Carlo Ancelotti by Aleesandro Alciato, Carlo Ancelotti Read Free Book Online Page A

it back yet. They picked up rocks from the ground and threw them at us, smashing the bus windows. Some of the team were hurt by this point, and blood had begun to flow. There was nothing we could do but try to lie low, on the floor of the bus, in the aisle running between the seats. It was a little corner of hell. Finally, out of nowhere, Liedholm showed up, not a hair out of place, escorted by two city cops.
    “Why, boys, what’s happened to the bus? Why are you lying on the floor?”
    We explained everything to him in chorus: “Go fuck yourself.”
    He was a character. A phenomenon. Before every major match he would instruct Dr. Ernesto Alicicco to tell us jokes in the locker room. But that afternoon, we were the joke ourselves, and the punch line didn’t make us laugh. So the Roma team walks into the Lazio stadium … In the emergency room, we got so many stitches we could have run up a whole new set of team uniforms with the thread.
    Roma was just that way. My nickname on the team was Il Bimbo—the Kid—and Il Bimbo is who I am. Someday, I’m going to coach that team, I have a debt of gratitude. It was a fun team to play for. From the very first day. From back in 1979, when Liedholm, on his way back home from a holiday at the spa in Salsomaggiore with his wife, stopped by to see me in Parma and took me away with him. The transfer fee was 1.2 billion lire ($950,000). It was like an episode of
The Price Is Right
. And, from the minute I got there, it was clear that I was in a unique place, and first impressions matter.
    I got off the train from San Benedetto del Tronto at Rome’s Termini station with simple, easy-to-follow instructions: “Get a taxioutside the station, tell him to take you to Via del Circo Massimo, the press conference is being held there. Pay close attention: a yellow taxi, with writing on the door and TAXI written on the dome light on the roof; don’t take a gypsy cab, they’ll charge extra.” Fine. I obeyed the instructions to the letter, but the taxi driver didn’t recognize me; we pulled up outside of Roma headquarters, and there was a screaming, chanting crowd of four thousand delirious fans. In fact, the transfer season of 1979 was an important time: Turone and Benetti had just arrived, Conti had returned from being on loan, and Romano had joined in defense. It was a nice feeling, I felt like one of the team. I was ready to get out of the cab, asked the driver how much I owed him. “Ten thousand lire.” I pulled out my wallet, extracted a ten thousand lire note, handed it to him. There was a growl of disapproval from the fan base. When they saw that I was paying the cabbie, the crowd turned ugly, and insults flew in the general direction of that unfortunate taxi driver. “A Lazio fan!” “Dirty traitor!”
“Nun te devi fa’ paga’
—don’t take his money!”
“Cojone
, asshole, Roma is sacred!” To make a longish story short, they hemmed the cab in, taking the driver hostage, and started rocking the car back and forth for no good reason—and with me inside. I started feeling seasick. It must be fate—I seem to remember the faces of a lot of taxi drivers. He was terrified: “Get out. The ride is free.
Just get out of my cab. Beat it!”
My career was just beginning, and they were already ordering me out of taxicabs.
    There was just one minor detail: I still didn’t have a signed contract. With Parma, I was earning ten million lire ($8,000) a year; now that Roma had recruited me, I had decided to ask them for a hundred million. I was at the summer training camp in Brunico,we’d been working for a few days, so I went to talk directly with the chairman, Dino Viola, a magnificent manager and leader, and a man who counted pennies. “Ancelotti, how much do you want?”
    “A hundred million lire a year, Mister Chairman.”
    “You are out of your mind.”
    Then three weeks of total silence. On the last working day before the regular season began, Viola himself called me: