Carlo Ancelotti (4 page)

Answer: We wouldn’t want it any other way.

“I beg of you, stop giving me carpets.”

That was almost asking too much, but in the end they gave in on that point, too. Ask and you shall receive. Evidently, I’d chosen the wrong tactic. It was a total defeat on all fronts. My visit was really nothing more than a courtesy call, but Fenerbahçe was determined to get my signature on a contract, cost what it may. They seemed to be saying: “You’re not leaving here until you sign our contract.” A prisoner without bars—okay, but not great.

Luckily, even though I had been relieved of duty to make way for Alberto Malesani, my contract with Parma still had a year to run; that was what saved me. Or, at least, what saved me from lying. “I can’t sign anything official right now. Let me go back to Italy, it’ll only take me a few days to rescind my existing agreement, and then I’ll come back to see you.” That’s what I said, but in my mind there was a rider: “As if.” I managed to escape: Turkey–Emilia Romagna, a one-way ticket. There was just one thing left to do: inform Chairman Yildirim that, let us say, I had changed my mind. But I was too much of a chicken even for that: I had my wife
call him and tell him on the phone. I was a little embarrassed at what I’d done.

Still, he wasn’t giving up. He sent one of his emissaries to hunt me down, another one-way ticket: Istanbul to My House. The dreaded middleman Bilgiç arrived in Felegara by taxi while I was in my car, speeding back to Parma to keep from having to talk to him, like a thief in the night.

Was I crazy? No, it was much simpler than that. I was just the new coach of Juventus. How new? A couple of hours, to tell the truth. Blame it on a phone call from Luciano Moggi, which I don’t think anyone wiretapped, that I received the day before I left on my little jaunt to Turkey. “Ciao, this is Luciano. I have to see you tomorrow.”

“I can’t do it tomorrow, I’m going to Istanbul.”

“To do what?”

“There’s a football club there that wants to see me.”

“Before you commit to anything, I need to talk to you. Call me as soon as you get back …”

I figured he just wanted to talk to me about some player or other. As soon as I managed to elude the aggressive marking of the Turkish team, we made an appointment to meet the following day in Turin. That’s right, you guessed it: a secret meeting. We were supposed to meet in front of the Hotel Principi di Piemonte, a car was waiting for me, and I fell in line behind it, following it until we reached the home of Antonio Giraudo. I was sitting across from Antonio Giraudo, Luciano Moggi, and Roberto Bettega. The Triad, before me in the flesh. They wasted no time coming to the point: “We want you to become the next coach for Juve.”

“When would this be?”

“We know your contract with Parma still has a year to run, so from the coming season.”

“Listen, though, don’t you have Lippi? There’s no one better than him.”

“He’s not happy, he’s tired of being here, he’s decided this is his last year. So we thought of you.”

What did I think? I must have thought they were crazy and, as you know, it’s dangerous to contradict the mentally unstable, so I went along with them. After a few more hours of conversation, they had me sign their contract. First impression: three reliable, competent individuals, three talented executives.

They wrote out the contract by hand on a sheet of letterhead stationery, blue ink on white paper, twenty-three lines in total, not including signatures. Here are a few passages:

The numerical sums were written as shown above, missing a comma and three zeros, in millions, not billions: luckily, my bank account was safeguarded by the sums expressed in words, set in parentheses. Three signatures on the left and one signature on the right: Bettega and I signed with the same black ink, while Moggi and Giraudo signed in blue ink. I was going to be Lippi’s successor; it was written on that sheet of paper.

I came home to Felegara, I summoned my family and friends, I was bursting with pride. Chest (and belly) protruding, I made the momentous announcement: “I’m the new Juventus manager.” They shouted back in unison: “Oh, go take a shit—
va’ a cagher—
you’ve lost your mind.” After that, I had to carry the contract with me in my jacket pocket. I had accepted an offer from Juventus, valid from the start of the following year, and no one believed a word I said. As it turned out, I wound up on the Juventus bench earlier than scheduled, in February 1999: Lippi was having problems, but that is another story.

Every time I agreed to coach a new team, the decision was always accompanied by fireworks and occasionally by a mushroom cloud; in any case, it was never easy or simple. Except for the time I left Reggiana to go to Parma—I didn’t have to think twice about that one. For that matter, from the Italian national team—where I was the assistant coach to the Maestro Arrigo Sacchi—to Reggiana, I gave up a safe perch for an uncertain future. Between Parma and Juventus, I was escaping the pressing tactics of the Turks.

Then came A. C. Milan in November 2001, and on that occasion I was fleeing the pursuit of Stefano Tanzi, who wanted to take me back to Parma. None of this is intentional, it just seems
to happen to me; I move quicker than I mean to. Tanzi and I had a meeting on Friday and came to a verbal agreement; we agreed to meet at Parmalat headquarters the following Monday to get everything down in black and white. On Saturday, I rested up. On Sunday, I watched the Turin–Milan match on television with my old friend William Vecchi; and, to my surprise, I watched Stefano Tanzi announce on
Domenica Sportiva
that, beginning Tuesday, I was going to be his new coach. Every word was true. I guess Galliani was watching TV that Sunday, as well. On Monday morning, I took my son Davide to school; afterward I swung by Collecchio.

“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.

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 dialect—this is a nice beginning. Inside, waiting for me,
were all the soccer hooligan leaders, summoned by Moggi: “You have to make peace with Ancelotti, you understand?” No, they didn’t understand, it doesn’t do a bit of good to explain anything to them, you’d just be wasting money on a tutor.

I played for A. S. Roma in the 1980s, and our adversary was Juve. I played for Milan, and our chief opponent was Juve. I coached Parma, and in the Italian championship for the Scudetto we played against Juve. They only know me, and can only see me, as an enemy. End of story. That wasn’t going to change, and it never will. They’re just a few miserable losers, a few bad apples, surrounded by a city full of wonderful people—but that’s cold comfort. The middle finger that I raised in the general direction of the Curva Scirea (the notoriously violent section of the stands at the Stadio Delle Alpi in Turin) one evening, when I was the coach of Milan, was dedicated to them. They lacked imagination, it was always the same refrain: “A pig can’t coach.” It just annoys the hell out of me. It shows an intolerable lack of respect toward pigs.

Because a pig can coach. Definitely. And a pig can win, despite everything those hooligans might say, and in defiance of the much more likable skepticism of my two friends from Parma, diehard Juventus fans, and the first people I thought of after we won the Champions League final against Juventus at Old Trafford. God bless Shevchenko’s last penalty kick in Manchester. I bought two salamis, gift wrapped them with a lovely bow, and delivered them in person, with a pair of handwritten dedications: “To you, the salami; to me, the
Coppa.”
They laughed, they took it in the right spirit. Because they know me better than most. They understand the way I operate: I love to eat pork
coppa
, it’s a delicious cold cut
from home, and I eat it when I can, but in Italian the
Coppa
also means the championship cup, and any opportunity I see to win one, I take. And I do it with all the determination of my family, with a philosophy of life that comes from my homeland. Pork and tortellini: when it comes down to it, no matter what else happens, you always come around to the same point of departure.

If it hadn’t been for the hard work of my mother and father—mamma and papa—I’d be no different from anyone else. In the old days, you had to sacrifice: you worked the land with your hands and a few tools; there was no farm machinery, the days were long, and the work was endless. What you sow you can only hope to harvest a year later. There was no instant gratification; you had to be patient, you couldn’t lose heart when the going got tough.