing, and that’s what helped us to sweep away the barriers and prejudices.

To think back on it now, we really did act like idiots; he needed our support, and we just pulled out our handkerchiefs and started sobbing. It was paradoxical that Stefano bolstered our courage, and not the other way around. His brain travels at a supersonic speed, he’s faster than any of us, and, that evening at the Stadio Artemio Franchi, he’d already outdistanced us completely. We were thinking, it’s not possible that he is sick, while he was thinking, it is possible to find a cure.

At that point, I was still shocked and, to tell the truth, somewhat uncomfortable. Once we got back to Milan, Mauro Tassotti and Filippo Galli both told me that they had talked with him: “Carletto, Stefano asked us to go see him.” So I got over my reluctance and got into my car, and drove to his house, in Giussano. I was worried; I was afraid that I would freeze up in his presence, be unable to speak, go blank. Instead, the minute I entered his room I felt fine, I was at ease. Stefano talks through the voice of a computer. He speaks with his eyes, in the most literal sense. He moves his eyes to pick out letters on a display, forming words and phrases and sentences. All you need to do, though, is look at his eyes to understand a great many things, first and foremost that he is more alive than all the rest of us put together. When they say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, that’s a simplification. For him, they are the keys to escape prison—two glittering beams of hope.

The first thing he said to me was, “Do you remember that time when we were on the National team?”

“No, Stefano.”

He started writing an anecdote, word by word, laboriously. And as he wrote, I began to understand how that story was going to end. For me: badly.

“Carletto, you really can’t remember what a fool you made of yourself that time?”

Okay, now I’m starting to remember. Unfortunately.

“We were in summer training at Trigoria; you, me, and Roberto Baggio all in the same room. It was hot out, the middle of the summer, and we were telling jokes and kidding around. At a certain point, you decided to exaggerate. You went too far. You opened the window and you took off your undershirt, with a draft right on your back. There was no air conditioning …”

“Okay, Stefano, that’s enough. This is ancient history.”

“No, no, let me tell the story. I told you it was damp out, that you could get sick, but you said not to worry, that you were
defero
. That’s right, with a Roman accent,
de fero
—an iron man. We were laughing and kidding around.”

Some people might wonder what was so bad about what I did, and, in fact, I asked Stefano the same thing (alas!). “The next morning, you woke up with a fever of 104 and strep throat. Baggio and I came to see you to ask how the iron man was doing. You threw a shoe at us. And you left summer training camp because you were a wreck.”

At that point, I really felt like an ass, for two reasons. First, that day at Trigoria I had proven that I was an ass. Second, I was an
ass the first time I saw Stefano sick, because I thought that he was somehow different from me. In fact, I hadn’t understood a thing. When he was a soccer player, he was lazy, he lacked intensity in his playing, but now he has become a warrior. A soldier who never surrenders. He wants to win every battle, by whatever means necessary, and he will succeed this time, too.

I had misgivings about Stefano, and he helped me to overcome them. Me and many others—all his friends. And then Kaká and David Beckham, whom I took to his house. Stefano wanted to meet them in person to explain the situation to them. He believes that everyone can do something for him: support research to find a solution for his problem, and help the families of those afflicted with the disease, because treating the disease is often prohibitively expensive. Stefano already had Beckham’s autograph, on an England jersey that Capello had sent him. He had enormous respect for Kaká.

He tells everyone the same thing: “I know I can do this, but not alone. I need a team. The more of us there are, the better.”

I’m in, I can coach. Stefano’s the striker. The Bastard is the goalkeeper on the opposing team. We’ll force in a goal. We’ll win.

T
hank you. Quite simply, thank you. If I am Carletto Ancelotti, I owe it all to Italian football. I feel like an authentic product of my homeland, a genuine, official soccer player and coach. A 100-percent Italian product. For export, sooner or later, because the soul never changes: it goes well beyond the concept of borders. They raised me the way my father cultivated the soil; I grew because I was nourished with passion. In much the same way that he could predict the weather by looking at the sky, I could tell the future by interpreting DVDs—my present and my future. Whatever team I may be coaching, my last thought is for many people. Thanks again.
Grazie. Gracias. Thank you. Danke
. In all the languages of Europe.

GRAZIE:
I played in Serie A and on the national team, I won, I trained, I coached, and I won again. I passed the ball to van Basten,
I tried to stop Maradona, I explained soccer to Del Piero, Maldini, Zidane, Kaká (and, in an attempt to win him over, the rich tycoons at Manchester City called me up in January 2009: that was their first time), Beckham, and Ronaldinho. I wept, I smiled, I lived just as I wanted to live, with excitement and passion. I always took home a salary without ever really noticing that I was working, like fat and happy pastry chefs. They eat to work, not the other way around, and that may be why I have a certain tendency to spread and grow. I have broad hips and a vast heart. I am head over heels in love with what I do. Thank you. Thanks again. For everything that Italian soccer has given me. Much more than what I was able to give in return, even though I have been pretty generous. I experienced and learned a single and unified culture, that of results before everything else. The soccer we play is intervillage rivalry taken to its logical extreme.

But that’s all right. When I see kids playing in a little field, I get emotional. This is the point we’re at: “Go, boys, only one out of a thousand ever makes it.” Without wanting a lawsuit from Gianni Morandi for the lyrics of the song, I can safely state that I am that one out of a thousand.

April 1, 2009, was an interesting day. I don’t think I’m an April fool; if anything, I’m good for the whole year. More than a fluke of destiny, let’s say it was a bit of April foolishness. That fits with my personality. Until seven in the evening, I was mostly thinking in English. After lunch, I gave an interview to the Sky TV channel, which I still remember in considerable detail. That’s what happens on special days, whether good or bad—they are in any case unforgettable.

“Carlo, what do you see in your future?”

“I have a contract until 2010 with A. C. Milan, so I’m staying.”