STORIES
14-10-2021 by Freddie del Curatolo
This year, the fragmentation of television rights, which the new network DAZN won and then sold to everyone, has denied Italian residents and tourists in Kenya the opportunity to watch the popular program "La Giostra del Gol" on Rai Italia.
A broadcast that the so-called "spezzatino", i.e., the competitions spread over two or more days at different times, had already compromised.
For those who cannot afford a subscription to the satellite channel with DSTV decoder costing 50 euros per month, we go back 30 years, when live broadcasts of the Serie A in Malindi were listened to via radio and only in a veranda, at the Sultan Villas.
As I recounted in my book "Genoa Club Malindi".
"Thirty years ago Malindi was the world as a lover of freedom, adventure and the unexpected or a young fanatic of life without constraints, perhaps a little selfish but hungry for knowledge, always dreamed of it.
Endless spaces, sunshine every morning, days that could be totally idle or full of movement and unusual situations to lose your mind.
With a thousand liras you could live like a nabob, from dawn to dusk eating fresh fish, fruits and vegetables and drinking beer.
You could leave the front door wide open and the keys in the car and nothing would happen. After a while you'd realize you had their smile plastered on your face and an ebony expression of serenity.
I spent hours playing bao, a kind of checkers, in the company of fishermen, drinking ginger tea in their after-work hut, sailing in the open ocean aboard ancient and unstable dhows, among sharks and marlin, visiting the villages of mud and dry palm trees where the waiters of my father's pizzeria lived, eating their polenta, drinking from the coconut, freeing myself (but without thinking much about it) of Western toxins and ideologies of convenience. It was a great time of growth.
The only real breeze from Italy, in that paradise where it was so easy to find one's own balance but even more attractive to lose oneself in a thousand temptations, blew punctually on Sunday afternoons.
Needless to say, there was no satellite, decoders and pay-per-view had not yet been invented, internet and cell phones were not even mentioned.
The only way to follow the matches of the Italian championship live was a weak and precarious radio link that a Neapolitan named Mimmo had created in the veranda of his house. With an antediluvian but solid transatlantic transmitter and an antenna that looked like a sugar cane in the wind, Mimmo managed to pick up the signal of Radio Uno from Yemen.
Who knows how Roberto Bortoluzzi's voice reached Yemen, involving Sandro Ciotti, Alfredo Provenzali, Ezio Luzzi and the other colleagues from "Tutto il calcio minuto per minuto".
I remember well, however, how the Italian residents were welcomed on the veranda of the Neapolitan fan.
The Neapolitans (like my father and Vincenzo Prezioso, who had a leather goods store next door to the Bar Bar) were the guests of honor, Interisti and Milanisti were more or less ignored, Juventini and Romanisti had to bring supplies and whoever showed up for the first time was obliged to pass under the caudine forks of comments, mockery and gossip. It was a rite of initiation in which it was enough not to be touchy and to respond to the caustic jokes of the welcoming committee.
I was privileged, as a Genoa fan, so not only of a team far from the top, but twinned with Naples, as well as the son of an avid Neapolitan supporter and friend of Mimmo.
The committee also included the Colonel, Milan, Ivano, yellow Capitoline and Camillo, the Tuscan fan of Juventus, the gossip said it was because it was a bit 'hunchback really. He had the satanic grin of Andreotti, the sharp irony of his fellow countryman Benigni and a vein of evil with which he struck down anyone who dared to contradict him. He also brought along a claque made up of male characters, catapulted to Africa for various types of bankruptcy and was the fulcrum of sports betting, also banked in real time.
Often, less ardent fans would join in, but they would even gamble money on crab races on Silversand beach.
There were Stefano Caramella and Stefano Mortadella (Milan fans), Giorgio Mozzarella and Paolo Banana, the Trentavizi brothers (which is their real surname, not a nickname), their cousins Enzino and Fabione (Inter fans) and many others.
At the time Malindi had only about a thousand residents, mostly male. Even those who weren't soccer fans and didn't understand anything about it, inevitably became football fans. Even if only to meet up on Sunday afternoons and feel part of a community.
The radio signal, however, came and went, and the good Mimmo tried to follow it, wandering around the enormous veranda like a diviner, insulting Africa, Yemen, Guglielmo Marconi and even Bortoluzzi.
With jolts and croaks, seconds of silence and continuous rustling, we arrived at the thirty-fifth minute of the broadcast, when, with such un-African punctuality, an unknown muezzin overlapped with the afternoon prayer on the Middle Eastern frequency.
It usually happened during the run-up to a penalty kick, or when the partial results of the entire Serie A were being summarized.
For a good ten minutes it was total panic.
Anything could happen and something always did. Italy trembled, the Italians in Africa prayed... that the line would soon return.
For the guests on the veranda, it was as if that damned Arabic chant lasted more than an hour. In that time, hundreds of predictions, guffaws and sunny certainties were flying around.
Camillo blessed that interruption and used it to accept further bets. Once the invocation to Allah was over, there was time for the summary of the final results, for the ritual blasphemy of those who in the meantime had conceded a goal or a defeat and for the rounds of the winners.
If Naples had scored a goal, then it was time for post-match comments, laughter, and furious arguments. Otherwise, Mimmo would kick everyone out of the house and the crew would move to Germano's Bar Bar, which was very important to Verona, but also to his business, so Mimmo would not be seen on his veranda.
This emigrant custom, like a neo-realist film full of Albertisordi and Ninimanfredi, lasted a couple of seasons. Then each club got a satellite radio and from 1994 onwards, the first video signals were picked up to follow the matches live.
But this is another story that I will tell you later.
It comes out these days in Italy the new novel by writer and director of Malindikenya.net Freddie del Curatolo.
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