On an unspecified afternoon in the boring early 90s dominated by some ball killers who made tennis differently from baseball (Jim Courier, the ugliest thing seen on a clay court after the holes), someone wrote a letter on the first Italian pay-TV ( of paper, no internet) to the pair of commentators Rino Tommasi and Gianni Clerici, the highest form of Italian tennis commentary from which the modern Jacopo Lo Monaco and Federico Ferrero of Eurosport come. “They ask us why when the Italian tennis players play, we don’t cheer”, reports Tommasi, who closes terse: “If you want to cheer, then turn on state TV”, an affront to those in those years, perhaps in a less polished way, still commented on tennis from the microphones of Rai, that state TV that for urgent scheduling needs (politics, which required the news to fall the world) had come to interrupt the Wimbledon final on the most beautiful and to know how it had gone, yes he had to turn on the radio.
Giampiero Galeazzi, who died yesterday at the age of 75, was not Tommasi and Clerici or even Lea Pericoli on Telemontecarlo, the ‘good’ lounge of tennis, but he was able to give a more familiar and ‘club’ vision of that sport, also paired with Adriano Panatta, becoming the pop alternative to the two jazz musicians of Tele +. And anyway last night, before Italy-Switzerland in his city, “the father of us all”, as the commentator called him, was remembered on the notes of ‘Round Midnight’, because although the role of the commentator is in the specialized time, Bisteccone – so called by the journalist Gilberto Evangelisti, who saw such a piece of man in front of him one day – has entered the hearts of Italian sportsmen and others, and sometimes this is enough and advances. Especially if the commentator stays a step behind what there is to comment, ‘sbracando’ only when needed.
Galeazzi’s illness had its television showcase three years ago in another living room, that of Mara Venier, with the reporter already a television icon for a whole series of historical passionate commentaries, even shouted, but which have always appeared genuine. From that Bisteccone armchair it was quoted, warning that he had to cross “the last 500 meters of my life”, the life of an Italian rowing champion who just commenting on the sport in which he excelled, touching the Olympics of ’68, would open to a school of screamers that have come down to us with alternating successes, and another school of sidelines to extract words from the players, even those with long faces. Until in the locker room of Napoli, on the day of the second championship.
For Galeazzi who acted himself in the cult film ‘The coach in the ball’, at each interruption of Italy-Switzerland the Rai is all a “Let’s go to win”, the audio of Seoul 1988 with the Abbagnale brothers in the water to win gold and Bisteccone, now in photography, in the cry of someone who, in his own way, has won everything.
